LEVIN HOPED THE EDUCATION courses he took in the summer of 1993 in Houston, as part of the Teach For America teacher certification plan, would give him some ideas for his second year of teaching. Feinberg went to Los Angeles to work at the Teach For America summer institute. Teach For America officials had been receiving good reports on both of them. The organization was happy to tap into the classroom experience of corps members such as Feinberg and Levin, even if they had only been in the classroom for a year.
Feinberg drove the red Cherokee he had acquired to the institute site at the University of California at Los Angeles. He carried his teaching materials in milk crates and taught a course on all the mistakes he and Levin had made their first year. He and Levin had skipped similar classes when they were at the institute the summer before at Cal State Northridge, but Feinberg was determined to be indispensable. He offered himself, aged twenty-four, as the voice of experience. He taught the Ball chants. He supervised a small group of recruits, called a learning team, as they did their student teaching. “If you focus on finding the balance between having fun and keeping the focus on learning, that should take you very far,” he told them.
Returning to Houston, Feinberg discovered that Verdin was adding to his responsibilities. On his recommendation she had hired one of his UCLA learning-team members, Andrea Coleman, to be a bilingual teacher in the fifth grade. Feinberg became the fifth-grade-level chair.
His Spanish was improving. He could say anything he wanted to say, although he still had to work on understanding what was said to him. His new fifth-grade class was more diverse than the previous year’s class. Most of the children were Hispanic, as before, but the students who had almost no English had been given to Coleman. Feinberg had the most unruly students from the previous year’s fourth grade.
He and Coleman decided to share their classes and teach by subject matter. She had good Spanish and a literary bent, so she did reading and writing. He took math and history. It seemed to work and ultimately influenced Feinberg and Levin’s decision to departmentalize their first KIPP fifth grades in the same way.
Ball had convinced Levin and Feinberg that learning could only occur in a well-run classroom, and that no classroom ran smoothly unless the teacher was firm. They were both young men of great charm. Most people considered them nice guys, at least before they started making pests of themselves in advocating for KIPP and their kids. But they felt they had to be strict with their students or the behavioral distractions would overwhelm the class. It was difficult for them to be so tough with children who were, with few exceptions, enormously lovable. But they had seen what happened to classes whose teachers had given in to their softer sides. Both became quite strict, rarely giving an inch when tempted to let a child whisper in the back of the room or skip a homework assignment or tease a classmate. Their toughness became a part of their reputations, sometimes leading other educators and some parents to say they were too harsh, even abusive.
Over time, they cut back on yelling—a harsh but sometimes effective tactic—and switched to quieter, if still intense, conversations. But they ignored advice to become more accommodating of childish weaknesses. They told themselves the children had a choice: they could learn because they liked it, or they could learn even though they didn’t like it. They took their cues from Ball’s insistence that all children will learn.
One of Feinberg’s new students, Elbert, reminded him of Levin’s Quincy. The year before, Feinberg had seen the boy punching another child in the face. The boy’s teacher had done nothing about it. Elbert was five foot nine, but Feinberg was a half foot taller, and he used that. Whenever Elbert began to bother other students, Feinberg leaned over and got in his face. If Elbert looked away or rolled his eyes, Feinberg put his finger under the boy’s chin and forced him to make eye contact. Every Elbert misstep brought a quick Feinberg response. The boy disliked the teacher’s getting so close. But he seemed to appreciate the attention, the message that he was worth all this trouble. He began to calm down.
When Elbert had excuses for not paying attention and not doing his work, Feinberg tried to address each one. After a fight on the playground, he told Feinberg he was angry because he had found a dog in the street and his mother would not let him keep it. Feinberg took the boy home that day and made a deal with the mother. They took the dog to a veterinarian, where Feinberg paid for a checkup. He explained to Elbert what he had to do to keep the dog and convince his mother that he had earned the privilege. Henceforth, whenever Elbert misbehaved, Feinberg would say, “You know, I helped with your dog. What are you going to do for me?”
Students stayed after school to work on projects or go over their homework, and sometimes Feinberg and Levin took them to the Boys and Girls Club for basketball and other games, if they had done their work. When they kept them late, they took them home in their cars. Levin still had the Taurus, but Feinberg had replaced his Cherokee with a white extended-cab Chevy truck that he thought went well with his cowboy hat and boots. When they dropped children off at home, they would often go in and chat with the parents. The students’ families had already given them permission to keep the children after school, but it never hurt to say hi. The personal contact made it possible to negotiate disagreements over how parents were disciplining their students. When the father of the lead in the school musical pulled his daughter out the day before the performance for talking back to him about doing the dishes, Feinberg pleaded with him to punish her with some lost privilege at home, not at school. The father finally agreed to let her perform, in exchange for tickets to a Houston Rockets basketball game.
A good relationship with parents was particularly useful with students like Manuel, who took over the role of Feinberg’s most disruptive student after Elbert began to improve. Feinberg dropped by Manuel’s house and told his mother that he thought Manuel had great potential, but that unfortunately he had come to bring her another story of misbehavior. “Manuel, have you heard what we expect you to do?” she said to the boy. “I am not taking you to soccer practice this weekend.” Manuel was ten. Soccer was the joy of his life. He would sometimes cry at that, but the conversation would continue. “I am sorry you feel that way,” the mother said. “But you shouldn’t make Mr. Feinberg spend time at night coming here and talking to us. I am embarrassed. You have to change.”
Levin and Feinberg found that the home visits were important, not only because they taught students they could not misbehave without consequences but because they made allies of the parents. Even the parents of some of their better-behaved students began to call and ask Feinberg or Levin to stop by at night. “I need you to talk to my kid,” they said.