ONE DAY IN THE SUMMER of 1994, Sy Fliegel, a former New York City school administrator, received a telephone call from Levin. He said he had heard of Fliegel’s work for the Manhattan Institute. In an unusual partnership, the conservative-leaning think tank was paying the liberal-leaning Fliegel to set up small and innovative public schools in the city. Fliegel had founded the Center for Educational Innovation, a leading educational reform organization.
Levin said he was interested in talking to Fliegel about establishing a school in New York. He and a friend were starting a program in Houston, but they weren’t sure it would have room to grow there. Would Fliegel be willing to talk to them the next time they were in town?
“Fine,” Fliegel said. “When are you coming up?”
“Sometime in the fall. We are really busy now,” Levin said.
“Let me know,” Fliegel said. “We’ll have a meeting. We’ll sit down.”
It wasn’t until October that Levin, still in the first semester of the KIPP experiment, made it to Fliegel’s office at the Manhattan Institute, on the third floor of a building at Vanderbilt and Forty-fourth streets. Feinberg had not come with him but would be there on subsequent visits.
Fliegel was a legend in New York education circles. As a public school administrator in the 1970s and 1980s, he had engineered the creation of several successful schools in East Harlem. The most famous was Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS), whose principal, Deborah Meier, became one of the most respected educators in the country. She and her teachers raised the achievement of inner-city teenagers by treating them like graduate students. Instead of work sheets and multiple-choice tests, CPESS had research projects and oral exams. To make sure Meier could pick a congenial team of teachers, Fliegel violated several staffing rules, particularly the one that required him to post any job openings so that the most senior eligible teachers could apply for them. The school’s success gave him a reputation for daring effectiveness and led to a book, Miracle in East Harlem, about how he had helped that subdistrict move from thirty-second to fifteenth place in reading and math achievement in the city.
Levin and Feinberg’s approach to teaching inner-city children was different from Meier’s, but Fliegel was willing to help anyone with an idea that worked. The two teachers felt that KIPP might be smothered in its crib before its first birthday if they stayed in Houston. They wanted to keep the fifth graders they were teaching, promote them to sixth grade, and recruit a new fifth grade. They wanted to hire at least two more teachers and eventually establish a full-scale fifth-through-eighth-grade middle school. Verdin had finally told them she did not have the space or the authority or the money. Hoping to change her mind, Levin remembers asking her on a date but being turned down. Verdin says that never happened.
Fliegel did not ask Levin for any data on his program. He just wanted to hear the young man talk. He had favorite responses for the two kinds of situations that New York school administrators—and school-reform entrepreneurs like him—most often faced. If someone complained about something, he nodded gravely and said, “Thank you for bringing this important matter to my attention. I will investigate it right away and get back to you.” Even when his wife complained about his leaving socks on the floor, he would smile and say, “Thank you for bringing this important matter to my attention.”
His second standard response, offered whenever someone brought him a new scheme to save American schools, was to probe the petitioner’s soul. “What is your dream?” he would ask. The question did not work as well with the conservatives who ran the Manhattan Institute. He asked them instead, “What are your goals?” But Levin responded enthusiastically to the dream question. That won Fliegel over.
“Well,” Fliegel said, “I think I can get you two fifth-grade classes in the South Bronx.” He had no guarantee that Levin and Feinberg would be successful, and they were certainly nothing like the much older, more experienced, and more cerebral Meier, but he believed what they were saying about low-income kids’ potential for success. He was also impressed that two Ivy League graduates who had completed their Teach For America obligation still wanted to stay in the inner city.
Fliegel felt his usefulness at this stage in his life was in employing his reputation as a miracle maker to put bright and eager educators in the right environments. Fliegel knew that District 7, the part of the New York school system that included the South Bronx, had an area superintendent, Pedro Crespo, who was friendly to experiments like this one. He also knew that whatever Levin and Feinberg’s fancy plans, New York principals would have the same practical view of them that Verdin had had when she accepted their idea for a new kind of fifth grade. They were smart and energetic teachers who would probably do better in the classroom than anyone else who might apply. And they were tall, athletic males, a rare and valued commodity in schools full of restless boys.
Fliegel believed that the success of educational enterprises depended as much on leadership as on the quality of the concept. People came to him with ideas that they assumed would succeed simply because of their obvious merit. Fliegel thought that was nonsense. An idea had no chance unless there was strong leadership. Levin went to see Crespo and his top staff in District 7. They said exactly what Fliegel said they would say. They thought the KIPP idea was interesting. They could certainly give him and his friend two fifth-grade classes in an existing K-5 school. District 7 officials knew Fliegel’s track record. His relationships got KIPP New York started, but Levin soon learned that surviving in the South Bronx was going to take much more.