BUS TRANSPORTATION FROM the Gulfton homes of Feinberg’s students to their new school at Askew Elementary was a problem. District policy was to punch in students’ addresses on the computer and choose street corners that served most of them. Many still had long walks to bus stops. Feinberg thought that could kill his program. It would be dark those mornings. His school was starting so early. He had promised his parents that the buses would be convenient.
He knew the building on McCarty Drive where the school district bus schedulers had their offices. He showed up one morning with breakfast taquitos for the entire staff and offered to help them get the new KIPP bus stop locations just right. “Could we put the computer on manual override?” he asked. “I would like to punch in my own times and locations.” The man in front of the computer, munching on his taquito, told Feinberg to go right ahead.
Askew was a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade school. The two-story brick building was fifty-six years old, with a dozen yellowish brown modular buildings clumped together in back. KIPP would use three of the modulars—a large one with space for two classrooms, a smaller one with space for one class, and a third with a two-hundred-square-foot storage room, which would serve as Feinberg’s office. Piles of broken furniture, old books, and cleaning equipment filled most of that space, but Feinberg managed to push them to one side. He had a desk and chair.
Unlike Levin in New York, Feinberg had gotten permission to conduct a summer session. It was shorter than he wanted, just two weeks. It finished a week before the regular school year began. He still needed to arrange for lunches and a hundred other details. He pushed the FileMaker program on his Mac to the limit getting the paperwork ready for opening day. He wrote schedules and homeroom lists and letters to parents. His teachers tried to remove, or rearrange, the piles of debris in the previously occupied modulars. There was not much time for pedagogical debates or detailed lesson plans. Feinberg told his team to focus on essentials: “Get your classrooms ready, get your materials ready, tell me what you need, start doing your planning for what you are going to do when the kids get here. Those first couple of days we’re going to have them all together, and don’t worry about it. I am going to take care of everything.”
As his teachers discovered, Feinberg’s idea of taking care of everything sometimes meant doing things they thought they had already done. Each night, after they went home exhausted, Feinberg slipped into their classrooms and made changes. Some of their posters were not, in his view, properly hung or well chosen. Some of the lettering on their bulletin boards was crooked. Feinberg knew he was going too far, but he could not control himself. He blamed Levin for his fixation on classroom arrangements. His friend demanded the best possible displays, as Ball had done. Feinberg had picked up the perfection bug from them. Feinberg loved what he called Las Vegas lettering, glittery characters in colors so bright they could not be ignored. He wanted every wall of every classroom to radiate excitement.
But rearranging teachers’ classrooms behind their backs was not a good management technique. He rationalized his intrusions by saying he had hired them just to teach. They could not be expected to share his twenty-four-hour-a-day obsession with every detail at the school. He knew what he wanted but lacked the time and skills to communicate his vision clearly and completely. So he just interfered. It hurt some feelings, but he was quick to blame himself. He was full of jokes and compliments. That helped preserve, just barely, his image as a happy-go-lucky big dog who knocked over the furniture but was fun to have around.
For the first day of the shortened KIPP summer school, Feinberg made a large gold poster that said THINK LIKE A CHAMPION TODAY. He had stolen the slogan from an inspirational football movie, Rudy. He rode the first bus to Gulfton, arriving at 6:30 a.m. Farabaugh was in the second bus. At each stop, Feinberg hopped out and held up his poster so that everyone would know this was the KIPP express. He shook hands with the parents. He shook hands with the fifth graders. “Welcome to KIPP!” he said.
He talked very fast, like a coach before a big game. “This is great!” he said. “This is going to be fun. Please touch the poster and say what is on the poster, then get on the bus.”
In Rudy, an undersized Notre Dame undergraduate through heroic effort makes the university’s football varsity and is allowed to join the other players in slapping a poster that says PLAY LIKE A CHAMPION TODAY in the tunnel on the way into the stadium. Few if any Gulfton children had ever seen the movie or been asked to slap a sign before they climbed on a school bus. Some were confused and passed by without touching it. Some had trouble reading the words. But they all got on the bus. By 7:15 a.m., they were at the school.
There were seventy-one students the first day. They included one Southeast Asian, two South Asians, one Anglo and two African Americans. The rest were from families that had originated in Central America or Mexico. As Feinberg had requested, the KIPP teachers had cleared all the desks out of one of the classrooms so that all seventy-one students could crowd in for an opening-day orientation. The teachers stood along the walls while Feinberg worked the room. He had the teachers introduce themselves. He tried some icebreakers. Who has two brothers and sisters? Who has three? Who has four? Five? Six? Who is left-handed? Who has seen the ocean?
He taught them some of the Ball songs, starting with “Read, Baby, Read.” He taught them how to roll their nines. It took them several tries to pick up the beat. They could clap, but when asked to sing at the same time, they lost the rhythm. Feinberg thought this was hilarious. He kept the mood light. They liked practicing “Read, Baby, Read” at full volume. The more they sang it, the louder they got.
Feinberg wanted to prove this was a fun school, but only because learning was fun. He knew there was a fine line between entertainment and engagement. He did not want his new students to think KIPP would be all games and candy and McDonald’s. He wanted to weave those thrills into mastering thirty-three-digit numbers, reading novels, and acquiring an intimate knowledge of the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court before the spring trip to Washington, D.C.
“It’s going to be fun if we work hard for you, and you work hard for us,” he told them. “As long as you play by the rules, then we are going to go out of our way to do all kinds of cool things for you. But it all has to be earned.”
The first two days, with the entire school still gathered in the one classroom, Feinberg and his teachers read The Sneetches, The Polar Express, and other books. Feinberg interrupted to ask questions, seek opinions, and make observations and connections to relevant parts of his students’ lives. He wanted everyone involved in the magical act of reading. That would be the heart of what they would do the rest of the year.
His message was the same one Levin was using in New York: We are a team and we are a family. Not only do we respect one another’s differences, but we celebrate them. We live together, learn together, take care of one another, and have fun together. In The Polar Express, he emphasized the moment when the children hear the bells, a sign of their faith and belief in what has happened to them on their journey to the North Pole. Feinberg hoped that family feeling would guide their long days at school and their hard work to learn. He introduced them to parts of the KIPP credo that he and Levin had been polishing for months:
“Work hard. Be nice.” (This was an Esquith slogan. He preferred the “Be nice” to come before the “Work hard,” but Feinberg thought it read better the other way. In New York, Levin used “Be nice. Work hard.”)
“There are no shortcuts.” (Esquith’s signature slogan, eventually the title of his autobiography.)
“Assign yourself.” (That meant students should take responsibility for doing whatever they needed to do to get an education and support their team and family.)
“If there is a problem, we look for a solution. If there is a better way, we find it. If a teammate needs help, we give it. If we need help, we ask.”
They were simple aphorisms. In the affluent and well-educated neighborhoods where Feinberg and Levin had grown up, they would be dismissed as unfashionably banal. But in Houston, among families seeking to rise out of poverty, they made sense.
In the middle of the third day, Feinberg called an end to the group orientation and sent the students to their respective classrooms. It was time to let his teachers teach. Feinberg and Levin believed, based on their own clumsy beginnings in Houston, that teachers should be judged not by style or philosophy but by results. If their students were excited and engaged, if test scores rose, if KIPP alumni went on to succeed in high school and, most particularly, got to college and did well there, then that was all that they needed to know about those teachers.
Feinberg and Levin would, of course, closely monitor teachers’ performance and interfere when they saw fit. They were not reluctant to reteach something a teacher had already covered. When students arrived for Feinberg’s math class, he never confined himself to math. He had reading exercises. He discussed science and its relationship to math. He would say, “You just learned about the water cycle, right? So talk to me. What is evaporation? What is condensation?” If he saw blank looks, he would tell Farabaugh, the science teacher, “Hey, the kids don’t know the water cycle.”
Every afternoon, the KIPP fifth grade was reorganized into three groups, each at a different level in reading. They read novels from 3:30 to 4:15 p.m. They began with Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. By the end of the school year, they had completed six books. In class, each child would read a half page to a page aloud. Their teachers would often interrupt to provoke a discussion. From 4:15 to 5:00 p.m., the time that Levin and Feinberg had devoted to dodgeball their first year, Feinberg had a study hall period so that students could start their homework. They were assigned about two hours a night, including their forty-five-minute head start at school. KIPP teachers supervised physical education for their homerooms during the same period after lunch that the Askew students got their exercise.
Unlike Levin, Feinberg had a good relationship with his building principal. Elaine Allen did not see him as a threat or an annoyance. He never had trouble getting into the school building, as he had had at Garcia. KIPP Saturday classes were at Lee High, closer to Gulfton and with those enriching extras, like the computer lab and the swimming pool.
Feinberg encountered—not for the last time—parents who despite signing the Commitment to Excellence contract did not like the strict discipline and long homework. One mother called Jill Kolasinski, Feinberg’s reading teacher, on the telephone and complained loudly about her daughter’s being put on the Porch. “My daughter is just fine,” the parent said. “She doesn’t need to be treated this way.”
Feinberg’s response to such complaints was to visit the home and show the parents their child’s fourth-grade TAAS scores. “Your daughter is very bright,” he said to the mother who had yelled at Kolasinski. “She’s got a lot of potential, but before she got to KIPP, this is how she was doing. If you say you want her to be treated the way she was at her old school, this is the result of her old school.” That parent calmed down. But others continued to complain. One or two each year would be so unhappy they would not send their children back the next year.
J. R. Gonzalez, a Gulfton student recruited in 1996, remembered years later what it was like to be a fifth grader at KIPP Houston. He was tall and athletic, good in math, and weak in English. When he did not do his homework, his teachers were in his face, marking off points and putting him on the Porch. Feinberg could be frightening. He might scream at J. R. and then, in a suddenly quiet voice, explain that such behavior was not acceptable.
Homework was a huge issue every day. Feinberg experimented with making students stand the entire period in any class for which they weren’t prepared. “You haven’t brought your ticket with you,” he told the students, “so you can’t sit down.” J. R. did not like it. But he did not tell either Feinberg or his father how he felt. He was afraid of what they would say to him. He was also beginning to think that despite the school’s annoying rules, it might be the best thing for him, and he was making friends with the other KIPP students.
Feinberg thought the first year went well. His teachers were gaining confidence and adding new techniques. The school’s standards remained high. But the future did not look good. There was no room at Askew to create a sixth grade the following year. Patterson had promised to find the space, but she was taking much longer than Feinberg had expected.
When no expansion plan materialized, Feinberg unleashed on the central school administration his advocacy-in-democracy lesson. All of the fifth graders called officials downtown to complain about not knowing where they would be going to school the next year. Hours later, Patterson was frantically trying to repair the damage, while Feinberg, not the least contrite, continued to ask her exactly when he was going to get his new facility.
Patterson had to explain to everyone she worked with that the rash of student calls was indeed, as they had suspected, the work of that overgrown adolescent Feinberg. She also had to tell them she was going to put a stop to Feinberg’s misbehavior once and for all. Patterson told Feinberg to report to her office immediately after school. She knew that was unlikely to happen, since he was never prompt for any appointment with her. She had lost count of the times he had promised to be at her office by 5:30 p.m. and then kept her waiting past her usual time to go home. It was often not until 7:00 p.m. that she would see him, through her office window, pulling into the parking lot in the blue Chevy van he had bought to transport children. She would give him a stern look. “I’m sorry, Anne,” he would say, “but there were some kids I had to take home.”
When he arrived the evening after the advocacy lesson, she dispensed with all pleasantries. She had to get through to him. She talked about being a team player, about not cutting the ground out from under her, about being patient, about not acting as if he were the only school principal in the city who cared about children. She could tell he was not buying it. They both knew she was not good at dressing down subordinates. It was mostly playacting. Feinberg was a gifted classroom performer when it came to being stern with his students, and he could tell she was going through the motions.
He stood his ground. He said he would do what he had to do to cut through the apathy that was strangling Houston and a lot of other school districts. His school was doing great. His kids deserved a chance to achieve. He was going to continue to fight for that any way he could.
Patterson leaned forward on her desk and rubbed her temples. It was time for action. So for the first time, she wrote Feinberg up.
Writing somebody up is a popular method of administrative discipline in American school districts. Patterson gave Feinberg an official letter, to be placed in his personnel file, telling him what he had done wrong and directing him to act differently in the future. She told all of the officials who complained to her about Feinberg that she had written him up. In their culture, where many actions were taken for the sake of appearance, this was a satisfactory punishment. People at headquarters thought, She really stuck it to Feinberg this time. He’ll think twice before he does something this outrageous again. It’s in his permanent record now.
What actually happened was that after Feinberg signed the reprimand, adding the smiley face he and Levin used in almost all KIPP communications, Patterson tossed the letter into one of her drawers. It did not go into Feinberg’s file, and she forgot about it.