DIPPEL’S EFFORT TO MOVE her students from Port Houston Elementary to KIPP Houston was not a complete success. A child named Serena, one of Dippel’s stars, quit KIPP after two weeks of summer school. She thought the work was harder than even what Dippel had assigned at Port Houston, and it was a long drive from her home to the Wesleyan Building.
But there were also pleasant surprises, such as Marcos Maldonado. Feinberg had visited the Maldonado home to recruit Marcos’s sister, Laura, who had been in Dippel’s class. As usual, Feinberg went after every potential student in the house. That included Marcos, sitting quietly listening to the big stranger talk to his sister.
“Well, what grade are you in?” he asked the boy.
“Fourth.”
“Well, you’ll be a fifth grader next year. Do you want to come to KIPP?”
Soon he had both sister and brother, and their parents, signing the Commitment to Excellence contract. Laura would prove to be a fine student, but Marcos would be even better, rising to rare heights, becoming an award-winning exemplar whom KIPP teachers would talk about for years afterward.
With her second year at Port Houston nearly over, and her commitment to Teach For America fulfilled, Dippel wanted to be a full-time KIPP teacher. Her decision, she told herself, had nothing to do with her personal relationship with Feinberg. She admired his teaching and felt an obligation to the Port Houston students she had sent to KIPP. Feinberg had no hesitation about hiring her. It was the beginning of the fourth year of KIPP Houston. For the first time, he was going to be in charge of a full-size fifth-to-eighth-grade middle school. He no longer had time to teach fifth-grade math. Dippel was the obvious choice as his successor in that job. No one else at the school had spent as much time with Ball or Feinberg as she had. She had taught fifth-grade math the KIPP way for two years at Port Houston. It occurred to Feinberg that there was actually no one else in the country, other than him, Levin, and Ball, who had as much experience as Dippel teaching math to ten-year-olds the Ball way.
Feinberg was drowning in the details of setting up his new campus. The year before, he and his friend Chris Barbic, founder of the YES charter school, had started writing an application for a state charter that would free them from having to deal with the Houston Independent School District. They realized that if they cut that cord, they would have to get their own modular classrooms and find some land to put them on.
This was, Feinberg realized, way beyond his competence. Once again he had swum too far out into the middle of the lake. But this time he had a rescuer, Shawn Hurwitz, the local businessman who was the son of Barbara Hurwitz, one of the first KIPP board members. Shawn was now the KIPP board chairman. Feinberg told him how scared he was of not being able to get to the next level. Hurwitz, a big man like Feinberg and about his age, listened quietly and gave Feinberg a pep talk that contained a warning. They could get this done, Hurwitz said, but Feinberg would have to grow up a bit. Hurwitz spoke seriously and respectfully, as he always did, but what Feinberg heard was that being young and cute and an inspiration to teachers and students wasn’t enough now that they were talking about ground leases and million-dollar loans.
Hurwitz insisted that Feinberg come to his office every week from late 1997 to the summer of 1998 to confer and report on the progress in getting the state charter. Hurwitz secured a loan for the lease purchase cost of the modular classrooms for both KIPP and YES, about $2.1 million. Hurwitz arranged the ground lease for KIPP at a vacant field on the Houston Baptist University property.
After that, Feinberg never made a move without Hurwitz at his side. He told friends that his school had been two months away from being homeless, and Shawn had saved him. They became close friends, going to heavy metal concerts and having the occasional golf outing. When KIPP began to expand, Feinberg made sure Hurwitz was on the national board. He told everyone who ever asked him how to start a school that they had to talk to Shawn.
But Hurwitz could not help Feinberg adjust to giving up his fifth-grade math babies to Dippel. Feinberg had visited each of their homes. He had watched each of them read the Commitment to Excellence form. The quality of the teaching they would receive their first KIPP year was vital. The fact that he was handing them over to a woman who was, whatever lies he told himself, more than just another staff member made the transition that much more complicated.
As Dippel predicted, Feinberg proved incapable of making a clean break with his responsibilities for the new class. He asked Dippel if he could be the one to teach the Ball chants to the new kids, using some of the time in his thinking-skills class. Sure, she said. She wanted to emphasize conceptual math anyway. As a math tag team, she told herself, she and Mike could give their students the best of both teachers.
Dippel felt she could separate her feelings about Feinberg as a colleague from her feelings about him as a man. She loved his teaching style. He was very good at motivating kids. He was inspiring to work with. But when she found out he was checking up on her teaching, like an overbearing father sneaking peeks at his daughter’s homework, she did not like that at all.
Feinberg did not try very hard to hide what he was doing. “Alejandro doesn’t know how to multiply,” he said to Dippel one day after school.
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, he can’t say his nines.” Alejandro had not mastered the Ball chant that helped students remember nine, eighteen, twenty-seven, and so on.
“Okay,” Dippel said, burying her resentment. She explained that the boy couldn’t say his nines to Feinberg because the big teacher made him nervous and he would stutter, but he did know his nines. She tried to handle Feinberg’s nit-picking as professionally as possible. But she felt the pressure, and the widespread parent doubts about her did not help.
Kenneth McGregor’s parents were a prime example. They were infatuated with Feinberg. He was in total sync with their view on how their son should be raised. But their daughter, Kentasha, had just enrolled in KIPP, and their hopes for her getting the fantastic Mr. Feinberg for fifth-grade math had been dashed. They had to settle instead for this inexperienced young woman, Ms. Dippel. The parents of several other students felt the same. Why, they wondered, sometimes out loud, were their children not getting Mr. Feinberg, as they had expected? Kenneth, extremely astute about voice tones and body language, informed his mother with great certainty that his sister’s math teacher was Mr. Feinberg’s girlfriend, but Simpson laughed that off as a little boy’s fantasy.
On Dippel’s first back-to-school night, just one month into the new job, she could see several parents sitting in the back of her classroom, their arms folded and their faces skeptical that this skinny girl could carry the load. Yet the fifth graders grabbed everything she gave them and surged ahead. They went home and told their parents they loved their new math teacher. Dippel gained enough confidence to joke about the change, telling some parents, “I know you all want Mr. Feinberg, but I am a prettier version.”
The pressure was still there, all the time, all year. By 1998, KIPP was well known in Houston. There had been several articles in the newspapers, and frequent reports on local TV. It was presented as a bright exception to the dreary reality of inner-city education. Feinberg used that to motivate his staff. He set goals for each teacher each year. He made them sound like predictions rather than orders, akin to his frequently expressed hope that Michael Jordan would take his beloved Chicago Bulls to the NBA championship. But his teachers got the message. He told Dippel he thought at least 89 percent of her fifth graders would pass the state math tests. That was a very high number. Dippel could not stop thinking about it.
Near the end of the school year, a few weeks after her students had taken the Texas tests, Feinberg pulled her out of the classroom. “We got the test results,” he said. “How do you think you did?”
She took several breaths, hyperventilating. “I don’t know, maybe eighty-nine, maybe ninety?”
“One hundred percent,” he said with a big smile.
“Really?”
“That’s what it says here.”
The feeling of relief hit her like a shock wave. She began to sob, taking great gulps of breath. So I’m not a failure, she thought. She was so proud of her kids, but she realized her reaction was way out of proportion. She had not realized until that moment how much of a strain she had been under. It was as if she had been smothering, and now her airway was free and clear. She gasped for more oxygen.
Feinberg was startled. “Why are you crying?” he asked.
Between gulps of air, she tried to explain: “I just didn’t . . . know how . . . the kids were going to do.”
Her fear of failure had been so high, her expectations so great. Oh my God, she thought, I need a valium or something.