Mike Feinberg and Colleen Dippel married in 2001. She was not happy moving back to what she referred to as “that hot hellhole,” Houston, Texas. But that was where he thought he would be happiest and most valuable to KIPP. They wanted a family, and it was difficult to arrange that when he was traveling all the time, so she relented. In 2005, Feinberg set to work on a master plan, conceived with his two business-executive friends Shawn Hurwitz and Leo Linbeck, to have forty-two KIPP schools in Houston by 2017. By 2008 they had raised $65 million, a charter school record.
After Scott Hamilton took over as KIPP Foundation CEO, the number of KIPP schools nationally continued to expand. To the surprise of many education reporters, accustomed to such franchises petering out, the achievement results at nearly all the schools were as good as they had been at Feinberg and Levin’s first two schools, and sometimes better. It was another blow to the assumption that low-income children couldn’t learn very much, no matter how hard they tried.
One morning in October 2005, as Hamilton headed toward his office near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on the Vespa he had started riding to work, his front tire caught on a streetcar rail on Market Street. He went flying into the air. He cracked his helmet when he landed, and was unconscious for several days. Boyd, told to expect the worst, stayed with him and saw him gradually recover. She used her management skills to organize a rehabilitation program that by the spring of 2006 had him sounding and moving as if nothing had happened. They decided to try living with their young daughter in a scenic part of Wyoming. Boyd started an online preschool-finding service, the Savvy Source. Hamilton left KIPP to work for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, an education reform group run by Chester E. Finn Jr., the former Edison official who had first encouraged the Hamilton-Boyd romance.
LEVIN, ACKNOWLEDGING IT was his turn to be the boss, ran the foundation temporarily from New York when Hamilton had his accident. Much of Levin’s administrative chores were done on his cell phone while he drove his car around the city. The number of schools continued to grow. Eventually, Levin and Feinberg and the Fishers persuaded Richard Barth, an executive at Edison, to take over the leadership of the KIPP Foundation.
Barth was known to both Feinberg and Levin because he was married to Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America. Barth ran KIPP from New York. By the summer of 2008, the school network had sixteen thousand students in sixty-six schools located in nineteen states and the District of Columbia.
IN LATE APRIL OF 2005, Dippel, eight months pregnant, was in Connecticut visiting an old friend whose mother had died. Feinberg was in Houston, planning the annual KIPP fund-raising gala. In the middle of the night, he got a call from his wife saying she was bleeding a bit and getting a quick check at a hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York, close to where her father and stepmother lived. She put Feinberg on standby. The next day she called and told him to catch the next plane.
He was there for the labor, which lasted several hours. At one point she asked him to give her a back rub. When he did not press down hard enough to suit her, she upbraided him for a lack of manliness with the exact words Corcoran had used when Levin almost gave up his effort to establish KIPP in New York.
At 11:00 a.m. the next day, April 30, a large, healthy baby boy was born. The couple had to drive him back to Houston in a rented blue Toyota SUV because the airlines would not take Dippel so soon after childbirth. They stopped every three hours for Dippel to nurse the infant. The trip took three days. It was a stressful journey. Feinberg later claimed they decided to get divorced in Georgia but reconciled in Mississippi.
They named the boy August Phillip Feinberg. Phillip was for Phillip Dippel, Colleen’s father. August was for Augustus McCrae—the character in Lonesome Dove that Feinberg thought was so like his friend Dave. Just like Captain McCrae, ex-Texas Ranger, the boy would grow up being called Gus.
AT 6:00 P.M. ON August 11, 2007, David John Levin married Chanda Nichole Chase in a ceremony presided over by a minister and a rabbi at the Ohio Street Beach on Chicago’s Lake Michigan shore. Marrying on the beach was against city rules. But Levin, remembering Feinberg’s persistence with Rod Paige, staked out the office of the Chicago Parks Department official in charge and worked out a deal. A local bride’s magazine was so taken with the novelty of the occasion that they sent a photographer.
There were sixty guests in attendance, including Feinberg, Dippel, Ball, Corcoran, Winston, Barth, and Kopp. Ball’s pinched nerve forced her to use a wheelchair for the short walk from the hotel to the beach. The ceremony had a mix of Christian and Jewish rituals. The bride wore a silky off-white dress, no poufs. The groom was in a tan suit.
After a two-week honeymoon in Hawaii, the first nonworking vacation Levin had had in fifteen years, they returned to New York. Chase resumed her consulting in the marketing industry. Levin continued to oversee plans to expand to nine KIPP schools in New York, adding KIPP high schools and elementary schools as Feinberg had done in Houston. Levin also announced the establishment of a new state-certified teacher-training institute at Hunter College.
The idea was to raise the classroom skills of a new generation of teachers to the level Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg had attained by listening to Harriett Ball, Rafe Esquith, Charlie Randall, Jerry Myers, Anne Patterson, Susan Winston, and Shawn Hurwitz and by working as hard as they could to help each of their students climb the mountain to and through college.
Feinberg and Levin began their teaching lives in some of the worst possible circumstances and found they were unprepared. But if they had never been faced with such embarrassing failure, they would never have mustered the energy to try to overcome their own inadequacies and their students’ disadvantages.
Most American schools in the poorest cities and towns continue to fail in the same way Levin and Feinberg did at the beginning. Their decision to build more schools grew from their hope that their story of revival could be repeated. They were just two educators, and they were going to need many more who were willing to believe that good teaching can make a big difference and that all children will learn if they receive the time and encouragement and love they deserve.