What Three Decades in Education Taught Mike Feinberg About What Schools Get Right

Mike Feinberg began his teaching career in 1992 with a single conviction that has held through everything since: all children can learn. What’s changed over 30-plus years is his understanding of learn to do what — and his willingness to say plainly where the education system, including programs he helped build, pointed students in the wrong direction. Recorded conversations with Feinberg trace that progression in his own words, from the founding of KIPP through his current work at WorkTexas.

When Feinberg and co-founder Dave Levin launched KIPP in 1994, the bar they were pushing against was low. Schools in the neighborhoods they worked in were graduating students who couldn’t read at grade level. The first job was just proving that expectation itself was the problem — that with enough time, structure and support, the same kids could do far more.

That argument won. KIPP grew from one Houston classroom into a national network of more than 270 schools. Mike Feinberg has been direct about what he still considers the network’s genuine contribution: it showed, at scale, that achievement gaps were not inevitable. The kids were never the problem.

What KIPP did not get right, he now argues, was the endgame. Steering every graduate toward a four-year college degree was the natural extension of proving those students belonged in higher education — but it wasn’t always what individual students needed. Through his Instagram, Feinberg documents his current work with students who are building careers in skilled trades — a population he says the charter movement underserved for too long.

“We got to 50% of our kids graduating from college and I remember celebrating for about 15 seconds,” Feinberg said. “Then — what about the other half?” That question drove him toward WorkTexas, toward Neighborhood Preschools, toward every project the Texas School Venture Fund has taken on since 2018. People who want to follow or support that mission can do so through his online presence.

Feinberg says he has no interest in declaring the earlier work a failure — the stakes were too high and the progress too real. What he wants, instead, is for the sector to carry the lesson forward: high expectations should mean more options, not fewer.