Two Guys...and a Dream
Critics of KIPP are hard to find, but those who have raised concerns cite the rigid discipline and its practice of paying for progress. If students are used to being bribed for performance, how will they do when the only reward is in the learning itself? In response, Feinberg and Levin say the paycheck is but one tool in a whole bag of incentives. Playing for the love of the game, they say, is simply not realistic for the whole group. "Some kids are interested and motivated from the word go," says Levin. "But the majority are not, so the rewards are like a crutch to get them walking on their own."
A bigger question for KIPP's founders, and for public education in general, is whether the success of their program can be replicated elsewhere. Some observers argue that KIPP parents, however underprivileged, are inherently more motivated than the parents of other public school kids. To which Feinberg responds: "More motivated? They have to answer a knock on the door and listen to us for an hour and sign their name? How difficult." Levin invites doubters to compare the statistics of KIPP kids when they enter the program and when they leave. "The kids in fourth grade started out with the same low scores, the same sorts of disciplinary problems," he says.
Final exam. Looking back over a decade in the classroom, Feinberg and Levin cite the sorts of triumphs and failures familiar to any adventurer in the blackboard jungle. "There have been so many nights being up until midnight after waking up at 5 a.m. and voice mails from parents yelling at me like I'm a little worse than the devil," Feinberg says. Levin, too, takes an emotional beating almost daily. Even as he has grown as a teacher and an administrator, he says, "it doesn't mean the problems in students' lives get any easier to handle--the crises of confidence, the lack of skills, the peer pressure. Every day there are moments." But every day, too, he says, the disappointments are canceled out by the rewards.
In the rewards department, Feinberg recalls a recognition ceremony for eighth graders at a KIPP school in Houston. (The "G" word is reserved for high school and college.) A few of the students had been accepted to parochial high schools, but they couldn't afford the tuition. So their peers held a car wash for them: They raised $360--matched by Feinberg's mother--and announced a scholarship fund. "There was not a dry eye in the house," says Feinberg. "I told them, 'You have passed my final exam, not in math or English but in the most important subject of all, and that is life.'"
Levin has no shortage of such moments of his own. But he leaves it at this: "We don't go to bed at night," he says, "wondering why we are on the planet."
Dave Levin
BORN March 16, 1970. EDUCATION: B.A., Yale University. FAMILY: Single. QUOTE: "People want to replicate parts of what we are doing, but it's the totality of the efforts that make this work, and they all pale in comparison with the personal connection; if you just had great teachers, it would work."
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