Mike Feinberg arrived in Houston in 1992 with six weeks of Teach For America training and a fifth-grade bilingual classroom full of kids who mostly didn’t speak English. He stayed. Three decades later he’s still in Houston, still chasing the same question: what does it actually take for a kid from a struggling neighborhood to build a stable life? His answer has shifted a great deal.
“College prep does not need to mean college for all,” he says now. “All of our college counselors could have, should have been career counselors or life counselors, where college is an important pathway but not the only pathway.”
What the Data Told Mike Feinberg
Feinberg co-founded KIPP in 1994 out of a single classroom at Garcia Elementary. The network grew into more than 270 public charter schools built on a simple bet: rigorous academics and high expectations could put low-income kids on a path to college. For years, nobody questioned the premise. Then the alumni data arrived.
By 2016, KIPP Houston had crossed a threshold Feinberg had spent years chasing: more than half its alumni graduating from four-year colleges, a first among high-performing charter networks by his account. He says the celebration lasted about 15 seconds. “That’s half,” he recalls thinking. “What about the other half?”
The other half wasn’t failing. Many had gone into trades, the military or started businesses, and they were doing fine, while some who did earn degrees had taken on crushing debt for credentials that didn’t pay off. “We basically shamed vo-tech out of the high schools, which was a terrible mistake,” Feinberg says. “We told kids and parents that if you want to be successful in this world, you have to go to college. In the ’90s, it was a car loan. Now it’s a home mortgage.”
From KIPP to WorkTexas
Feinberg pushed to change the culture from inside KIPP before he left around 2018, and he says the resistance was real. “That was a very strong culture monster we created,” he says. “It was going to take several years to turn that ship.”
He co-founded the Texas School Venture Fund, which later incubated WorkTexas alongside Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale and former student Vanessa Ramirez. The program trains high schoolers and adults across two Houston campuses, with curriculum built by more than 100 employer partners. Feinberg calls it a correction, not a repudiation, of the work he spent 25 years building, and he’s kept making that case on the keynote circuit as well as on his personal site. A record of the earlier chapter, when the story was still about KIPP alone, is preserved in a PBS interview from that era.