Two Guys..and a Dream

Below is a wonderful article about David Levin and Mike Feinberg, the two founders of KIPP, from a recent issue of U.S. News & World Report.  I always learn new things in these articles -- for example, I never knew this:

Feinberg and Levin had confidence but no clue. For Feinberg, the realization came on the first day of school, the minute he said, "Hi, I'm Mr. Feinberg. You can call me Mr. F." Levin, a fellow Teach for America recruit, didn't fare much better. When the school added 17 kids to the 11 he had started with, Levin put them in groups facing each other. "What no one had told me," he recalls, "is that they were from rival gangs." There were bets--a running pool with odds--of whether he would make it past Thanksgiving.

Or this:

Feinberg, who majored in international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, likes to say that he became a teacher because Mardi Gras coincided with the administration of the law school entrance exam.

Or this:

The two met on the first day of Teach for America training when Feinberg was angling to meet another new teacher. The woman needed a ride to the store, but Feinberg didn't drive a stick shift, so for cover, he asked Levin to come along. He didn't know that Levin, raised in Manhattan, couldn't drive a stick either.

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Two Guys….and a Dream

 

By Susan Headden, US News and World Report

February 20, 2006

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/060220/20leaders.htm

 

Ask Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin what drove them to write one of the greatest educational success stories in recent times, and their answer seems reasonable enough: "ignorance." Except that the ignorance they speak of wasn't that of their students; it was their own. "We didn't know what we didn't know," says Feinberg. "No one said how impossible this was going to be."

That's a good thing. Because if these two Ivy League-educated white guys had really understood the challenges of teaching fifth graders in inner-city Houston when they started out 14 years ago, they might never have had the audacity to found the Knowledge Is Power Program, a national network of public schools that has posted stunning achievement gains and shattered all manner of myths about the academic capabilities of minority kids.