KIPP schools co-founder sees growth potential

Mike Feinberg, who is the superintendent of nine KIPP schools in Houston, said the organization's goal is to use its success in educating mostly underserved, impoverished students to affect public education the same way that competition from FedEx forced the U.S. Postal Service to reform.

"I think school districts want to improve, but no monopoly has ever reformed itself from within. We can provide the friendly, outside push to help the leaders drive the change that they need to drive," Feinberg said in a morning visit to KIPP Tulsa College Preparatory, 1661 E. Virgin St.

Based in San Francisco, KIPP boasts 57 schools in 17 states and the District of Columbia, with a total enrollment of more than 14,000 students.

Feinberg said KIPP plans to shift its growth from opening schools in new cities to increasing its presences in cities where KIPP schools already exist, including Tulsa.

He said that in Tulsa, "one cluster of five or six schools will get you to that tipping point" of affecting the entire school system.

"First off, the community is so generous. There are the leaders who realize that it is about great teaching and more of it and how we put policy in place to drive toward that," he said.

KIPP Tulsa was founded

The school serves students in grades five to seven who live north of Pine Street and is expected to grow to serve eighth-graders in 2008-09.

KIPP Tulsa is one of only two schools in the KIPP network operated through a contract with a school district.

But Feinberg said all new KIPP schools likely will be charter schools like the majority of existing ones.

"We learned that even in places where we found an amazing, forward-thinking superintendent and school board who wanted to contract with us, it was fine and dandy when we were working with them, but then the school board election came or the superintendent then left, and the new board and superintendent didn't want anything to do with us, and we were up a creek," he said.

Although the nature of charter schools has its own disadvantages, a charter relationship with school districts gives KIPP "a little more control over our own destiny," he added.

Local legislators and nonprofit group leaders asked Feinberg's opinion of Oklahoma's charter school law, which recently was amended to allow universities and CareerTech boards to sponsor charter schools just like school districts do.

He said Oklahoma had made progress with the amendments but still might consider offering additional funding to charter schools with proven success and allowing districts to claim charter-school test results in their overall totals.

The idea for KIPP was born in 1994 when Feinberg and another teacher, Dave Levin, launched a new public school program for fifth-graders in inner-city Houston.

In 1995, Feinberg remained in Houston to lead the KIPP Academy Middle School, while Levin returned home to New York City to establish a KIPP Academy in the South Bronx.

Five years later, Doris and Donald Fisher, co-founders of Gap Inc., formed a unique partnership with Feinberg and Levin to replicate the success of the two original KIPP schools across the country through the nonprofit KIPP Foundation.

KIPP TULSA COLLEGE PREPARATORY SCHOOL

1661 E. Virgin St.

260 students, grades five through seven

80 percent receive free or reduced-price lunches

School receives federal Title I funding

14 teachers, one counselor/ librarian

Andrea Eger 581-8470
andrea.eger@tulsaworld.com