When the high-rolling co-founder of KIPP, Mike Feinberg, was fired in 2018 based on allegations of child sexual abuse, he found work running some vocational programs in Houston. He is once more hooked up with construction magnate and charter school enthusiast, Leo Linbeck, and Feinberg heads up an outfit called Work Texas, a jobs training program that sends its grit-infused program completers into blue collar careers.
As a board member of Work Texas, one of Linbeck’s companies was paid $2.4 million in 2020 to build the Work Texas vocational school (see IRS 990 here).
Rather than training children to become future assets for white collar corporations, which is the mission of KIPP, Feinberg’s new lucrative “non-profit” venture hopes to make black and brown workers into assets for construction and building companies.
In the following clip from a recent article promoting Work Texas, which uses an old photo of Feinberg from his “stallion” days at KIPP, Feinberg finally admits at least some small part of the damage that KIPP has imposed on its graduates.
The [graduation] numbers are eye-catching: WorkTexas boasts an 88 percent completion rate. But Feinberg insists the more telling data emerges later. Graduates who stay employed for at least a year earn an average of $23 an hour, while about 100 alumni have returned for additional training to advance their careers.
This long-term obsession comes from Feinberg’s earlier work at KIPP, the charter school network he co-founded. KIPP famously tracked its students through college for up to a decade after middle school. That data revealed sobering truths: while half of KIPP Houston alumni earned degrees, others dropped out burdened by debt.
“We hurt children,” Feinberg admits about students who took on massive loans but never finished. “They’re working at Starbucks with $100,000 worth of debt.”
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