Feinberg Finally Speaks Some Truth about KIPP

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.”

Details of Allegations Against KIPP's Mike Feinberg

Do you remember Christine Blasey Ford's emotional and riveting testimony related to her decades-old sexual assault at the hands of Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, when he was a drunk, horny punk who enjoyed terrorizing and humiliating females? If you do, you're likely to remember, too, that institutional sexism functioned as it always has: it maligned the female victim of abuse so that the male perpetrator would never be held accountable for his criminal violence and cruelty.

You may remember, too, that Blasey Ford is a highly-regarded white middle class professional, whose testimony lacked only vital criterion required to establish its veracity: maleness.

Now picture what it must be like for a working class non-white female to go up against a privileged middle class male hero of the white male establishment, this time in a Southern state where discrimination and racism are even more systemic than in Washington, DC. 

This is what happened in April when a former KIPP student and her mother testified before two administrative law judges in Texas about a sexual assault that occurred twenty years ago when she was an 11-year old Mexican-American girl at Mike Feinberg's Houston KIPP middle school.

And even though Wilmer-Hale, the prestigious DC law firm hired by KIPP in 2017 to investigate the allegations, "found the alleged victim to be credible," the Texas judges have now concluded that they will recommend to the Texas Education Agency that the victim failed to "meet its burden to prove any such allegations," and that Feinberg, then, should retain his teaching license.

Here is the summary of the main allegation against Feinberg, who was defended during the hearing by some of the best defense attorneys money can buy.

As the factual bases for the present disciplinary action, Staff has accused Respondent of sexually abusing Student 1 during two incidents that would have occurred during the spring of 1999. At that time, Student 1 was completing the second of two years that she spent in KIPP Academy’s fifth grade while Respondent was serving as the school’s principal and as a teacher. In the first incident, according to Staff’s pleadings, Respondent “took [Student 1] into his office” at the school, ostensibly to conduct a “yearly check-up,” and then proceeded to reach under her shirt and run his fingers between her breasts and also along her back. The second incident allegedly occurred “[a] week or two later,” when Respondent “took [Student 1] back to his office,” this time under the pretense that he had “lost the file” from the earlier “check-up” and “would have to redo the exam.” Then, according to Staff, “Respondent asked [Student 1] to remove her clothing from the waist down,” “had [Student 1] sit on the desk and spread her legs,” then “approache[d] her with a Q-tip and inserted it into [her] vagina for a few seconds.”

The Texas judges did not hear the two charges against Feinberg's for sexual harassment against KIPP employees, and they did not hear allegations that Feinberg used KIPP computers to access porn.

It is be up to the State Board of Educator Certification to make the final call on whether or not Feinberg will keep his provisional middle school teaching license that he qualified for during his two year stint as a TFA recruit in the early 1990s.

Feinberg's lawsuit against KIPP, Inc. for defamation was dismissed earlier this year.

Mike Feinberg's Lawyers Go After Abused Hispanic Family

In what has to be one of the greatest power disparities in the history of charter school sexual abuse, Mike Feinberg and his high-rolling legal team faced off against a girl and her mother last week at a hearing to determine if the predator KIPP founder will be able to keep his teacher's license after being fired for sexually abusing a middle school child.

Reading the excerpt from the Texas Tribune article below, it's not a tough call.  We will still have to wonder, however, if Feinberg will be able to buy his way clear.

. . . . In a petition calling for the hearing, a TEA lawyer said Feinberg allegedly performed a “yearly check up” on the former student, then a fifth grader attending KIPP in Houston in the late 1990s. While the two were in his office, the petition alleges, he placed his hand inside her shirt and rubbed up and down between her breasts and belly button. He had her “touch her toes while he ran his finger from her neck to her waist,” it says. 

A week or two later, Feinberg is alleged to have told the student he lost the file and had to redo the exam. He “took her back to his office,” closed the door and had her partially disrobe, the TEA petition claims. He inserted a Q-tip into her vagina for a few seconds and then instructed her to return to class, it says. He was a teacher and the principal of the school at the time. 

In testimony at the certification hearing Wednesday, the former student said she “felt confused” after the incidents. She put on her clothes, went back to class, and told her mother about it after returning home. Although her mother was upset, the student asked her not to share the information with her father. “I thought my dad was going to blame me for it and hit me,” she testified. 

Asked why she didn’t tell the school or police, the student responded, “They wouldn’t believe me because of my race.” She said she wanted to leave the school right away, but her mother didn’t know how to explain it to her father. She left a year later. “I wasn’t comfortable” anymore, she said. 

The student’s mother largely confirmed her daughter’s account. 

“I was in very bad shape. I started crying with her,” the mother testified through a Spanish translator. “I wanted to say something, but my daughter didn’t let me. We needed to talk to my husband, but we were scared of him because he was very strict and tough with her and with me.” 

Feinberg’s lawyers [called more than a dozen witnesses and] worked to dismantle the student’s testimony. Feinberg sat pensively observing, sometimes taking notes on a yellow legal pad, during much of the testimony. He winked at his wife as he sat down to testify; they clutched hands after he finished speaking and rejoined his lawyers at their table. 

“That did not happen … absolutely not,” Feinberg responded to detailed questions about the student’s allegations. Asked if he contended she was lying, he gave a long pause: “I contend that what she is saying are not the facts.” Asked why she would lodge the allegations, he said, “That would just be speculation.” . . . .

New Court Details on KIPP Founder and Sexual Predator, Mike Feinberg

Recent revelations from a lawsuit brought by Mike Feinberg against KIPP have given a whole new meaning to KIPP's concept, "KIPP through college."  In what has to be the sleaziest example of a quid pro quo, it seems Feinberg offered ongoing financial help to an 18-year-old KIPP graduate for sex in return:

. . . Feinberg offered her financial support in exchange for sex, calling it a “tradition in the North,” according to KIPP lawyers. The proposition occurred in the early 2000s, at a time when the then-18-year-old worked for the charter network before enrolling in college, according to the motion.

Other details uncovered in court filings show Feinberg playing doctor, you might say, with a 12-year-old KIPPSTER whom he fondled repeatedly in his office on the excuse of providing physical examinations.

Other details to emerge: Feinberg used his school computer at least 30 times to access porn sites.

But nothing can stop a dedicated "stallion" educator like Mike Feinberg from fulfilling his moral calling.  Today he is helping run a charter school founded by (irony alert) his original patron and Gallery Furniture owner Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale.   

Rick Hess's Apologia for Child Abuser, Mike Feinberg

KIPP, Inc. would like to forget that Mike Feinberg is co-founder of KIPP, a corporate "no excuses" charter school chain made infamous by a weird macho management style that exhibits sadistic and masochistic excesses toward both students and teachers.  Adults and children are commonly worked to the point of physical and mental collapse and then discarded without any signs of empathy or concern by KIPP CEOs.  

KIPP's discarded victims are most often brainwashed to self-blame for their failure to meet KIPP's expectations, which keeps negative PR to a minimum while insulating the perpetrators from any sense of responsibility for their corrosive and cruel treatment of other humans.  It's a cult technique that continues to be well-funded, as corporate and federal support make the KIPP Model of total compliance schooling the dominant mode of segregating and culturally sterilizing economically disadvantaged black and brown children.

If we have historians a hundred years from now, KIPP Model practices will be viewed the same way we, today, view the eugenics ideology and practices of the 1920s.

While KIPP students are mostly poor and almost entirely black or brown, management is largely white male, and the teacher corps is majority white female.  The KIPP Model is the 21st Century version of the black industrial model of schooling for ex-slaves in the late 19th Century, a theory and practice that was perfected at Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute.  

At Hampton, the future black teachers were indoctrinated to accept their social subjugation and moral inferiority as their just due and to work their fingers to the bone in order to gain acceptance as second class citizens among the white elite. The 80 percent of students who were dismissed from Hampton before earning teaching certificates were viewed as victims of their own recalcitrance and/or laziness.

Last spring Mike Feinberg found himself being dismissed from KIPP, and just as KIPP students or teachers who are viewed as liabilities are disposed of without a second thought, so was Feinberg fired when his sexual dalliances with a middle school student and employees could not be covered up any longer and, thus, became a threat to the KIPP brand. 

Now corporate ed reformer and think tank denizen, Rick Hess, has offered another take on to the unfairness of Feinberg's firing.  Hess doesn't blame KIPP, Inc. nearly so much as he does 1) the timing of Feinberg's public outing, coming as it did during the peak of the Me Too movement, and 2) the "emotionally immature, impetuous, and impressionable" qualities of Feinberg's child accuser. Here's the most disgusting part of Hess's dissembling dissing of the accusations:

Educators work intimately and forge powerful bonds with emotionally immature, impetuous, and impressionable minors. A teacher can’t do their job whole-heartedly or well if asked to live in constant fear that unsupported allegations can ruin their professional lives and public reputations.

KIPP vs. Feinberg: Battle of the Moral Sewer Dwellers

For almost 25 years, Mike Feinberg broke enough rules to bull his way up to the top of a morally-compromised heap of paternalistic charter hell school operators. 

In the early days of KIPP, Feinberg is remembered as the hothead without boundaries who threw a TV through a plate glass window at KIPP Houston--the same reckless wild man who would load KIPP students into an unventilated U-Haul trailer for a "field lesson" across town. 

"Whatever it takes" was "Cage-Buster" Feinberg's mantra, and he and David Levin believed that, as KIPP's top leaders, they should model the aggressive, hyper-macho, and abusive "let the stallions run" style of leadership for their clueless regiment of KIPP "school leaders."  No holds barred, take no prisoners, let the rules be damned.

Who knows if their schooling "philosophy" of reckless abandon contributed to Feinberg's eventual bust for sexual harassment of two KIPP employees, sexual abuse of a middle school student, and another charge vaguely referred to as “repeatedly violat[ing] KIPP’s technology usage policies.”  

Sexting? Porno? Who knows what the "cage-buster" was up to?

When it became obvious to KIPP in 2017 that Feinberg's behavior could be the source of a major scandal that could damage the brand and, thus, jeopardize the flow of hundreds of millions of federal and private dollars to KIPP, KIPP launched its own very hush-hush investigation into allegations that Feinberg had sexually assaulted a middle student some years before.  That was in April 2017. See documents here.

On September 7, 2017, KIPP notified Feinberg that he was off the hook, while entirely downplaying the sexual assault charges with this: "Other than what the former student alleges, now almost 20 years after the alleged acts, there is no evidence of any wrongdoing." In other words, KIPP chose to ignore the charges and "to consider the matter officially closed."

Obviously, the allegations did not go away as easily as KIPP would prefer.  Just two  months after Feinberg was "exonerated,"  KIPP Houston hired a law firm, WilmerHale, to conduct a real investigation beginning in November 2017.  Contrary to KIPP's own findings just two months before, WilmerHale found the charges of sexual abuse with a middle schooler credible.  The law firm, whose specialty is investigating sexual misconduct allegations, also uncovered two sexual harassment cases involving Feinberg and KIPP employees, one of which resulted in a settlement in 2004.  

Did the KIPP Board know about this part of Feinberg's history when it gave him a free pass just months earlier?  How could they not know if a settlement had been paid?  

Unable to sweep all this under the rug any longer, KIPP sent a letter to Feinberg on Feb. 22, 2018 announcing that, as of that day, he was fired.  Furthermore, he was told that his email account had been closed and that he was to return all technology (computers, tablets, phones) that belonged to KIPP.  His belongings would be mailed to him.

In other words, Feinberg was fired the same way that Feinberg and the KIPP hierarchy have treated so many thousands of disposable teachers and staff over the past 25 years.  Such irony.

It is likely that Feinberg believed that he would be able continue his lucrative career as a "no accountability" charter kingpin.  After all, this has been the pattern for fired KIPP administrators, who have been able to move into higher management slots with other charter chains. That doesn't seem to be the case, however.  

Recently in an effort to reclaim a reputation that his own egomaniacal recklessness destroyed, Feinberg has decided to sue KIPP for its handling of his dismissal.  For its part, KIPP stands by bare-knuckled firing of Feinberg with its entire absence of due process, and they offer Feinberg this parting shot:

“This is a baseless and frivolous lawsuit. Mr. Feinberg’s employment was terminated last year after thorough investigations uncovered credible instances of misconduct incompatible with KIPP’s values. We regret Mr. Feinberg is choosing to put the women who came forward to share painful experiences, the witnesses who supported them, and the entire KIPP community through further distress.”

Stand by.  Who knows how much more of the truth will emerge during the trial?  Will we find out what was on Feinberg's computers, phones, and tablets?  Will victims get their day in court?

KIPP Co-Founder, Mike Feinberg, Fired for Sexually Abusing Middle Schooler

Always an advocate of a kind of heedless "let the stallions run" mentality for charter school administrators, Michael Feinberg was fired last Thursday for sexually abusing a KIPP student in Houston in the late 1990s, where Feinberg was the principal of the only KIPP school in Houston at the time. The KIPP home office carefully avoided pointing that this was a middle school, grades five through eight.

According to KIPP Houston, which now manages 28 schools in the Houston area, the KIPP home office learned in 2017 about Feinberg's sex crimes against a KIPP child in the late 1990s.  

. . . sources confirm an investigation was launched into a new allegation of sex assault of a student. Feinberg was reportedly instructed he couldn't be around students or at the school unsupervised.

Even though KIPP launched an investigation in the Spring of 2017, the charges remained a close secret until last week, with parents and students, alike, in the dark about the allegations.  

The KIPP Foundation also acknowledges (finally) that KIPP was party to a financial payout in 2004 to a KIPP employee, who was a victim, too, of Feinberg's sexual harassment. Punishment for Feinberg?  He was suspended for two weeks!

Feinberg's high-dollar lawyer is now quick to point out that the KIPP home office did not offer Feinberg "even the most rudimentary form of due process."  Perhaps Feinberg will come to know a tiny bit of how the thousands of fired KIPP teachers feel when they are summarily riffed with no reasons given.  At least Feinberg knew something about why he was fired.

We can only hope that Feinberg will take the KIPP home office to court.  That is probably the only way we will ever find out the extent of Feinberg's sex offenses.  In other words, don't expect to see Mike Feinberg in court.  

But I suspect that the KIPP Foundation made sure that Feinberg will be taken care of, that no court action will be taken, and that the KIPP home office will celebrate its decisive action, even if it was 20 years after the fact.

Charter school parents everywhere must wonder how many more privileged pedophiles like Mike Feinberg are lurking in charter schools, which are not subject to public oversight or public accountability for administrative conduct.  What price must school children pay so that paternalists and privatizers can achieve their ideological goals and the economic ends?

KIPP Calls for End of Debate and More Disposable Teachers

My response below to Mike Feinberg's op-ed in the Houston Chronicle:

It's that time of year again when thousands of exhausted KIPP Model teachers are anticipating their final teaching days and hoping to recover from the regular traumas of working in "no excuses" charters like KIPP.  In these schools, unsustainable hours, unending paperwork and meetings, impossible discipline and test score expectations, unbearable, unrelieved workloads, total compliance school cultures, autocratic administration, shortages of materials, the absence of textbooks, and an unbending and uncaring organizational hierarchy, all have served once more to push out thousands of teachers after a couple of years of trying to bear the unbearable.

KIPP and its charter chain emulators could not staff their corporate operations without yearly infusions of malleable teacher-missionary beginners from Relay and Teach for America. With the average tenure of KIPP Model teachers being two years, it is not surprising, then, to see Mr. Feinberg's adver-torial aimed to yield another crop of well-meaning neophytes to staff the KIPP Model segregated charter chains.

Nor is it surprising that Mr. Feinberg would advocate an end to debate about the future of privately-run and publicly-funded K-12 schools like KIPP, which embody the zero-tolerance school culture that weeds out the low performers and behavior problems that could damage the KIPP brand.

Debate about the place of segregated no excuses corporate reform schools in a democracy is not going to end, however. Just as the the agenda of the assimilationist and segregative charter schools has been laid bare in my book and others, the racist plan by white philanthropists' to fix the weak work ethic, the defective behaviors, and inferior character traits of black and brown children will continue to be exposed. 

Why Feinberg's Kids Will Never Go to KIPP

Update November 22, 2015

Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys through "No Excuses Teaching will be published in February 2016 by Rowman & Littlefield.  Pre-publication orders may be placed here.  jh

Corporate cult leaders, Mike Feinberg and David Levin, are their own biggest fans, and to prove it, they gave themselves 80 minutes onstage at the recent million dollar summit in Houston to answer some puffball questions for the KIPPnotized KIPPsters in the auditorium.  

Oops, someone got this embarrassing question through: 

Will you send your own kids to KIPP?  

At about 54:00 on the video, Levin begins to scramble with how to answer.  He passes the baton to Feinberg, who delivers this priceless one and a half choice minutes of fabrications and dissembling:

Feinberg: Gus and Abadit [Feinberg's two children] are not going to go to a KIPP school [begins rubbing his face], 

and that's actually for--there are several reasons for that. I mean, you get into, for, you know, with a 10 thousand kid waiting list, um, my kids have options, I don't want to take away a seat from another [more beard rubbing] family that doesn't have options, that's, um, part of it,

but at, with my parent hat, I want most for Gus and Abadit.  I would put them in a bunch of our primary schools in a heartbeat, knowing what a great education they would get, how well they would get taken care of [makes a strangling motion with his hands]. 

It would be unfair, I think, to Gus and Abadit, cuz' in a KIPP school, they wouldn't be Gus and Abadit, they would be Feinberg's kids, and I don't want them--I want them to grow up, and being in a school, being Gus and Abadit, and not be a fishbowl parent.  

And I've seen this happen with other leaders' kids, where, um, ah, within five minutes of being put in timeout, the school is talking about the kid being in timeout.  I just want them to have a chance to be Gus and Abadit and, uh, as I said, Gus, you know, he wants to be [begins scratching his face], 

to wear a KIPP shirt, with, with pride, and he wants to be a KIPPster [starts rubbing his hands together], he wants to come and tutor, and things like that, to find other ways to get him plugged in to Team and Family [looks over to Levin as to say, please, god, get me out of here!] E

End of segment.

Fortunately for Feinberg, no one at the million dollar summit asked to see that mythical waiting list with 10,000 kids on it.  If that were anywhere near the truth, we may wonder why KIPPs like Memphis are having to pay back money for enrollment overestimates based on projections that never matched reality?  Surely Feinberg could find one of those many under-enrolled KIPP schools where teachers are sent out regularly with their clipboards to beat the bushes like missionaries to find warm bodies to put in desks (or on the floor).

Notice, too, how Feinberg wants to protect the privacy of his children when they mess up at school, even if he is the co-designer of a system of KIPP paychecks that guarantee that every teacher of any KIPP child knows when he has been good or bad by checking the paycheck each KIPPster carries with him from class to class.  Remember, too, that public humiliation is standard operating procedure at KIPP, but protection from that is only important for Feinberg's children and the children of the corporate whales the fund KIPP.  I understand your quandary, Mikey.


Feinberg's fumbling rhetoric and transparent body language cannot conceal the condescending corporate paternalism that is a defining characteristic of KIPP's abusive corporate reform school testing camps.  Despite the lame effort,  how that paternalism shows through:  Feinberg has choices for his kids, but he wants to make sure that the children of the poor have a single option once the testing machine has closed most of the urban public schools.  Poor children need KIPP, rich kids don't.

What happened to the advertised concept of choice for the poor?? Pure malarkey.  The new paternalism demands that elites like Feinberg and Levin should decide what the poor must learn and how they should learn it and how they should prove that they do learn it.  In the end, passing tests is less important for that distant abstraction called college than it is for the Feinbergs and Levins of the world to know that these kids and their parents are towing the line that has been drawn for them by the Fisher family and the other coroporate overseers who pump hundreds of millions into these chain gangs for the poor.

Feinberg's child, Gus, will have to find another way to become part of "Team and Family."  He can wear his KIPP shirt (while inside the auditorium, for god's sake), and he can maybe come tutor the poor kids and perhaps tell them some of the neat things he is learning out there in the world where children have choices.  

Nah, forget that last part--the KIPPsters can't afford to have any distractions--they have to prove their sponsors and handlers intentions are noble ones.

KIPP Segregation: A Single School Choice Without a Voice

Mike Feinberg has a reputation as an impulsive brat and bully in a china shop (even as documented by the worshipful Jay Mathews), and the Feinberg op-ed in the Houston Chronicle today shows there is no reason to doubt it.  Not only is he audaciously reckless in calling for public funding of property and buildings for all corporate charter schools in Texas, even as KIPP sits atop a pile of several hundred million dollars from the philanthrocapitalists, but he also demands that all of Texas' "parental choice" charters, the ones with black and brown and poor kids anyway, be converted to the psychologically-sterilizing, apartheid KIPPs or KIPP knock-offs such as the YES College Preps.

The other segregated charters, the lily-white-flight ones with family incomes to match their soaring test scores, will be left untouched, except of course, their building will be paid for by the state and their principals CEOs will be given unconditional authority (like the rest of the charters in Feinberg's fantasy) to hire, fire, and promote without the burden of any consultation with teachers.

And what happens to the parents and children who discover that their choice-without-a-voice school based on an abusive behavioral catechism of total compliance is not what they signed up for when the KIPP recruiters brought their canned pitch into their living rooms?  Well, in that case they don't have a choice except to return to the malignantly-neglected public schools they were trying to escape in the first place.

In Feinberg's dreamworld, charters can't do it all--there will always be the need for the marginally-funded public schools that mimic the lockdown methods of KIPP to accept the discards that could, otherwise, damage the KIPP brand with low scores or a disruptive and stubborn refusal to become miniature corporate automatons.  And if these children can't cut it there in the residual public schools?  Well, there is the other penal system, the one that provides free room and board, an orange jumpsuit, and good jobs for the smiling, postivized guards that Feinberg's human-crushing crucible will crank out.

The fact that our society, even in Texas, could be contemplating Feinberg and Levin's eugenics-inspired brand of containment, segregation, and behavioral sterilization, provides evidence that we have learned nothing from the previous century's dangerous flirtations with fascism.  Our present Gilded Age is as blind now as that one a century ago, with "progressives" like Feinberg and conservatives like Rick Perry both embracing the same "educational" strategies and tactics in an emerging version of a "war against the weak" that has the same goals as the one that swept through America a hundred years ago, the one that inspired a middle-brow madman in another country suffering the bludgeoning effects of economic meltdown and war.

To learn more about KIPP, please see Lessons One, Two and Three.   To learn more about Gates, Broad, and philanthrocapitalism, have your library order this book.

KIPP Houston, We Have a Problem

Updated November 2015: My new book about teaching in "No Excuses" charter schools will be published February 2016.  Pre-publication orders may be placed at Rowman & Littlefield.

Jesse Alred has done a bit of number crunching in Houston, which is the mecca for the KIPP Cult and its spin-off denomination, YES Prep. In line with the CEO reward model upon which these total control camps are based, the administrators at KIPP Houston are much more likely to earn six figure salaries than admins in the public schools, HISD. What about the frontline brainwashers, er, instructors of these anti-cultural cults?

Well, Alred does not include salary info, but he does note that 4 of 10 KIPP teachers and 3.6 of 10 YES teachers say "no" after one year. Not even TFA and its national television advertising campaign bankrolled by the Oligarchs can hope to keep up with that kind of turnover rate. By the way, KIPP and YES are the "no exuses" charter apartheid models that the Obamaites promote as the urban education solution. From the Examiner.com:

. . . . Relative to size, KIPP has more administrators making salaries of $100,000 or more than the Houston Independent School District. KIPP has 262 students for each employee earning $100,000 or more in salaried compensation. YES Prep charter schools, about the same size as KIPP, has 681 students per employee earning $100,000 or over. HISD has 1,472 pupils per employee earning $100,000 or more.

Bonuses for most KIPP administrators are very low compared to HISD, but not for its founder and Superintendent, Mike Feinberg. His 2008-2009 bonus was $34,000, larger than every HISD administrator except for Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra. Ms. Kathleen Gil, KIPP's Assistant Superintendent for Instruction, received $26,100, more than all but two HISD administrators, Dr. Saavedra and Dr. Karen Garza. Dr. Garza's bonus was $29, 070.

KIPP-Houston serves 2,358 students whose parents apply for admission. It is the size of a large HISD high school. HISD has responsibility for 198,769 students zoned to its schools. HISD also serves a more diverse range of students in terms of learning abilities. HISD has twice the percentage of students who need special education services than KIPP-Houston. . . .

Also from the Examiner:

. . . .About one in nine teachers leave HISD each year. The annual turnover rate is 14.6%. The typical HISD teacher remains the district for an average of 9.4 years and has 11.7 years of teaching experience. Statewide, teachers stay with their districts an average of 7.4 years.

Two of five KIPP teachers leave their jobs each year. This is a turnover rate of 40%. KIPP teachers have an average of 1.7 years of service in the charter network and an average of five years total teaching experience.

Yes Prep teachers have slightly fewer teachers leaving each year than KIPP. Its turnover rate is 36.8%, still much higher than HISD and statewide turnover. The average YES Prep teacher stays with the charter network for 1.3 years and has 4.6 years of teaching experience.. . . .