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.

Former KIPP Student Remembers Humiliation and Culturally Unresponsive Pedagogy

A clip from the Lindsay Gary's commentary at the Daily Cougar:

. . . Of my graduating class at KIPP, I was one of about 20 black students in a mostly Hispanic population. Being the minority wasn’t easy, and some of the teachers at KIPP didn’t make it any easier. There are a few incidents that vividly stand out to me.

I can still remember “judgment day” as I once called it. It was the day that students would learn their fate in attendance at the end-of-year trip. As an extremely well-behaved and straight-A student, I had no worries about my fate. But something was different in the teachers’ eyes when I met them at the judgment table. They told me that I was not on the list to go on the trip. I was shocked and embarrassed. It was heartbreaking news for a former “Student of the Year.” They explained that I had made an improper comment. As I searched my memory bank for any recollection of anything improper, one of my teachers explained my wrong-doing. The improper comment: “I understand and love learning about Jewish history, and I understand our founders are of Jewish heritage. I was just wondering if we could ever learn about black history or more about Hispanic history, since most of us are black and Hispanic.” I fought back tears as my fate was unveiled. I couldn’t understand what was so wrong about that statement. Did the opinion of a little black girl matter in such a school?

There were many other instances when I felt this intolerance, such as the time we were told our black hair products were a joke, the favoritism Hispanic students received, the lack of information we learned about black history, the fact that we were often targeted for misconduct, and the fact that at least one of the school’s plays was about Hispanic culture and none were about my own. But Judgement Day was by far the most hurtful of all my culturally negative experiences at KIPP.

. . . .

After such negative experiences, I vowed to never express my opinion at KIPP again. In fact, my teachers eventually allowed me to go on the trip. But they threatened that if I ever made remarks like that again, I’d be put on a plane, alone, from California to Houston. It wasn’t until Harriett Ball passed, that I decided to openly voice my opinion again.

In February, I received the monthly newsletter from a KIPP Alumni Association representative and was extremely disappointed with what the newsletter mentioned, or should I say failed to mention. The newsletter highlighted Valentine’s Day and internships among other things, but made absolutely no mention of Black History Month, which as its name states, spans the course of the entire month. I was already disappointed with my recent discovery that the woman who had inspired and mentored the KIPP co-founders, was in fact a black woman. It wasn’t until Ball’s passing, seven years after I had completed my KIPP education, that I would learn anything about her. Don’t you think knowing this would have made a world of difference, created a pool of inspiration, for a little black girl at KIPP? Was it merely an accident or pure neglect that the newsletter failed to mention something so important to black people? . . .