Michael Feinberg

Mr. Feinberg currently serves as superintendent of KIPP Houston. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, Mr. Feinberg joined Teach For America and became a fifth grade bilingual teacher in Houston ISD. In 1994, Mr. Feinberg co-founded the Knowledge Is Power Program along with fellow TFA corps member Dave Levin; in 1995, he founded KIPP Academy in Houston. Mr. Feinberg was named an Ashoka Fellow in 1994, awarded to leading social entrepreneurs with innovative solutions and the potential to change patterns across society, and along with Dave Levin was awarded The Thomas B. Fordham Prize for Excellence in Education and the National Jefferson Award for Greatest Public Service by a Private Citizen in 2006. Mr. Feinberg is married with two children, a son and a daughter. His father was a pipe salesman and his mother was a speech therapist turned psychotherapist. Mr. Feinberg was raised in a wealthy Chicago suburb and studied international relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He joined Teach for America and started teaching fifth grade in Houston in the early 1990s, and was stymied, he later told reporters, by the behavior and learning problems of his low-income Latino students. With Mr. Levin, a Yale history graduate, he received approval from the Houston school board to begin KIPP, which stands for Knowledge is Power Program, in 1994. The program’s motto was “There Are No Shortcuts.” KIPP, one of the country’s largest and most successful charter school chains, dismissed its co-founder on Thursday February 22 2018 after an investigation found credible a claim that he had sexually abused a student some two decades ago, according to a letter sent to the school community.