Co-founder sues KIPP over abuse claims
Feinberg seeks to clear name; network says firing justified
Mike Feinberg, co-founder of KIPP, filed a defamation lawsuit against the national charter network Thursday in a bid to force the organization to turn over information to rebut the sexual abuse and harassment allegations that led to his firing.
KIPP fired Feinberg 18 months ago, saying it had found credible allegations that he had sexually abused one of KIPP’s middle school students 20 years ago and had harassed two adult female alumni who worked for KIPP.
Feinberg denied he had ever done anything sexually improper with KIPP students or alumni. The lawsuit, filed in the 11th District Court in Harris County, is an attempt to clear his name, he said.
“I’m finally getting a chance to defend myself,” Feinberg said. “For the past 18 months, I’ve wanted to defend myself while not wanting to trash KIPP in any way. KIPP is my baby. But what the board did to me is flat-out wrong. I can’t sit idly back and take one for the team.”
The lawsuit seeks more than $1 million in damages. But according to Feinberg’s lawyer Mano DeAyala, a more significant goal is to force KIPP to release documents that would allow Feinberg to understand the specifics of the allegations against him and rebut them.
Feinberg said the accusation of child sexual abuse has caused extreme pain for him, his family and his former students: “I go to bed every night with a hole in my soul.”
KIPP leaders issued a statement Thursday in response, calling Feinberg’s lawsuit “baseless and frivolous.”
“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,” said the statement by Sehba Ali, CEO of KIPP Texas, and Richard Barth, CEO of the KIPP Foundation.
The lawsuit marks another move in the ongoing rift between KIPP, which coordinates with local chapters to operate more than 200 schools across the country, and Feinberg, who started the charter network 25 years ago in Houston with fellow teacher Dave Levin.
KIPP officials fired Feinberg following two separate investigations into allegations of misconduct.
Initially, an independent attorney hired by KIPP reviewed an accusation that Feinberg sexually abused a minor. That investigation resulted in a declaration that “no evidence of wrongdoing” was found, according to Feinberg’s lawsuit.
Months later, KIPP’s board launched a second investigation, conducted by the Washington, D.C.-based law firm WilmerHale. During the course of the second inquiry, investigators spoke with a former employee who said Feinberg offered her financial support for continuing her education in exchange for a sexual relationship. Another employee lodged a similar complaint, but the employee declined to cooperate with investigators, KIPP officials said.
KIPP leaders said the second investigation did not conclusively confirm Feinberg sexually abused a minor, but it “found the allegation to have credibility.”
The two harassment allegations were deemed credible, and investigators located a financial settlement involving the former employee who cooperated with the review, KIPP leaders said. It is unclear whether KIPP officials or another organization authored the settlement. Feinberg’s lawyers have said the settlement was reached with the accuser over the objections of Feinberg, who intended to take the case to trial.
The charter’s leaders have not provided a copy of any investigatory findings or disclosed evidence leading to Feinberg’s termination. To date, none of those women or witnesses have come forward publicly. Since the firing, no further accusations of wrongdoing have publicly emerged.
Feinberg and Levin, who was his roommate and a fellow Teach for America teacher, started KIPP — then the “Knowledge Is Power Program” — in 1994. In a single large classroom in northeast Houston’s Garcia Elementary, the two tall, intense Ivy League graduates taught 47 lowincome fifth-graders. They used methods that later would become the core of the KIPP philosophy: extra time at school; mnemonic devices such as multiplication tables sung to the tune of a Selena song; emphasis on behavior, characterand a group ethos; and an end goal of graduating from college.
From that single classroom, KIPP has grown into one of the country’s most celebrated charter networks. Today KIPP’s 242 schools enroll more than 100,000 students.
Many accounts of KIPP’s early years — including the book “Work Hard. Be Nice.” — emphasize the young founders’ intense connections to their students and their willingness to break with established school customs. Students were required to call Feinberg and Levin at home for help with their homework. The teachers met with parents in their homes, gave kids rides, held class on Saturdays, bought students McDonald’s meals, and arranged bus trips to Utah and Washington, D.C. KIPP prided itself on transparency, welcoming outsiders to observe it in action, both supporters and detractors sometimes compared the tight-knit group to a cult; students who bought into the school’s high-performing culture were said to be “KIPP-notized.”
When KIPP launched its initial investigation into Feinberg in April 2017, he says he didn’t think much of it at the time. He hadn’t expected the investigation to find wrongdoing.
But in the larger culture, the issue of sexual abuse was gaining traction. That summer, several tony boarding schools in the Northeast released reports of sexual misconduct by faculty and staff, some of it dating back to the 1950s.
In September, the issue came to the KIPP chain: KIPP NYC announced that it was investigating allegations of misconduct in the early 2000s by staff members at KIPP Academy Middle School in the Bronx — the first school that Levin founded there, after he left Houston. One staff member was fired after investigators found that when informed of the allegations in 2014, he hadn’t alerted the KIPP system.
KIPP launched its second investigation, this one by the WilmerHale firm, of Feinberg in November 2017. Feinberg’s lawsuit paints that investigation in dark terms. Such investigations, it says, often yield the result hoped for by the organization’s leaders, providing public relations “air cover” for an organization.
At the time, though, Feinberg didn’t regard the WilmerHale investigation as hostile. He met with investigators twice, both times without a lawyer. Though he said he answered investigators’ questions, and even drew them maps of KIPP’s rooms during the time periods in question, the investigators didn’t give him detailed information about the allegations being made against him. Without knowing the details of the accusations, he says, he couldn’t defend himself — even to the investigators.
“KIPP’s statements were false, misleading, written to justify terminating Mike, and published to make sure he could never compete with KIPP,” the lawsuit states.
These days, Feinberg is president of the Texas School Venture Fund, a nonprofit that aims to start new schools in places where the demand for high-quality schools doesn’t meet the supply.
In addition, though he hasn’t taught in a classroom for more than a decade, he’s chosen not to surrender his teaching license — the normal thing after a teacher is fired for cause — in order to force the Texas Education Agency to hold a hearing on the matter. That hearing, says Feinberg’s lawyer Christopher Tritico, offers another chance at due process, another chance to demand information on the precise charges against him and, possibly, to be exonerated.
“KIPP’s statements were false, misleading, written to justify terminating Mike, and published to make sure he could never compete with KIPP.”
Lawsuit filed by Mike Feinberg