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?