When KIPP started as a fifth-grade classroom in Houston in 1994, the goal was simple: prove that kids in underserved communities could reach high academic standards given enough support, structure and time. Accounts of KIPP’s early years show a program built from the ground up, shaped by the specific children and families it served.

Two decades later, Mike Feinberg watched that bottom-up energy give way to something else: a relentless push for scale that he says eventually became the whole point. More schools, more students, more replication — and, he argues, less willingness to ask whether the model still fit the kids in front of it.

“By 2010, it was scale, scale, scale — and we stopped talking about scope,” Feinberg said. What began as a conversation about which types of schools different children needed had narrowed to a single question: how fast could existing models be copied? Writing about ed reform’s blind spots has increasingly pointed to this same pattern — growth metrics crowding out questions about fit.

Feinberg left KIPP and launched the Texas School Venture Fund in 2018 with a different mandate: build new kinds of schools, not more copies of old ones. The fund has since incubated WorkTexas, two neighborhood pre-K-through-eighth-grade charter schools, a network of childcare partnerships, and Project Remix Ventures, which serves justice-involved youth.

Each project, Feinberg says, grew out of a question the charter sector wasn’t asking: what about kids who need early childhood programs? What about adults who need a second shot at a credential? What about young people whose path out of the justice system runs through a job, not a diploma?

Media coverage tracking Feinberg’s work since KIPP reflects that pivot — from charter expansion to a quieter, more targeted effort to fill the gaps that large-scale reform left behind.

More detail on the programs Feinberg currently leads is available through his organization’s website. The common thread, he says, is a belief that the right size for a school or program is the size at which it can still know its students by name.