The book's subtitle, “How Two Inspired Teachers Created America’s Best Schools,” leaves little to the imagination when determining Mathews’s opinion on KIPP. However, to Mathews’s credit, his account attempts to present different sides of the KIPP debate. Rather than making the program’s implementation seem easy, Mathews shows the many difficulties, ranging from colleague jealousy to administrative bureaucracy, that come with starting something different. Mathews also does not ignore Feinberg’s and Levin’s many missteps during their early years in teaching for TFA and creating KIPP. Although he portrays some of the anecdotes, such as Feinberg’s decision to have his students call school board members and inquire about the progress made in finding KIPP a new place, as drastic but necessary tactics or eccentric stunts designed to get needed attention, Mathews does not gloss over some of the more obvious errors that Feinberg and Levin commit.
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Another limitation with the book is its structure. While it revolves around Feinberg and Levin, Mathews also discusses their relationship with other teachers, such as Ball, and students. These relationships do humanize the two men. However, by interspersing ongoing stories about students with the basically linear narrative of Feinberg and Levin, Mathews sometimes makes it difficult for the reader to fully follow the different threads. While this problem is easily solved by flipping through the book and finding the previous thread to a given account, this solution makes for an occasionally unsatisfying experience.
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