Yerlin Rivera dropped out of high school as a teenager after falling in with the wrong crowd. She worked two jobs, at Chick-fil-A and a Mexican restaurant, before deciding she wanted to finish her education. A traditional high school would have made her start over as a freshman at 17. She wasn’t interested.

Instead Rivera enrolled at the Gallery Furniture North campus of Premier High School-Houston, a charter partner of WorkTexas, and combined online credit recovery with a certified medical assistant program. “I really like that you’re at your own pace, but [teachers] are still pushing you to do better,” she said. Three years later, at 20, she passed her CMA exam and is on track to graduate, with a goal of becoming a neonatal ICU nurse. “Have a career, not a job,” she said. “Those are two completely different things.”

How Mike Feinberg Turned a Furniture Showroom Into a Trade School

WorkTexas exists, Mike Feinberg says, to help people “get jobs, keep jobs, and advance in their careers.” Feinberg built his reputation founding KIPP, the national charter network, before concluding that its college-for-all approach left too many students without a plan. “It should have been career for all,” he says now.

When he needed a home base, Feinberg turned to Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale, KIPP’s first funder. “I wanted to figure out a way we could teach these people a trade,” McIngvale said. “Rather than give them a fish, they could learn how to fish and feed themselves.” He donated roughly 15,000 square feet of his furniture showroom. Mike Webster, then a Houston Community College administrator and now its president, helped line up funders and framed McIngvale’s role bluntly: “What we didn’t have [at the college before] was the Mattress Mack bullhorn to get out there and say, ‘Hey, come on down and get trained.’”

What Employers Get Out of Mike Feinberg’s Model

Beau Pollock, president of TRIO Electric, was an early industry partner who shared his own training curriculum and later hired former employees on as instructors. “He has embraced the employer’s perspective but also has the education perspective and knows the needs of the people going through [the training] to make them successful,” Pollock said of Feinberg. In the 2023-24 year, WorkTexas served 203 adults, 113 justice-involved youth and 65 Premier students, drawing on more than 50 funding partners between federal WIOA dollars, state grants and private donations. Details on that work sit alongside Feinberg’s own history on his personal website and his about.me profile.