Pros
There are two great things about Great Hearts. You get to spend the day with some wonderful students and you can leave before 4.
Cons
Great Hearts has continued to cut pay and benefits in the past few years. The management can be wonderful or terrible depending on the school you end up at. We've had a number of management changes over the years. Unfortunately, they are starting to cut TA hours which puts more pressure on the lead teachers (and the TAs since they aren't getting the full 40 hours they were promised). The rumor is that they will eventually move to 1 TA per 2 classrooms. TAs have been asked to do silly things like moving tables and helping with janitorial duties rather than keeping them in the classrooms. Great Hearts has also opened up TA positions to anyone with a high school degree. This is causing many of the high performing TAs to find other employment. It leaves the lead teachers with people who, at best, are not helpful in the classroom and, at worst, are taking away from the learning of the students. HR has become petty with time clock hours for the TAs; frequently sending lengthy emails to all the headmasters and employees showing every time an employee has manually punched in to the time clock. This wouldn't be as bad if they had taken the time to set up a useable website or app. Instead, they quickly put together a website that is nearly impossible to use. In a recent meeting with HR, many of the headmasters had asked for these emails to stop and instead to simply not pay their hourly employees who had to manually clock in. While I'm "just a teacher" I'm fairly certain this is illegal. There are little to no advancement opportunities. Pay is abysmal. Benefits are getting worse and worse AND more expensive. There is no real professional development even though most of the employees have never been teachers. The most recent "professional development" has included reading a book that was not related to education or pedagogy, listening to classical music for 90 minutes, going for a hike, and a mandatory happy hour where we weren't paid four our time. While these are enjoyable activities, I don't think they are as helpful for the teachers as true PD would be (especially since many of these teachers haven't had any formal training to be in the classroom). Bottom line: the employees are subpar, there are no advancement opportunities, and upper management is continuing to make cuts.
