Pros
They care tremendously for the students. Each lead teacher (K-5) has a full time teaching assistant.
Cons
There are too many meetings, which take up valuable prep time. The administration tends to micromanage the teachers by requiring many unnecessary meetings, email requests, and paperwork submissions. Each quarter, the lead teachers are required to write very lengthy (4-5 paragraphs) report card comments for EACH STUDENT. This is information that could easily be discussed during a parent-teacher conference. Many parents did not even read these comments. These comments are "conveniently" due at 8:00am on the Mondays following Fall, Winter, and Spring breaks. This encourages the teachers to work during their vacations. It is hard to get them done during prep/planning time due to the incessant meetings and interruptions. The administration schedules the conferences for each teacher, and then sits in on the conferences "to keep them on track." There is no room for individuality amongst the teachers. The "Spalding Expert" for the network has warped the program and taken it away from the original blueprint. She does frequent observations in the teachers' classrooms and undermines the classroom teacher's authority by calling out, bringing attention to what was delivered "incorrectly" (according to her standards, not Spalding International), and taking over the lesson. This is rude and confuses the students. The discipline program is very lenient and contributes to more misbehavior from the students. Many of the teachers are very young and fresh out of college, without education degrees and state credentials. Great Hearts hires them and then teaches them to teach the "Great Hearts way," which probably is the reason for the micromanagement. There is also a very high turnover of teachers each year.
