All Roads Lead To Sales. Huntington Learning Center Hates Teachers and Poor People! - Managing Director Huntington Learning Centers Employee Review

TL;DR You will not have a personal life if you work here full-time. Neither the stress nor the pay is worth it if you actually care about education and helping people. Do not let anyone convince you that this is a good career opportunity for you; they will ruin your life and blame you for it. 1. There is absolutely NO work-life balance with this job. The tutors actually have it better than everyone else, since they are only part-time. I loved this job as a part-time tutor, and now I absolutely HATE it because I am full-time. 2. Do not work for Huntington Learning Center or any franchises full-time if you actually care about education. They train all full-time employees the same way because everything is about sales and marketing. The individual franchisees are allowed to rename the positions for recruiting, but you will be given a Huntington-official title, which always requires sales, marketing, and administrative responsibilities. The company aims to operate as a traditional school with approximately 1/16th of the staff, so every full-time employee will always have to do several jobs at once. There is absolutely no downtime and it is actually impossible to get everything done. It doesn't help that families are always canceling and asking for rescheduled sessions, or when they decide to stop their enrollment and you have to account for this in the business plan on a monthly basis. 3. Huntington Learning Center does not truly care about students, teachers, or education at all. They have invested the fewest amount of resources into the education (student performance outcomes) side of their company. The student success stats they tout are from some data they pulled from 2014. Much of their curriculum is from the 1980s, and several of their curricular programs are out-of-print. The curriculum is not bad, but there should be more variety. They mislead families and the public with their stats on student growth and improvement; they only measure grade-level readiness by what level of a textbook the student is in (just because the student progressed to a "third-grade level book", doesn't mean their reading level is third-grade). Gaps in the assessment often lead to foundational skills being excluded from a student's academic program. I have witnessed students in "grade-level" books, but their foundational skills are far below where they should be; I've seen 5th graders with atrocious handwriting and spelling skills, although the computer program (eCenter) says they are on grade-level. Bringing this up doesn't change anything, because HLC doesn't measure skill proficiency as much as they measure tutoring hours attended. It's more important to say that a student has completed 120 of 136 prescribed hours than it is to say that that student has learned to spell proficiently. HLC doesn't care about educating lower-income families. If HLC actually cared about students and families, their tuition wouldn't be so expensive, or they'd operate as a non-profit or not-for-profit. They encourage centers to ask financially-illiterate parents to move money from their pensions to afford overpriced tutoring; they encourage centers to manipulate parents into taking out loans that they'll never be able to pay off (they already couldn't afford the tuition; the ones that can afford it pay out of pocket) and to ask their families to take out the loans for them if they get denied due to their credit. Huntington always tells families that their child should be completing 6-8 hours of tutoring weekly; they don't like to see centers spending fewer than 6 hours a week; they will tell centers outright that this is a waste of time because the child will not make progress (and because they're not making a lot of money off them). Huntington Learning Center has no shame in admitting that they are a business and that profit is their #1 priority. They are on camera admitting this since all of their training sessions are recorded now due to COVID. 4. Huntington Learning Center has every part of their business mapped out, but the students' learning programs are on autopilot. There is a video of a Huntington Learning Center corporate employee admitting that the computer is doing all the work when it comes to a student's "individualized academic plan", as she explains why HLC prefers hiring and franchising with business people rather than with teachers. HLC requires franchisees and each location to have Center Daily Meetings that focus on revenue and profits. They have coaches that teach you to change the tone of your voice at certain points of the Initial Conference to manipulate parents into paying tuition because their child's future is at stake. But nobody EVER receives this much training on how to help students be successful. In fact, when you call them out about their curriculum, questionable assessments, and interpretation of student results, they will flat-out ignore you and move on to a different subject. 5. HLC hates teachers. Don't be fooled by corporate saying that pay rates are determined by individual franchises; they have a formula for determining tutor pay rates based on the hourly tutoring rate for each student. They purposely keep the labor costs low by aiming to pay tutors no more than 20% of the hourly rate that they charge families. This is why they aim to have tutors teaching 4 students at a time. Students above 4th grade do not receive their own private tutoring. Their tutor is working with 1-3 other students at the same time. HLC provides training sessions on this because they know there aren't enough tutors to provide each student with their own tutor. HLC likes to tell parents and the public that all tutors are "certified" (they cannot legally use the term "licensed", because that would mean tutors have state teaching licensure), which is not the case at all. It's really sad that they tell this lie, because when you look at the job postings for the tutor positions, they always have in the description "teaching experience preferred, but not required". HLC likes to brag about being accredited, but this doesn't mean anything at all when all their tutors are only part-time; the majority of centers cannot function properly because they don't have enough college-educated people who are willing to work for extremely low-wages. Yet, HLC requires that tutors have at least a Bachelor's degree (in any subject, which is more proof that they are misleading people about tutors being "certified"). Because there are never enough tutors nor full-time staff, it will always be extremely difficult (if not impossible) for the individual centers to truly flourish (which could be accomplished if corporate allowed centers to be flexible; but corporate cares more about forcing centers to adhere to Brand Standards, while offering no support at all whatsoever).