Great Hearts Academies reviews

1. What they practice is not what they preach. As noted by other reviewers, Great Hearts is a conservative Christian school that pretends to embrace 'Classical education and values' but really this is just a veneer for imbuing students with Biblical teachings. If you are not a white, right-wing, conservative Christian, you will find it nearly impossible to make friends or relate to your coworkers, and will be routinely made to feel you are inferior. Once, in a staff meeting, the Bible was described as 'the foundation for virtue, whether you believe in it religiously or not. This thinly-veiled Christian culture is reflected as well in the speakers they bring in – one, I recall, got (I kid you not) into a mini-tirade against 'idolatry'. 2. Another thing that makes relating to one's coworkers difficult is (as mentioned in numerous other reviews as well), the extremely high faculty turnover. They hire green new graduates, load them with double or triple the usual teacher workload, burn them out in a year or two, and hire a new crop. The entire six teacher grade level team I was a part of is now gone after only two years. 3. The workload is ridiculous more often that it is not (read others' reviews regarding quarterly evals that erase teachers' breaks almost entirely). New, inexperienced teachers are overburdened to the point of mental breakdowns, while TA's are effectively manual laborers, shepherding the children all over the place, monitoring the playgrounds before and after school, and spending the *vast* majority of their actual "classroom" time making thousands of copies, to the point where the TA is rarely even in the classroom during class time. Being a TA there does not give you training to be a teacher. At best, you learn how to line up groups of kids, operate and repair a copy machine, and master the grading software. 4. I believe the 'no pop-culture' mantra does indeed have it's place in a classroom, but Great Hearts takes it to the level of paranoia – no Disney songs on the playground, no Spiderman on your lunchbox, no Star Wars erasers etc. 5. Also, as mentioned elsewhere, the nebulous and detached administration routinely both implement and discard sweeping changes, to the point where it is often difficult to figure out how things are even supposed to be done. These ex-cathedra decrees are expected to be implemented immediately, so say goodbye to planning your lessons more than a few days in advance at most. Fairly often, you will then find that these changes you just began trying to implement have been discarded. 6. The 'Western Civilization' focus of the curriculum gets taken overboard to the extent that the non-Western world (more than that, the non-*Christian* Western world) is largely ignored or treated as a side-note in lessons. 7. Their phonics and handwriting system is taken to comical levels of draconianism, even with the youngest students. 8. Internal mobility is almost non-existent. It seems to be just as difficult to change jobs within a GH school as it is to simply get hired from the outside in the first place. I.e. there doesn't seem to be any preference paid to people who are already current employees. 9. Pay is very, very low, even for teaching, and there is a large amount of "mandatory unpaid volunteering" (i.e. slavery) that faculty must do. Club leaders are not paid for their extra time, and mandatory chaperoning of outside of school events like concerts and plays is likewise unpaid.

The only real problems I had were that I did not share some of their views on an ideal education. They believe in a classical education placing equal emphasis on all subjects which include some classical archaic languages, music and classical literature as well as some other traditional subjects. This is good for some, but there are definitely students which are able to identify their future goal earlier than others. The schools policy is not to allow "tracking" which essentially blocks some students from pushing their own potential by holding them back in their strengths, and also puts some other students in over their heads. I can't rate the company down for disagreeing with my own beliefs and philosophy, but if you're passionate about teaching as I am, you should really question your own philosophy and beliefs and make sure they are in line with this companies practices. The particular school I worked with seemed very effective at delivering this classical education.