1. INSUFFICIENT COMPENSATION: As a demographic, teachers do not seem to be particularly motivated by money--if they were, they would have chosen a different profession--however, when salaries fall below a certain threshold, teachers move to schools that remunerate them more fairly. (One Assistant Headmaster at the school where I teach has described Great Hearts teacher salary as "insulting.") For a young teacher looking to start a family or provide for one, the Great Hearts salary is simply insufficient.
2. UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS: Teaching is hard work anywhere, but the demands placed on a Great Hearts teacher seem considerably higher than the demands placed on teachers elsewhere. A teacher at Great Hearts is expected to write pages of narrative evaluations during his Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer Breaks, spend nights and weekends leading one or more extracurricular activities, and devote countless hours advising one or more seniors on their thesis (both inside and outside of school). Because teaching itself can be incredibly draining both physically and emotionally, it is simply unrealistic to expect teachers to carry out these additional responsibilities during those times when they should be resting and recharging their batteries.
3. NONEXISTENT RELATIONSHIPS: Great Hearts has an incredibly high rate of teacher turnover: looking through a yearbook from my first year of teaching, I was surprised to find that less than half of my colleagues from my three years ago are still at the school today. Part of retention problem seems to be due to the organization's insufficient compensation and unrealistic expectations, but part of it also seems to be due to Great Hearts' prevailing practice of hiring young graduates from liberal arts schools who have not earned teaching certificates and who have no intention of staying in education. Because many of them have not earned teaching certificates, they have to learn their lessons the hard way by trial-and-error, and because so many of them leave after a year or two, those lessons go unused. Students have to endure a never-ending litany of inexperienced teachers, and returning teachers feel little motivation to build relationships with their new colleagues. Research shows that the quality of a person's work relationships is inextricably connected to his job satisfaction, and when those relationships are nonexistent, satisfaction plummets.
4. HYPOCRITICAL SENIOR LEADERSHIP: Great Hearts espouses a number of worthy ideals ("Truth, Beauty, Goodness"); however, the senior leadership team shows little interest in realizing these ideals or putting them into practice. In his introduction to the faculty at the school where I teach, Eric Twist, the current CEO of Great Hearts Arizona, called one of the faculty members an "*ss," and there are countless other examples of hypocrisy among the leadership team, which seems much more concerned with pursuing personal aggrandizement by means of unsustainable expansion than laying the foundation for slow, steady growth.
5. POOR CHANGE MANAGEMENT: Change is a part of any organization; however, many of the changes that I have observed at Great Hearts could have been managed much better than they were. Great Hearts recently moved its payroll and benefits service from ADP to UltiPro. As part of the move, HR cut off access to employees' tax-related information on ADP for all of March and April (through the April 15th tax deadline) and protected this confidential information on UltiPro with a password that was no more than each employee's birthdate. What is more, UltiPro is only compatible with Internet Explorer, which is itself only compatible with PCs (and has been since 2005). Since more than half of my colleagues use Macintosh computers, the decision to make the move is puzzling to say the least.
