Great goals; poor follow through and staff treatment
Pros
You will learn lots of lesson initialization practices and classroom management skills that will make new teachers into better ones. The kids are great and there is a great need for schools that will empower these kids.
Cons
Before I begin, it must be noted that the majority of the positive reviews of the network use the marketing lingo that suggests that they were written by recruitment. There are many issues with this specific charter school network, but I will try to make this brief.There is often a lack of consistency day to day with consequence systems and routines for the children but also with expectations for the adults. Most of the applicant pool for this job is filled with new and young teachers, coming through alternative teacher certification programs like TFA. Now while that in and itself is not an issue, there are a myriad of reasons why more experienced and older teachers are not very represented here. Any short staffing or problems within a class are ultimately pinned onto the teacher and blamed on their lack of experience or ability to handle the class. There is not much of an HR department and teachers are not informed of the resources they have through MNPS. The consequence system requires frequent phone calls to parents, yet entails little follow through from administration. The schools are run like a corporation where employees may advance, instead of gaining more experience in the classroom. So much so that in the second semester they are given surveys asking what other positions they would like to advance to in the next academic year. Moreover, the kids seem stifled and miserable by some of the rules that don’t seem to have much justification at all- for example, walking on only the blue tiles in the hall or not leaning their cheek in their hand during class. A phrase I heard often was “this school is like a prison” which was not far from the truth- little recreation time, zero to no support for hands on activities, no arts or foreign language- the vast majority of emphasis and focus is only put on Math and ELA, because of their necessity as standardized test measures. When a third of the staff quits before the end of the first semester, it is abundantly clear that an organization is not functioning properly. There is no way around that, no matter how much “one team” is chanted.
