Jul 16, 2017
Achievement First Response
8yThank you for sharing your experience and - if you haven't already – I would love it if you could share that feedback directly with your former principal (especially if they are still with Achievement First). Work/Life Balance is clearly a significant challenge facing AF (and I would argue, the movement broadly). I promise you it’s not one we’re trying to solve with semantics. First, I think it’s important for all Glassdoor readers to know that there is a trade-off to doing this work at AF. It’s hard. I continue to spend more hours working than many of my friends. But unlike many of my friends, I don’t see those hours as just “work hours” that are separate from my life. They are spent with people I love doing work that is deeply meaningful to me. But that’s a personal perspective. And the reality is that so many of our people DO feel the tension between being their best selves personally and professionally. Our organization, and I, believe the movement will not succeed if we can’t keep making progress in helping people stay in it longer. And that goes so far beyond lip service for us. We’re in the middle of huge a 2-year investment to create lessons that teachers can use in every subject and grade, so that we never again have teachers spending hours every day starting from scratch in planning excellent lessons. It’s why we held a hackathon with our teachers to identify and create solutions for things getting in their way. And it’s why we’re already trying to figure out what our next changes will be in 2017-2018. We’re not going to fundamentally change what it takes to succeed in this movement, but by listening to our people and continuing to make changes I believe that we can make it a lot easier for people to stay and succeed.
-Tom Kaiser, Chief Talent Officer