Achievement First reviews

Thanks for taking the time to provide the honest and candid feedback above. I appreciate you showing the love to our school operations teams. Too many teachers across the country are still buying their own pencils and making copy runs. We believe that strong ops teams, when able to focus on all non-instructional projects in the building, allow teachers to put their full weight and brain power into being intellectually prepared and planned for rigorous lessons. Ensuring our students with disabilities and our English Language Learners succeed is top of mind for us as well, and we are taking steps to get it right. Our schools are prioritizing hiring dedicated special educators and ELL teachers to work with students who need extra support. We also offer a scholarship for general educators who desire to become special educators (because we know there just aren’t enough great special educators!). Additionally, next year we are opening a specialized, intensive program to help our most struggling scholars - AF Bushwick Empower Program. Empower will be a specialized program within a school with around 36 scholars and 8 teachers. Students will receive tailored academic support in small groups with qualified special education teachers. We’re confident that this new program will give our students with disabilities the instruction they need to reach their fullest potential. We are excited about the innovative approach we are taking with special education, but we don’t pretend to know all the answers. We do, though, know that we are making strides to ensure that every single one of our scholars can achieve. Thanks again for sharing your feedback! -Christina Braganza, Vice President, Team Special Services

Hi there, thanks for sharing your feedback! It’s heartening to hear how effective you have found the daily lesson resources. You named one of the impacts of the resources: more rigor for kids. But we also knew it would be a way to make teaching more sustainable for adults and over 90% of our teachers have found the resources to be helpful. No doubt the days are still long and there is a heavy workload for many teachers. It’s often taking too long (years) for teachers to achieve good balance, and even then it’s never easy. Some schools are doing a stronger job than others. Still - we’re convinced this is a key issue in our movement and are committed to making progress on this every year. It was lesson plans this year, and next year it’s a host of solutions (that our teachers helped us design). We hosted a Hackathon with network teachers and leaders to put our collective brains together to tackle this very issue. We created solutions on testing week design, sub-coverage, vacation-timing in Connecticut, and several other “1%” solutions. Bottom line: we’re not going to stop trying to make it easier (and not harder) for our teachers to stay in the classroom longer. -Tom Kaiser, Chief Talent Officer