Achievement First reviews

While “awful place” certainly hurts to hear, I appreciate you giving it to us straight. I’ve included some of my thoughts on your comments below, but If you want to speak to me directly, please email tomkaiser@achievementfirst.org and I can learn more about your experience. Work/life balance is still an on-going struggle for us (and I think for many who do this work) but we refuse to give up trying to make this better. We just finished a huge effort to dive deep into the daily life of a teacher (over 30 of our teachers tracked their time for two weeks to give us a deep window into how they spend their time) to help us figure out how we can make good changes. The work will continue to be hard AND we will continue to try and make it easier. I AM more surprised that you’ve experienced no development because that is generally where we see our highest scores on our org health surveys and organizationally something we deeply value / invest so much into our coaching, summer training, and weekly professional development. People come here to grow. It’s one of the reasons I stay. I particularly want to honor your comment about black men in leadership. You’re right to call us out on this. It DOES deeply matter to us that our school leaders reflect the background of our kids. Currently, only 45% percent of our school leaders identify as Black, Latino, or multiracial (including several who identify as black men) though that number will grow by next year. The even bigger issue is our BLM leaders are more underrepresented in our senior leadership. Only 33% of our executive leadership identifies as BLM and even less of our superintendents. But it’s not about a percentage. It’s about the fact that we exist to address racial inequity in education and we will not be the network we can be until more of our leaders share the racial identity of the communities we serve. Our leadership has been getting increasingly diverse at every level and that cannot stop.