$: Starting salaries are low relative to location. No merit raises, ever. Small annual CoL raise and bonus for FT employees. PT job pay rates inflexible, no raises. Seniority doesn't matter (except in the C suite). Raises at Academy campuses are tied to enrollment #s, with no differentiation between employees (e.g., the employee in charge of recruitment and enrollments gets the same raise as other FT staff at same level). I believe the company is rethinking some of this, but raises will be tied to new job titles, doing work far above and beyond actual job duties.
Management: Top management is a tight-knit group of mathematicians with no experience outside this company. At one point, they brought in an outside operations specialist, but she quit within a year and was replaced with inside candidate, again without operations experience. Company is run like a lot of tech companies, with founder/CEO calling all the shots and little-to-no ability to take real initiative. Most employees are young, with little-to-no outside experience. Job responsibilities continually expanding as company changes procedures / tools frequently. Processes and best practices ill-defined. Little trust in campus employees: classic recipe for stress of lots of responsibility, little control over job. Attempt to build morale through (required) social events, rather than improving internal communications and sense of teamwork. No management training for new managers. Retention focus misplaced: people often change jobs within the company, as that is the only way to move "up" (mostly these are parallel moves), but retaining people in their positions over time is not even an afterthought. As a result, there is a constant sense of reinventing the wheel. "Learn on the job" approach to management skills is torpedoed by the fact that seniority counts for nothing in promotion. Burnout/low morale in FT campus employees is endemic.
Systems: Company vision is for seamless plug-and-play education systems, with heavy reliance on (excellent!) math curriculum. While this works well on the math side, where the curriculum has been built over a 30-year period, attempts to implement the same approach in language arts classes mean limiting time teachers spend giving feedback on student writing, no resources put into educating customers on goals and methods of LA curriculum. Curriculum is surprisingly good despite this (thanks to v. small, overworked curriculum team), but it's clear that LA is an afterthought for upper management. New science courses do seem to be getting much more attention than LA courses. Company procedures and practices change constantly, with no resources put into keeping information documentation current (the org chart is not kept up, no one is in charge of keeping Google Drive organized, etc). Similar lack of attention to streamlined internal communications. Tendency to think the next tech solution will solve all problems. Change is very top-down, with no attention paid to "on the ground" staff despite constant attempts to pass information upstream.
Mobility: HQ folks switch jobs within HQ frequently. Personal relationships with upper management, rather than expertise, are central to promotion. Those who recognize problems are sidelined. For Academy employees, there is no path to move up unless the director of a campus leaves. Company is very reluctant to embrace remote work, even for seasoned employees (there are occasional case-by-case exceptions, but the overall company culture is and is likely to remain hostile to remote work).
Frequent turnover: at my campus, we had 100% turnover in management staff in just one year. This is unlikely to change, given that raises are minimal (except for campus director), ability to implement meaningful improvements is limited to singlehandedly taking on more work, and there is no way to move up within the company short of moving to another location, and only one step up for FT campus employees (to campus director).
Diversity: Company is proud of its diversity - but doesn't recognize that its sense of diversity is limited to that exemplified within highly-educated mathy types. LGBTQ friendly (lots of ppl have pronouns in bio), relaxed about dress code (jeans and tshirts fine), national origin not an issue for hiring purposes. Aside from that, company demonstrates all the shortcomings of liberal "colorblindness": lack of attention to cultural bias in curriculum, refusal to implement anti-bias training (in educators!), refusal to consider perspectives of non-elite employees (especially those without math expertise), simplistic idea of diversity. No concern at top for student accessibility/accommodations, which severely limits growth.
