East Harlem Tutorial Program reviews

ZERO work/life balance. You work overtime, for no overtime pay. You start the school year in early August for unnecessary PDs and end the school the same time as the DOE. This causes burnout very early in the school year. The leaders are UNQUALIFIED (most don’t have the education or credentials for school leadership, nor have experience as classroom teachers, or have only taught one grade for a year or two) and don’t listen to the teachers who obviously spends the most time with the students. Many teachers have vocalized their opinions about the curriculum and what their students need and it never changes, only the teachers just gets scolded by leadership and make it their fault. There’s no partnership. They only care about the test scores & their numbers, they over test and over work the students. Many of the students have intense behavioral problems that the leadership handles by giving them candy and sending them back to class. They claim to focus on anti-racism yet they do nothing to address certain behaviors, but instead enable them, that will unfortunately lead our students towards the school to prison pipeline. It’s disheartening to see it. They also let parents threaten and speak to their teachers and staff however they want to, to the point where i’ve seen a few teachers break down. I’ve seen students get away with bullying other students because leadership doesn’t want to deal with the difficult parents, which causes those students to eventually leave. They give you several PTO days, but when you take them the leaders have meetings telling teachers to hold their fellow teachers accountable for calling out and glorifying coming in sick. It’s always been a revolving door for teachers, as well as senior management, it’s only getting worse.

Ironically, the realization of the organization's anti-racist mission is not currently inclusive of Jewish experiences, despite discrimination being explicitly prohibited in the employee handbook. I was encouraged to stay remote and not given office space in order for leadership to not have to address politically charged paraphernalia that was allowed to stay up for months at a colleague's neighboring desk, where children and staff were tacitly indoctrinated in anti-Jewish sentiments. This colleague also refused to shake my hand on my last day, reflecting the hostile work environment. Over my last six months of employment I wanted to not have to engage in the political discourse that was sometimes made mandatory in "equity team" led meetings and just wanted to do my job. I never brought up these topics and explicitly asked to not have to engage my colleagues on this level. Instead of enforcing the handbook rules, my messages to leadership were met with "this is above my pay grade" and inaction from leadership. However upon leaving, the icing on the cake was HR bringing in an external person and proceeded to try to gaslight me about any of this happening, but I have thorough documentation that has been shared with the DOE. I left because I did not feel safe or welcome as a Jewish person and hope management takes explicit steps so that others don't experience this. Grateful to have left this organization.