Some Joy But No Balance - English Teacher, Secondary School DSST Public Schools Employee Review

Fun environment and encouraging as well

I don’t have any cons

Great mission, decent benefits, and amazing students. You'll work with some of the most fun people that you'll ever meet. The staff are likeminded and make the job just as much as the students.

This organization cooks the students' grades. They have a 50% threshold, meaning that you cannot go under 50%. There are quotas for grades. For example, no more than 10% of your class can have an F. They do have have Ds. The students know that they are guaranteed a C as long as they have two people doing more poorly than they are, and so they have no motivation to put in the work. I don't believe this is the students' fault; I believe it is a cultural flaw within the organization to get kids into secondary programs/college at ALL costs, regardless of the future outcome for the students. Yes, it has a 100% acceptance rate, and it also has a 19% rate for students who remain in college or secondary programs. This is more a factory than a place of learning, and the organization is letting down a generation of kids by handing out unearned grades for the sake of numbers. I have never believed that grades make a person, but I do believe that effort matters. Students can also quite literally buy their way out of consequences -- with 200 points, they can wipe behavioral write-ups off of the record without consequences. In terms of staff, I will say that the organization purports to have a very high staff retention rate, but we lost almost the entire SpEd department during my employment here, as well as several teachers. They don't have the staff retention that they claim to -- my coworker theorizes that they use the numbers based upon if the position is filled at all, not if it is filled by the same person.