Pros
- The buildings are nice. - The facilities are generally clean. - At the school I worked at, we had a GREAT teacher staff. - This environment isn't bad if you care more about the babysitting aspect than the teaching aspect of the job.
Cons
- A large percentage of the parents are VERY difficult to work with (a crowd that loves LOTS of “drama”), and their kids are often spoiled, rude, don’t listen, and/or are physically violent with other children and staff (e.g., kicking teachers and spitting in their faces). Many of them also don’t wish to discuss their children’s progress behaviorally/socially or academically (unless it’s something positive which doesn’t require any action), which is very frustrating if you’re a teacher who really cares. - The office staff are much more interested in keeping "customers" than providing quality childcare and education (despite the claims they make on their media and branding). Again, very frustrating company culture to deal with if you’re a caring teacher. - The administration will not be on "your side" if a dispute comes up between you and a parent, even if you are absolutely in the right and the parent is being completely unreasonable (as a warning, they will be VERY nice and offer a lot of help to you during the first week or two, but after that you’re on your own if you have a problem, unless they come in to “set you straight” after you upset a parent.) This means that the kind of kids mentioned above—and their parents—end up “running” your classroom and the office won’t do anything to help you, especially if the parent is notoriously hard to deal with (they’ll say to you that “you just have to find a way to deal with it” instead of telling the parent to get the child under control or banning them from the school for repeated violations.) - Even if you want to risk making a parent mad to raise a concern, you have to have EVERY communication you intended to have with a parent "approved" before moving forward with it (we stopped asking after a while, because our concerns were rejected too many times.) This includes basic things like welcome letters, too—they are VERY controlling. - By company philosophy, you aren’t allowed to give "time outs" or take-away privileges or do much of anything to discipline bad behavior, so you have even less leverage when trying to handle classroom management. - There is a strong chance you will be told to “cover up” things in reports to avoid upsetting parents (e.g., by writing “Timmy got a bruise when he bumped into another child” instead of “Timmy got a bruise after another child shoved him” on incident reports). - We frequently ran-out of items like paper towels and disposable gloves (which is extra fun when you're on diaper duty.) I don’t know if this was because they were stingy or unorganized, though. - They make you sign a contract saying you will pay them $1,000 or more if you quit before a year is up (and the rate of teacher turn-over is still high despite this provision, so that should tell you something.) - They are very often understaffed despite being an “upper class” school (so kids and teachers were often shuffled around from room-to-room and office staff would sometimes-- if absolutely necessary-- have to fill-in to keep the maximum state ratio in check in each room.)