Pros
- Mission-driven organization - no one is there just for the paycheck or the benefits. Everyone cares about kids and families first. - The best professional culture I've ever experienced - positive, upbeat, and supportive faculty and administration. - Useful and productive meetings and meeting processes/norms. I actually looked forward to and enjoyed the meetings. No, really...I did. - Able and willing to change quickly in response to students' needs and teachers' ideas. - I learned a TON about how to build culture, diffuse conflict, collaborate on a professional team, grow my teaching practice. - After I left Summit and went to work for a regular district school, I appreciated Summit even more: No gossip about students and their parents. No endless whining in the lunch room. No grumpy "just get to me retirement" teachers. No clueless and ineffective administrators. No racial or sexist slurs or discriminatory categorizations of students. And guess what: I worked just as hard and long at that district school as I did at Summit, in part because I had the "least seniority" and was given 4 different preps to prepare for every day, without much/any support. This would never have happened at Summit, where new teachers work hard, yes, but are seen as more in need of support/easier loads than more experienced teachers.
Cons
No question, it's a lot of work. Teachers are asked to wear many hats - teacher, mentor, admin-assistant. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and can be empowering and wonderful in that you get to work with colleagues and develop different skills. But it is a lot of time and work. There is some question about whether the rate of change is a good idea or not. It might be better to iterate slowly by trying different things out at different locations.