Work-life balance- If you're the sort of person who has to have a clean desk at the end of the day, you will be very disappointed and frustrated. The work never ends. When regular schools shut down during the summer, you will be working. And you may also find yourself working weekends and breaks just to try to keep up. The pace can be frantic and you might feel harried. Salary is so far below industry standard that it should be an embarrassment while class and caseload sizes are double the size. Each year I qualify for Earned Income Credit on my taxes because the pay is so low. Only the benefits package (which I pay extra for) saves this from a 1 star rating. Administrative duties outstrip and interfere with actual teaching. The potential for positive impact is blunted by the sweatshop-like industrial scale. Much of the work required is low-level clerical -- copying and pasting from one spreadsheet or data base to another, generating individual reports and sending them one-at-a-time, individual telephone calls on a mass scale similar to telemarketing. Teacher time is not held as much at a premium as would be in a traditional setting. This is not the Google of education by a long shot. Innovation and creativity are not necessarily encouraged or rewarded much less part of the culture. Innovation isn't planned because so much of the tension is derived from being K12 managed, where there is a definite profit motive mostly balanced on the backs of the teachers. Teacher-workers qualify for government assistance while the corporate supervisors get 7 figure compensation and 6 figure bonuses.
