--Quality is Deteriorating: With so much expansion, I find it hard to believe that the company is investing on retaining good teachers. They're hiring left and right because they're growing so much, and because people leave so frequently. They will argue that they have good retention rates, but I believe their data is suspect. I'm unsure of how they compile and report their retention rates. I know too many teachers working there who wish they could work somewhere else.
--The salary isn't great if you consider how much time you're expected to put into your job. Yes, I said job. The culture is set up so that voicing any type of independence, any type of attempt at having a life outside of your teaching role is looked down upon. I have no problem with being the outcast, but I know many people will sadly just comply with the culture and let the school suck them in, saying goodbye to their hobbies and families to be quite honest. It's really sad. Saturday schools. After school tutorials. Extracurriculars. Field lessons. Training. Parent meetings. You only have so many hours in a day and so many hours in your life. And it's up to you if you want to spend them on a job. It might be warranted if it made a difference, but if you look at the outcome, you'll see it truly doesn't. Don't be fooled by the number of students who go to Ivy Leagues.
--Elitist: What about average students? IDEA's elitist practices alienate the average student. It's unrealistic to expect every child to attend an Ivy League school, and focusing so much on that is disheartening to most children. The bell curve exists. Some students will be at the top of their class, most will be in the middle, and then some will be on the bottom. The Ivy League culture they encourage goes against their basic premise of "college for all." Yes, there is a college for everyone, and it's not an Ivy League one.
--Obsession with metrics: These guys are obsessed with numbers. Numbers look good. Numbers are simple to use. They can look impressive. Swanky looking powerpoint slides with graphs that show improvement can mesmerize. But if you know a bit about statistics and do a bit of reading, you can discern that this is a bit of a smokescreen. Again, I don't trust the data because I saw the day-to-day of these students. They're just regular kids. Some are academic. Others aren't. It's not surprising. You can't force every single child to be academic. No matter how hard you try.
--Micromanaging the students handicaps them: These kids become experts at following directions. At IDEA there's a rule or instruction for everything a student does. There's a rule about how to walk. There's a rule about how you walk into a classroom. I'm sure there's a rule about rules. Great. That's great. But what happens when these kids manage to get to college and walk into class the first day, with the professor going right into a lecture without providing any instruction? My students didn't understand that a set of instructions on the board was all that's needed to complete an assignment BECAUSE they were so drilled on having the teacher walk by their aisles telling them what to do. (That's what middle school looks like for IDEA students. ) These kids are ill prepared for college because they're so used to having a teacher telling them what to do every few minutes of instruction. (Teachers are encouraged to constantly walk around and oversee student's work, make periodic comments. Everything is very staged and scripted.) These kids lack basic common sense because this system doesn't allow them to think for themselves. They might become experts at taking state exams, because they force them to take so many practice ones, but what about an actually hard exam? What about an SAT? They even have SAT prep, but as most people know, the only way to improve real test scores is to improve a student's vocabulary, and that only comes through reading and working with vocabulary at a higher level. Not through drills and test prep booklets.
--D.I. (Direct Instruction): It's dog training. It's a system of training that perhaps works very well for young kids acquiring new words--but if you've studied a bit of linguistics (you know, the science of language) you'll know that the brain does not need drilling to pick up language. You set up a language-rich environment, and the brain just does its thing. That's how the brain works. D.I. is a system that was painful for me to watch and impossible for me to participate in. Students well into middle school are drilled on words. Straight up Pavlovian, the kids learn to respond to the teacher making a sound (usually a ruler smacked on a desk or something). Everyone has to respond at the same time. Seeing a thirteen year old kid dehumanized in this way is too much for me. Teenagers relish their independence and cannot psychologically handle being treated this way. Look it up. It's called child psychology.
--It's smoke and mirrors: This school is different than other schools in only two respects. For one, they manage to keep a pool of young, starry-eyed teachers /because/ of their turnover rate. (They get a fresh one as soon as one drops from exhaustion, since so many college grads are out there ravenous for work.) And, most importantly, they're different from other schools because they truly market themselves as THE ANSWER for our country's educational woes.
