Pros
There are few. Salary and benefits are better than other charters but worse than CPS salary steps. Students are legitimately wonderful if you treat them like human beings and can communicate the utility of your content.
Cons
My review is extremely negative, and I am concerned about how it will come across as Glassdoor is full of scathing reviews from disgruntled employees. I treasure many of my experiences from my time teaching at Noble. I was a high performing teacher, my students loved me and my colleagues respected me. It has been a long time since my last day and I happily work an unrelated job outside of education. I am not writing this out of bitterness (though I'd be lying if I said I wasn't bitter towards certain individuals), but my time at Noble was a very unhealthy time in my life and I see many of my friends still working there continue to struggle. Cons: 1. You will get worked to the bone. I built several course curriculums from scratch with no additional resources or compensation during my career here, and admin is not shy about piling on additional busy work with arbitrary deadlines. I now work a generic 9-5 in the private sector, and my workload expectations for an entire workday now are roughly equivalent to what I was expected to get done in my prep. Teachers serve as de facto counselors for students through the advisory system, to the extent that they are expected to write both academic and counselor letters of recommendation in behalf of students applying to college 2. Constant meetings. I had an additional three hours of meetings each week, before or after school or during my prep. If an administrator has a concern to express, you are expected to give up your prep or make time to meet with them about it, damn the consequences to your instruction. 3. Good teaching is not a priority. The best teachers consistently go unrecognized, even when there is objective data to support the quality of their instruction such as exemplary test score growth. Teachers are encouraged to prioritize maximizing GPAs even at the cost of maximizing learning. 4. Toxic staff culture. Being at work makes staff unhappy. Everyone not in administration is obviously overworked and feels taxed by constant demands in their time. The happiest teachers are those who publicly kiss up to administration to receive preferential treatment. These teachers receive smaller class sizes, extra preps, or less taxing teaching assignments at the expense of colleagues and are often promoted to figurehead department or team leads whose role is to soften the delivery of admin edicts. 5. Administrative bloat. My school of 600-odd students had 10-12 non-teaching administrators with Dean or Principal in their titles, all of whom arrived to school after me and left before me each day and mostly had salaries containing an extra digit compared to teaching staff. This is several times both the national and state average. Besides the obvious diversion of resources from instruction, the result of this excess is you have ten people with the salary and title to make them think they are your boss and you suddenly find yourself having the Dean of Social Work trying to manage you. 6. Mismanagement. Despite their numbers, or perhaps as a result of them, administration is profoundly disorganized. Changes and initiatives are haphazard and serious concerns go unaddressed. Several of my colleagues of color complained of being targeted by white administrators and these administrators remained in their roles with no consequences. Teachers cannot trust administrators to back them up or follow through on student facing policies and the overall result is a lack of consistency across schools. Network level administration rolls out policy with a striking lack of forethought. None of my administration was particularly equipped to make me a better teacher, even those who explicitly had that job. Despite all of this, administrators feel utterly entitled to exercise the privileges of their roles. It was common at my school to see administrators leave the building during the day for lunch or errands. I remember vividly our assistant principal arriving to school one day at 10am with her drycleaning on a day when classes began at 8am and teachers were expected to stay until 7pm for report card conferences. 7. Middling school culture. Academics are not a priority and students are disinvested from learning and feel little school pride. Fights and other safety concerns have been increasingly common over the last few years. Students freely roam the halls despite several full time staff being dedicated to monitoring them. It is developmentally natural for teenagers to push boundaries and students very quickly figure out that accountability systems are too poorly executed to function and this enables some pretty brazen behaviors. Students are constantly vaping in bathrooms and coming back to class stoned. This makes it awfully tough to teach them and there is little you can do about it as a teacher. I could go on, but I have already gotten quite specific and experiences across campuses are diverse. I will note that I worked at a well-regarded and relatively functional campus and still experienced all these issues. I expect there are certainly more challenging schools to work at in the city, but the time I spent working at Noble trying to achieve excellent results in the face of all the challenges I listed above was one of the most stressful periods of my life. Since leaving, I have lost weight, rekindled a social life, reestablished a healthy sleep schedule, had my blood pressure return to a healthy range and become a better family member. Again, I absolutely loved teaching and my students, but I absolutely would not wish this workplace on anyone.
