The list is long:
-Completely overworked and under-appreciated staff (teachers). Most days are 7:00am-5:30pm without a break. Yes, you rarely receive prep time at Summit, and your lunch if often taken up by a meeting, lunch duty outside, or patrolling the hallways. And while the day is supposed to end at 5pm (already way too late for a school day!), you frequently have student-parent meetings you are required to attend that go until 6pm or later. Again, this is all without any sort of break in your day to catch your breath, grade, answer emails, or work on your curriculum. It's just a long, mad dash to get anything done.
-This is perhaps the worst con of them all: the culture is unprofessional and emotionally unsafe. The admin at my Summit site truly managed through terror; there were interrogatory meetings where people were accused of "workplace crimes" they never committed or that weren't even legitimate "crimes," a constant punitive tone to all-staff meetings, and a general sense that everyone was waiting to catch you in a mistake so you could be made to feel inefficient and incompetent.
-The culture among teachers was also unprofessional and unsafe. My colleagues did things like poll their students as to which teachers they felt were the most annoying, or report other teachers to HR about a personal tiff they had but didn't have the integrity to speak with the person face-to-face. In all staff meetings, there were constantly eyes being rolled and faces being made behind other's backs when someone said something others deemed a waste of time or inaccurate.
-The educational model is seriously flawed and failing many students. For example, there was a policy that all high-schoolers can turn in or revise their work whenever they want, as much as they want, without receiving any negative effect in their grades. While this idea appealed to me upon joining Summit because I believe in giving students many chances to improve on their skills, it quickly became clear that this just encouraged students to never turn their work in on time (I usually had about a 20% turn-in rate for any given assignment) and to wait until the last week of school (we were on a year-long grading period) to turn in every hastily and half-completed assignment from the year. When we went on a tour of colleges with our students (cool idea, but another example of how teachers are overworked-- we had to plan every single thing about the 3-day tour, including the budget), we met some former Summit students who told us that a lot of the policies at Summit, such as the revision policy I just mentioned, were actually detrimental to their learning because when they got to college, they weren't in the habit of meeting deadlines or producing a final draft when something was due.
-Relationships between staff and students are often bordering unprofessional territory. Teachers are basically required (heavily encouraged) to provide their phone numbers to students and parents and be habitually texting with them (I'm talking multiple texts a day after school hours, often unrelated to academics). Teachers are also virtually required to hang out with their students/mentees (Summit has a mentor program) outside of school. A lot of teachers would go to their students' houses on a weekly basis or go to movies with them. I hope I don't sound like a curmudgeon or a party-pooper, but I think that to create a culture where teachers who aren't constantly texting with or hanging out with their students feel inferior, is both unprofessional and overly demanding.
-There is a common assessment program among all the Summit schools, meaning that you (as the teacher) are provided with a rubric and a set of skills, and that is the only mode of assessment you can use. All the teachers, of all subjects, use the same rubric and skills. While this was also something I supported when I started working at Summit, I quickly realized how inefficient and inoperative it was. All teachers felt that at least a few of the skills, if not all of them, had very confusing rubric language descriptors and were not only impossible for students to interpret and understand, but teachers too! Furthermore, if you were creating an assignment and really needed to assess something particular and unique to that assignment or just to your subject, it was endlessly frustrating to not have the power to do so.
-Summit values scaling its business over fixing problems that already exist and addressing resource gaps in its existing sites. Most of their school sites are crammed into small buildings with no real classroom space nor walls between classrooms, and no outside or indoor play or hang-out area for kids to let out energy and get much-needed physical activity in their school day. Teachers are not given a cent to purchase resources for their classrooms-- they are told they just have to spend their own money for materials. Instead of addressing these huge resource gaps, Summit chooses to squeeze out all the money in their budget to create new schools under the guise that the "model is really working" and that "their name is getting out there."
I work at a different school this year, and have found that none of these issues exist here and that they are truly problems unique to Summit. I am one hundred times the teacher at my new school than I was at Summit because I have more genuine and untainted support from admin and colleagues, and I have the liberty to teach my subject and assess my students the way that authentically works for me and for my students as individuals. In sum, I am extremely disappointed in the outcome of Summit's educational model and the culture that exists there and would strongly advise anyone considering Summit to look elsewhere for employment.
