Pros
Teaching at AF, I am very confident every day that I am helping kids get an excellent education. Virtually all the staff are really motivated and hold themselves to high standards, so I can trust the other staff to do their jobs well too (which matters a lot to me as a teacher---I don't want to be an island of good in a sea of mediocrity.).I've been impressed with how flexible AF is as an organization. Over the course of my eight years here, it has already become a better place to work. When something works, we keep it. When it doesn't, we change it. My first few years I worked insane hours, but now it's very reasonable. The network is no longer just running by grinding through 23 year-olds. The staff is aging, more people have families, or people are more experienced. I feel very respected at work. I think AF successfully avoids a lot of the pitfalls of this kind of charter network.
Cons
There's a real bloated level of middle management, "network" people who are supposed to oversee initiatives across lots of schools but are not actually helpful because they don't work in schools. You'll hear a lot of folks complain at work about, "well network is making me do..." It has definitely declined, but the school still asks you to do a lot of little things outside of the teaching role. It can be a lot. I don't know what it's like to be a person of color at AF. Pretty lousy benefits.