Do not work here! Do not send your kids here! - Teacher Futures Academy Employee Review

This company is the best example of why privatized education is so dangerous. Despite their claims, the betterment of education and helping students are the very least of their concerns. If you are a person who wants to be part of an education revolution of sorts, this is not the place to be. Their claims are that since all curriculum is standardized throughout the company and have all the resources readily available, teachers don't need much prep, therefore they can devote their time to teaching. Pay & Hours Abysmal. Teachers can expect to start somewhere between $17 to $18 an hour. Some campuses have been desperate and managed to offer $20 to get teachers in the door. Or a teacher knows someone at corporate and makes $20. You will never get a raise here unless you get another job- people have gone years without a raise. Lead Teachers are paid the least amount the state allows for exempt employees (even though they technically cannot be classified as such). Directors are not much more, although they can get bonuses after a year with the company. There are some sales competitions for directors, but the prizes were $25 gift cards for about $30k in sales. Getting hours can either be extremely easy or extremely difficult. The more subjects you teach, the more classes you will get. Of course, this also means you will have more classes to prep for. It is likely you will be forced to teach a class with content you have little to no knowledge in, either because you are desperate for the hours or because there's no one to teach it and directors are forced to put in an unqualified teacher or lose the sale. The only way to really fill a schedule is to be the only teacher in your subject and to be available all day if needed, but since there are no guarantees, many people have to have a second job to pay the bills. This of course limits your availability. Hours vary from week to week- some weeks will have 25 and the next week have 5. Students will cancel with no notice, and even though there is a cancellation policy with fees, many directors ignore it to keep parents happy. You only get paid if the class session happens or if the director institutes the cancellation policy. If not, you get nothing. Training rate is $10 an hour. Besides your initial training, there is a summer, week long intensive in Orange County. Little is learned or accomplished in this training. If you live in LA, that means you get to sit in a van for 2 hours in rush hour traffic, "train" from 9 to 3, then sit in rush hour traffic home. Paychecks for this training were not only late but incorrect. The company will also nickel and dime you to no end. Over clocking in by a few minutes is subject to a write-up. They refused to pay employees $10 for an hour spent doing county mandated fire safety training. Prep hours are next to nothing, and the rules for what teachers are entitled to are different depending on who you talk to. Even so, the 15 minutes prep really only exists to comply with labor laws, not because you should be paid for prep time. It is nearly impossible to clock in for the correct amount of time because the system is online and the internet is constantly slow. Directors spend hours every week either fixing missed clock ins or checking for every extra minute. Staff has tried alternate methods to fix the issues but they were all struck down. You will work off the clock. It is impossible not to. You will not be paid accordingly. This company preys on people who see themselves as educators and want to make a difference, and as a result have to go above and beyond to make their classes better. Benefits I only bring it up because they don't exist except for full time staff. Supposedly, due to recent laws, the company has to review which employees meet the hourly qualifications to be offered benefits. But since hours are so varying, it will be interesting to see how it is implemented. The company CEO actually told the entire company that it would be more cost beneficial to pay the federal fine than it would be to do the right thing and offer everyone benefits. Day to Day The day to day is dependent on how well your director and admin can keep up (and lead teacher if you have one). Directors are salespeople, principals, counselors, registrars, schedulers, and so much more. As a result, you won't likely come across one that can do all of it well. The company is most concerned with getting directors who can sell and keep costs down by way of micromanaging teacher clock ins. They have virtually no training on matriculation and many students are enrolled in classes they shouldn't be. Admins are vastly underpaid and have too many tasks. They are responsible for answering phones, emails, enrollments, schedules, appointments, walk ins, transcripts, class auditing, office management, mail, and billing for just $15 an hour. Discipline is non existent because its more important to keep parents happy and paying, and because there is no one being paid to monitor kids since the only full time staff is so swamped with work. Scheduling is a nightmare and constantly changing. Its not uncommon to start the day with one schedule and have almost every class rescheduled or cancelled. There are ways to get everything done, but someone has to bear the brunt or get short changed. Campuses are typically located in office buildings with high rents. Campuses are very stale and not overly welcoming. The desks are cheap and constantly breaking, but since there is no maintenance people the teachers have to try upkeep campus. Students are allowed to come and go as they please with practically no oversight because there is not enough staff to keep up with all of them. Teaching & Curriculum This company truly believes that teaching is just being given a list of things to do and that any warm body can work there. Classes are 45 minutes long and you are expected to grade and review homework, teach a weeks worth of material, assign homework, do paperwork, and assign any other projects/tests- it is nearly impossible to accomplish. As a teacher, you are forced to choose how you spend that paid time- either completing all the company required paperwork or have good lessons and prep/grade off the clock. The curriculum department is understaffed and overworked. Almost all the curriculum they have is lifted from somewhere else or straight out of the book. Parents are promised a customized education for each student, which almost never happens because teachers are not paid to prep. All the books and resources are online, but the internet constantly crashes and half of class is attempting to log in to the book website. Pacing guides, worksheets, tests, and anything else is half usable at best because there is no attention to detail. Grading policies are a mystery and "mastery" is loosely defined as 80%. Basically, the lowest grade a student can get on an assignment is 80%, and if they don't they have to redo it and are charged for an extra appointment. As you can imagine, this doesn't go over well with parents and grades are fudged. This is a point of contention in the company because they claim to not be a "pay for grade" school, but mastery is defined by performance on assignments and the subsequent grade, and parents have to pay until a student shows a certain level of mastery. Nobody seems to be able to wrap their heads around this concept. The school advertises specialty in working with kids with ADD and ADHD, among other learning challenges. Few if any staff are actually trained to work with SPED students beyond the 20 minute presentation received at summer training. Parents are told Halstrom specializes in working with those students and trust that their students are receiving specialized help, only to discover that when their student doesn't fit the Halstrom class mold, parents will have to pay extra money to get their kid caught up. Lab sciences are a huge issue because many campuses do not have the proper facilities. Teachers try to find a balance between safety and providing the rigorous education parents paid for. It makes no sense that the company opened all these campuses and didn't ensure that everything was safe. Spending On the surface, the company looks extremely successful because of the the massive expansion. What you don't see is that a good chunk of these campuses have very few classes. As a result, the profits of one campus are keeping the new ones open and spending is heavily monitored. Spending freezes are common and all perks (even coffee) are denied. However there was enough for the Corporate all expenses paid trip to Cabo and an End of Year party on a giant yacht, and the Corporate office has a huge snack and beverage room and jobs for friends and family. Hundreds of marketing flyers (printed on quality photo paper) show up every month for one night events and end up as scratch paper. Turnover Turnover is unlike anything I've ever seen. In one school year, some campuses have seen 3 different directors. I've seen classes get shuffled to as many as 5 different teachers. Getting fired is an accomplishment all its own because they are so desperate to keep teachers on. I've seen someone quit AT TRAINING. The company Careers page will never show this, but there are so many openings posted on Craigslist. At one point, 5 of the 6 LA campuses had no director because they all quit or they couldn't fill the position. HR Like many HR departments, their sole job is to protect the company. As a result, you are not worth their time. Many people have issues getting paychecks on time and in the correct amount or benefits issues resolved. The irony is their inaction and mistakes actually costs the company money, which they are desperate to prevent. Unprofessionalism runs rampant and there are little to no company policies to protect workers. Their excuse is that they are busy processing new hire paperwork, which they wouldn't have to do all the time is turnover wasn't so bad. Corporate Halstrom Academy is under a corporation called Futures in Education, Inc. Despite their offices and all campuses being in California, their corporation is registered in Delaware to avoid taxes. Not uncommon or illegal. The corporate staff, barring a few good apples, are some of the most entitled, oblivious people I have ever worked for. Basically, they are a group of guys and gals that grew up together or are long time friends who take small education companies, buy them out, expand them far beyond their means, and then sell. According to them, this is enough to claim so many years in education reform, despite the fact that many of them have never actually taught in a classroom. Its actually pretty impressive they've managed to last this long considered how many people are seemingly completely unable to do their jobs. The IT department can barely put together a functioning network (most campuses have multiple internet crashes a day), book orders take months to fulfill, software is never updated (if it gets installed in the first place), and the grade system is limping along. The claims of being a technologically advanced education company stops at the fancy iMacs and iPads. The finance department is stuck in the dark ages and can barely manage to run payments on time (and often are late) since they do credit card payments BY HAND! Marketing and sales seem to have it together, granted they have the largest budget by far.