special education teacher

elementary school teacher

school teacher

school program staff

teacher

Great-Hearts-Academies

Great Hearts has continued to cut pay and benefits in the past few years. The management can be wonderful or terrible depending on the school you end up at. We've had a number of management changes over the years. Unfortunately, they are starting to cut TA hours which puts more pressure on the lead teachers (and the TAs since they aren't getting the full 40 hours they were promised). The rumor is that they will eventually move to 1 TA per 2 classrooms. TAs have been asked to do silly things like moving tables and helping with janitorial duties rather than keeping them in the classrooms. Great Hearts has also opened up TA positions to anyone with a high school degree. This is causing many of the high performing TAs to find other employment. It leaves the lead teachers with people who, at best, are not helpful in the classroom and, at worst, are taking away from the learning of the students. 

HR has become petty with time clock hours for the TAs; frequently sending lengthy emails to all the headmasters and employees showing every time an employee has manually punched in to the time clock. This wouldn't be as bad if they had taken the time to set up a useable website or app. Instead, they quickly put together a website that is nearly impossible to use. In a recent meeting with HR, many of the headmasters had asked for these emails to stop and instead to simply not pay their hourly employees who had to manually clock in. While I'm "just a teacher" I'm fairly certain this is illegal.

There are little to no advancement opportunities. Pay is abysmal. Benefits are getting worse and worse AND more expensive. There is no real professional development even though most of the employees have never been teachers. The most recent "professional development" has included reading a book that was not related to education or pedagogy, listening to classical music for 90 minutes, going for a hike,  and a mandatory happy hour where we weren't paid four our time. While these are enjoyable activities, I don't think they are as helpful for the teachers as true PD would be (especially since many of these teachers haven't had any formal training to be in the classroom).

There are two great things about Great Hearts. You get to spend the day with some wonderful students and you can leave before 4.

Bottom line: the employees are subpar, there are no advancement opportunities, and upper management is continuing to make cuts.

“We are here to coach  you.” is not a thing here.  Please watch out if they interpret something you say or do negatively. You can be completely monotone or breathe wrong, and it’s an issue. They will sit there and attack you for being too “difficult” and too “soft” simultaneously on the kids. 
They do not care to hear if it is a misunderstanding.  They find reason to pick at you to your core on alleged mistakes you only find out about if  you are in the headmasters office.  It’s not about helping you grow or coaching you to be a great teacher. 
There’s a reason why there’s such a high turnover rate.


Expect to have 80 hour work weeks for low pay and to do many more duties beyond what you signed up for. 
This company is all about money. Your job is not guaranteed. It’s not a contract you sign to work for the year. You are replaceable. If the enrollment is low, expect staff cuts.  There’s absolutely no sense of belonging or inclusion. You do not even have to be certified to teach here so they can pretty much train you their way rather it goes with any state required teaching certification program or not.
 The people in corporate are making all the money while you as the teacher in the classroom are doing all the legwork for a non-livable wage. 
They get money for every student enrolled in the classroom which means you need to expect to plan lessons and prep work for 30+ students with 2 hour ELAR blocks, 1.5 hour math blocks, ect. There is absolutely no collaboration with other grade level staff members. It has to be a LONG typed out script word for word on what you will say for every second of the day no matter if the curriculum book has one laid out for you or not. You do not get enough 1-1 work with students even with the teacher aide in the class due the scheduling demands . There is no social emotional learning. You do not get a say in your classroom management or discipline. The school forces teachers to use their clip chart system which is on display for everyone to see. If you clip a student down, it will look like you are “shaming” a kid. If you don’t, you’re too “soft”. Kids will either sink or float- it’s a charter school run by a lottery system to enroll kids so it’s not a requirement to send your kid here. 


I absolutely love my job. I get to spend my day helping teachers, families, and students solve problems and grow through change, and also enjoy relationships that help us all grow in morally and intellectually rich ways. We read and discuss books together over a meal, we play pickleball together, we hold fine arts concerts together, and we also weep with each other in the trenches. 14 years ago I started as a parent of Great Hearts students, and thanks to the nurture and investment of its leadership, today I am both a network leader in training fine arts faculty and an Academic Dean at one of the local academies. 

The hardest part of my job is responding with hope and courage each day to the degeneration of learning and culture in our nation. It is a constant act of humility and trust. And because we are a public entity we are constrained in forming morally and intellectually strong schools. We cannot deny or rescind admission to our schools, which means we must accept negative influences as much as good influences, and without strong leadership it is difficult to enforce the kinds of comportment guidelines (uniform, speech, etc.) that root us in the good work of learning. We also struggle to find enough qualified teachers, which puts a strain on learning and satisfaction. We lose good people in the process.

But we also form good people in the process. I am one of them, a stay-at-home mom turned education leader through the ways in which people at Great Hearts have held fast to the Truth, honored the Good, and loved the Beautiful. Knowing Great Hearts is committed to this mission at every academy on every level with every person gives me great hope and encouragement, and it reminds me how important my work is every day.

Several reviews mention how demanding Great Hearts is: the long hours, the different accommodations for students, heaps of grading. They're right; and that's what it takes to craft a thoughtfully created, classical school culture. The job needs to be demanding for all the noble and beautiful aspects of the great hearts curriculum to succeed, and the job will enrich your soul while profoundly challenging it. 

Unfortunately, I worked here for a few years and finished with a salary that was about what I was making when I first started: an insultingly small amount. A humiliating amount: you'll be one of the lowest paid teachers in an already tragically underfunded state. Furthermore, the larger Great Hearts corporation takes extortionate tributes from its different schools, furnishing obscenely high salaries for their insatiable board, leaving the teachers who do the real work of the organization with even less (in 2023, it's poverty). Every year we would get the same email promising a radical new structuring of finances, raises were promised, and at the end of every year they would follow up with the same apology letter making some flaccid excuse for why we'd have to settle for a 2% raise, when the economy is being devastated by inflation.  They've decided they just don't need to keep people: someone with a liberal arts degree and no teaching certificate will always be desperate enough to work here. In the long run, this kind of "turn and burn" model devastates school cultures, institutional memories, and destroys the classical mission of the school by reminding its Socratic heroes, every brutal day, that they are completely disposable, cheap, and just not worth the investment. While asking the world of them.




The work can be very challenging and exhausting. My school has fantastic administration, but the oversight from Great Hearts is disheartening (excuse the pun) and often made me feel like an undervalued fast-food worker. The workplace culture is excellent, and I experienced numerous teachers and TAs who were competent, funny, and good people to be around. 

Day-to-day, expect to do whatever your lead asks of you. This may include grading papers, taking student lines from place to place, supervising lunch and recess, watching over specials, administering consequences for student behavior, teaching lessons, or acting as a substitute if your lead must be absent. In my time here, I saw several people who were forced to cover for unexpected long-term absences, regardless of the TA's previous experience in the classroom. Traffic duty in the morning and afternoon is a requirement. Parts of this job are immensely rewarding--like teaching a child to read--but other parts are exhausting and demoralizing. My clearest example is having to act pleasant and happy in front of a parent while the parent was actively hostile and rude to me and other staff members. One may consider this just another element of a customer-service job, which being a TA is in many ways. 

The pay is the hardest pill to swallow. As a person with an excellent college education, 24k a year was immensely disappointing and difficult to live on. It is hard to teach kids who are very well off when you yourself are living below the poverty line. Many TAs room together, 3 or 4 to a house, in order to afford living expenses. 

I have learned a lot from this job, including how to manage a crowd, how to express complex thoughts in manageable terms, and how to improvise even under extreme conditions. These are excellent skills to carry onward.

What is the best part of working at the company?
The students are truly a treasure. Most of them really make an effort and are kind and respectful. There are a few "craft builders," of course but overall, great students.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
This is a good fit for a brand new teacher with no creativity who is willing to be pushed around and micromanaged. If you are an experienced teacher, beware. Instead of being open to new ideas, they are rigid and inflexible. They have regular observations by teachers with no experience in your area of specialty that come in and try to tell you how you should change or fix non-existent issues. 
Students with exceptional needs such as autism and AD/HD are purposely not diagnosed so they do not have to hire an aid. When these students disrupt your classroom and you ask for help, they avoid speaking with you, do not answer emails, pass you off, and then gossip about you, convince everyone you are not adhering to the "Great Hearts way," are not competent, and create a hostile work environment. They are also not accepting of anyone in the LGBTQ community or not Catholic/Christian.  

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
It is very clique-ish. There are popular teachers and everyone is expected to kiss up to them. If you are not accepted by the popular teachers, they gossip about you behind your back, are rude to you, and you get written up for made-up issues. Toxic work environment.  

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
You are expected to arrive before school and help with a duty, often skip lunch as they do not provide adequate prep time, and stay after school for another duty. They do not offer equal pay for men and women and experienced teachers are considered brand new if they have not worked at Great Hearts.

To be frank, I think Great Hearts has a great purpose and a wonderful curriculum (though I do not agree with the choice for math). However, many of my issues were with the campus I worked for.
When the new headmaster took over at my campus because the other headmaster was being taken to a new school, the leadership and support faltered ALOT. I was the only new teacher on my team and I felt like I did not have the proper support a first year teacher should have in a new environment. I was always told three different things and got the run around instead of given a clear, precise answer. I was told to plan for a subject I was not the strongest with. My “team” would not assist me and when they did it was not useful advice. The leadership was very unorganized and displayed very obvious favoritism. Leadership should have a non-biased view among the staff and should see EVERY SIDE OF THE SITUATION. When I would complain about my teams unwillingness and very obvious group mindset (them against me) I was told that I needed to get to know them better because they said I did not hang out with them. The environment was very toxic within my grade level team. If I complained nothing was done, I was told that it was because of something I did or that I didn’t really know them. However, if they complained I was reprimanded and towards the end of the year I was not offered my position back. It is not a great environment for first year teachers - GO SOMEWHERE ELSE!

The culture of the workplace is that if you are willing to eat, sleep and breathe only academic air and work constantly (10-12 hours at school per day) you will do fine. Hopefully money is not something you are in need of because you won't be compensated for your overtime (which should go without saying). Management is there to correct you if they ever hear a complaint from a parent, no matter how petty you can rest assured that you will hear that you are simultaneously being too difficult on children and too soft. There is no pleasing those who run the show. Keep your head down and stick to the script and perhaps you will not get put on a disciplinary plan. In general however, this place operates based on the few teachers willing to put in 50-70 hours per week or you come do your work and hope that no parent takes issue with you because of something you did in class. "The tests are too hard", "the papers are too long", "there isn't enough rigor". Not to mention the children are given no time to be children here. The year I worked at Great Hearts they gave the children a 25 minute recreation/lunch time and they were often yelled at for using soccer balls outside on the field. Overall I would NOT recommend this place unless you are very good at going over and beyond to please the mediocre management. Be very wary of their claims of standing for "Truth, Goodness and Beauty" there is one thing they know how to do, which is sell those words to gullible parents and staff. Don't buy it. 

Great Hearts Academies is a company committed to the Western Tradition and classical education. This means that as an educator, my primary tasks are developing and implementing a well-rounded, rigorous education that inspires students to be lifelong learners in pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. In addition, Great Hearts not only concerns itself with developing intellectual virtue/excellence but strives to cultivate moral virtue equally. The benefit of these aims is that the employees and families Great Hearts attracts are usually like-minded in desiring what is noble. This creates an environment that is gracious, encouraging, and supportive. Even though the demands of the job of significant, it allows one to have a sense of pride in the work accomplished. 

Pros: The reason working for Great Hearts is so great is because of its commitment to Western Civilization. From that comes the values it expects from its employees and scholars. The commitment to a rigorous education draws in excellent teachers and wonderful families who are united in their pursuit of lifelong learning.

Cons: The only real drawback is that the level of excellence and commitment of teachers is demanding. Teachers are expected to know the content they teach well. The assignments are not busy work and the feedback given to students should be meaningful. The reason it is rewarding is because it is demanding.

I've worked for Great Hearts in Texas for ten years. My starting pay was 40,000 but I now make close to 60,000. So the raises are okay. The opportunities for advancing or increasing your pay are decent. But you do need to be confident and able to ask for raises and greater responsibility to enhance your salary.

The number up top is misleading because full time teachers are not paid by hour. You are also paid through the summer for two months off. Days are 7:20-3:45, normal for a teacher. You get two hours off during the day plus lunch for prepping. Many of us need to take time in the evening for additional prep. But two hours off each summer helps soften the blow.

Like most teaching jobs it gets easier every year. A teacher of ten years does very little work outside of class time which is 4-5 hours a day. While sure... You still need to be there from 8:45-3:45.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Special education teacher 111 salaries reported	$20.38 per hour
Elementary school teacher 71 salaries reported	$17.11 per hour
School teacher 79 salaries reported	$14.73 per hour
School program staff 59 salaries reported	$16.09 per hour
Teacher 17 salaries reported	$46,118 per year

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