tutor

site director

fellow

resident director

learning and development coordinator

Saga Education

I finished my full service year, but I thought about quitting many times per week. Don't apply for this job unless you have very good mental health. Everyone (Saga Fellows, students, actual teachers) gets so burned out, and they highly discourage taking more than 5 personal days. I really connected with most of my students, and I felt like I owed it to them to stay. 

Our direct supervisor was petty, nitpicky, and generally unhelpful. I didn't interact much with other management, except for when they filed some paperwork incorrectly and tried to cheat us out of our compensation. Halfway through the year we found out that our training hours "didn't count" and we would have to do 50-100 hours of extra work to earn the education grant. It was only resolved during the pandemic when they finally relaxed the rules about how many hours we needed.

The 2 weeks of training at the beginning of the school year were not enough. They didn't explain that most of our time would be spend disciplining students rather than teaching them. They didn't train us on how to gain the trust of teachers who didn't want us there. In fact, they explicitly told us that we wouldn't be giving grades based on correctness, just effort. That changed partway through the year and it really made the students distrust us. 

I can't convey how awful it feels to have a student tell you their sibling just died, and you have to somehow convince them to do math or they get a failing grade for the day. Some days, this job will make you feel like a terrible person, and all you wanted to do was help some kids learn math.

This company does not care about you. They do not respect whatever education background or experience you have. They gave you a lot of work for little amount of money. TONS OF HEAVY WORK than they claim at their job posting. YET they dont claim you to be an employee. Make up your mind, what are we? teachers, tutors, volunteers? decide then give a reasonable amount of work.

 It's best you work at retail. Hey at least your manager treat you like an adult and you get paid at the right amount of work. Some of the Site Directors are the most nastiest people you have ever met. Lay off the ego, Site Directors, you dont even have a strong background in hard science and you ain't better than anyone else around here. First day of work and you already screaming at your fresh employees lol. This is not the military. I would expect professionalism from a company that claims they want to help the minorities. 

The company does not even give you the whole picture on working with the high school students. Most of the students are great but come on, stop showing the agenda that these students are easy to manage and are willing to learn. Please, stop watching Hollywood movies and implement them in real life.

Either way, if you have a bachelors degree, apply elsewhere. JUST APPLY else where. You can make more money as adjunct professor or data analyst.

This is my first year with Saga. In summer workshop they told us we're an important part of the company because we're the student facing people. But whenever staff talks to us they're very condescending. People ask questions in meetings and the staff gets annoyed even though they're smiling. You hear it in their tone of voice. You can tell we don't matter. Fellows are all replaceable. A staff member told our team we're legally not employees so aren't protected by employee rights. Imagine actually saying that to someone who works 45 hours or more every week for you.

I graduated a few years ago and thought this would be a good intro to high school math teaching seeing as there's a shortage of math teachers. But if this is how hard teachers have to work for 25% less than the average similar professional, I won't do an MEd. Too much record keeping. Too many meetings that don't make us more productive. Way too much busy work. I even got denied for SNAP benefits even though Saga said I qualified for them. No help from Americorp or Saga when I got denied.

So much work during week that on weekends instead of doing professional development I catch up on sleep. Saga talks a lot about mental health. So why do they exhaust people so our mental health is so bad? Every fellow I speak to says the same thing but everyone's afraid to say anything to management because we all need a good recommendation after the service year to get a real job. I'm outta education at the end of this year.

Have been employed for 2 years as tutor.  

I would recommend the tutor fellow position for someone who is not sure about working in education but wants to try it out. A lot of tutoring positions out there don't actually place you in a public school, this one does and that means something.  It's also full-time and has good benefits BCBS.  

I think the company does a fair job of making a bargain for all the parties involved: students, school administrations and fellows. They are now hiring associate degree holders- a person without a masters in education should consider themselves lucky that they can be employed in a public school under any condition, in my opinion. 

You're basically exposed to the work environment that a public high school teacher copes with everyday, but you get to bear the workload with 5+ other professionals, one of whom (your SD) has work experience as a teacher.  

The service year has a $6000 (Segal) award that can pay for education expenses, help you pay for the student debt or for a future masters.  

Few people who work for this company keep a career in it and there's nothing wrong with that necessarily, its part of the company's model. Most will put 1-3 years in and then either go to grad school, maybe to become a teacher.

I took a job as a SAGA Fellow (aka math tutor) shortly after graduating undergrad. The idea was to figure out if I wanted to become a teacher before I committed to a graduate program. 

Pros:
-Gives you a taste of classroom teaching
-Excellent feedback for work
-Patient supervisors
-Less stressful than Teach for America or Americorps
-Tight-knit teams/staff
-Highly-engaged executives
-Thorough training
-Resume-building workshops and team-building activities
-Extremely friendly workplace
-Perfect work-life balance (they do everything in their power to help you with self-care)


Cons:
-Disheartening setbacks when things are bad for your students at home
-Stipend is very low. You will need to moonlight if you pay rent.
-Management is disorganized at times.
-Healthcare premiums are pretty high, given that they don't provide great coverage, and especially given the salary.
-Promotions are limited unless you have a background in education or mathematics
-Inefficient professional development/training days. They're thorough, but they're also wayyyy longer than they need to be.


The organization is extremely young, which means that they're still figuring out how to make everything run smoothly. That said, the kindness of the staff, excellent mission, and good work-life balance make it a great pit-stop before you pursue the career you really want.

The non - profit is a mask for truly wanting to operate as a corporate entity.  Poor communication from upper management who is out of touch with New York City Schools, the level of diversity in them, misconceptions about New York City students, and the actual rigor of Common Core testing characterize this organization.  Additionally, it does not help that the CEO prides himself on the premise of "under promising and over delivering" at the expense of children and hires some of the most under qualified individuals to tutor and work with children to groom for academic success.

Furthermore, the initial pay is garbage - insulting garbage.  If you are able to obtain a management role, one should take advantage of it.  But you will be spied on and undermined.  Some of the tutors will be tasked to report things to upper management.  Imagine having a mole on your team and be prepared to provide things for employee satisfaction out of your own earnings.

In all honesty, this organization would be so much better if it did not mask its "White Man's Burden" ideals onto children who are really in need.

What is the best part of working at the company?
It was being able to work with different people, but that changed when people started stabbing each other in the back to get ahead.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Everything. There was no support from your immediate supervisor and if you made any indication that you felt unsupported, you were immediately reprimanded but not officially.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Its not very collaborative. Its more like if you know someone in the "in-crowd" you were okay; however, if you did not know them you could expect to be left out of important meetings, and notifications.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
stressful. You engage in a repetitive morning meeting that does not provide useful information. After the meeting, you may have a planning period before engaging students or you may begin your tutorials. For the SD position, you are most likely checking lessons, completing observations, checking and responding to emails etc.

This was a GREAT job! I enjoyed what I did, learned more about my passion in education and it was flexible enough for me to be able to be with my family and friends as well as finally finishing my Master's. I grew so much in this position and truly felt loved, valued and appreciated and grew my network once I left. The bad though is that there was no upward mobility (I worked in my role for almost 5 years with an announcement that there would be no more future major increases in pay org-wide and there was no role to be promoted to; you'd have to be apply like everyone else to other positions offered by the company). Also, inconsistency was a problem -- what site you worked at year-to-year changed year-to-year, which sometimes meant that if a site was no longer housing our organization, there was a chance that you may not be placed at another site if one can not be found for you.

This is a new job for me, I am not here to get rich, so the pay for the amount of time isn't great but isn't super relevant. However, a typical day at work starts with not knowing what your schedule will be like or what is expected of you that day and ends with feeling like there is something you are supposed to be doing but no clear communication about what that is.  The site director is spread thin and inexperienced, the students are almost entirely not english speaking, and the fellows are expected to learn to speak Spanish which I did not know when I was hired, it would have been nice for there to be a bilingual qualification for this position, seems a little unfair for everyone to not be transparent in regards to the ability to communicate with students.  There is little behavior management going on on-site, so even for the English speaking students, the effectiveness of the tutoring seems laughable so far. 

Saga Education is still a younger organization, so there is work to be done in terms of building out teams/departments, and becoming more organized overall. That said, I have learned a lot during my time here, and it feels like everyone is really working to fulfill the mission of the organization. I believe the organization leadership does try their best to continually improve the organization based on employee feedback, which is great. They also provide resources to help employees have good work-life balance and wellbeing. Overall, I have felt very fulfilled with my role at Saga. 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Tutor 47 salaries reported	$21.24 per hour
Site director 3 salaries reported	$81,683 per year
Fellow 7 salaries reported	$25,857 per year
Resident director 4 salaries reported	$73,038 per year
Learning and development coordinator 2 salaries reported	$50,400 per year

Working at Saga Education: Company Overview and Reviews

Saga Education

Saga Education Ratings

Popular jobs at Saga Education

Salary Satisfaction

Job Seeker Tools

Employer Tools

Browse

Stay Connected