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Center City PCS

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Center City PCS Reviews

3.2

61% would recommend to a friend

(68 total reviews)

Mr. Russ Williams

72% approve of CEO

45% positive business outlook

Center City PCS has an employee rating of 3.2 out of 5 stars, based on 68 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Center City PCS employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Education industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

68 reviews
1.0
12 Feb 2016

Not what I expected...

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There are different campuses that you can collaborate with during professional development and the pay is better than other public charters.

Cons

Please note that not all of the campuses are the same. My review is for one of the worst schools that is part of Center City. -In the middle school you teach three different grade levels with a little over an hour of prep time per week. It is impossible to plan for all of your classes without working extremely long hours throughout the week and weekends. -Students are not disciplined equally. One student could get expelled for an offense that would only result in a suspension for another student. -Professional development is not useful and teachers rarely are provided with time to work in their classrooms. -There are so many changes in routines in structure that are never presented to the teachers. There is no teacher input taken into consideration and teachers are expected to be able to implement changes without being provided with the information. -You are promised with biweekly observations and feedback, but I never experienced that to be the case. They do a great job of saying they will help you grow into the teacher you want to be, but the support simply isn't there. -A co-teacher model is used to allow for special education students to remain in the classroom. The expectation is for both teachers to play an active role with the entire class, but co-teachers are often lazy and incompetent. This results in the general education teacher doing most of the work and being held accountable for the faults of the co-teacher even though the opposite is not true. If your co-teacher doesn't show up to class, doesn't know the content or doesn't know how to do proper modifications, the general education teacher is expected to do the work and roll with the punches. -The class sizes are too large with all having started with over 30 students at the beginning of the year. -Administrator and teacher turnover is extremely high! -Administration fears certain parents and thus some poorly behaved students do not receive appropriate consequences. -Students get into fights and do no receive consequences. Teachers are encouraged to not write referrals for fear that OSSE will audit the school due to a high suspension rate. -There is no consistency with the handbook. There are rules in place, but it's as if they don't exist since no one is held accountable.

1.0
4 May 2014

Don't do it.

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Pay for senior and administrative staff is decent.

Cons

Massive turnover, poor management, toxic culture.

3.0
6 Aug 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

So many wonderful teachers, aides, and service specific educators work the halls here. There are a lot of people with passion, ideas, and technical classroom knowhow who represent the very best in education. I found the salary and benefits, including time off, to be more than fair. There is room and flexibility at many of the campuses to bring a pet project of yours to life for students and the school or to hop on to someone else's project. If you reach out laterally for help, you will almost always find support from within your building, and occasionally across buildings. This is a place to cut your teeth, and you will walk away from Center City with some excellent hard skills you will be able to apply anywhere. The students, for the most part, are a joy (provided you've set and maintained good expectations and routines).

Cons

Leadership at Center City tends to be weak, directionless, or Type A belligerent (the experience differs depending on the campus). Central Office too often makes sweeping changes that negatively impacts teachers, students, and directionality. Rather than reflecting on and actively listening to teacher and staff concerns, particularly with regards to poorly informed decisions made by leaders at schools or CO, it becomes a "circle the wagons" moment that ultimately results in leaders getting what they want while staff who challenge them feel marginalized, attacked, or under intense scrutiny because you had the temerity to raise legitimate concerns up the chain. Among leaders at CO and at schools, there's often a fealty of belief in making big changes without consulting those most affected nor deeply considering how to make new changes work in practice. If you aren't in leadership, expect to have your input solicited and then mostly ignored for anything other than the smallest of changes. Expect this to have a major impact on your work life and mental well being.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 68 Reviews

Glassdoor has 71 Center City PCS reviews submitted anonymously by Center City PCS employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Center City PCS is right for you.