I believe this company and its vision are intrinsically flawed and deeply unethical.
Fusion Academy promises on its website that it will provide each of its students with a world-class, personalized education in a safe, nurturing environment. The "Fusion model," DeVos-aligned CEO Peter Ruppert claims, offers customizable, one-on-one tutoring and mentoring for students who don't "fit in," for various reasons, at "traditional" schools.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The "Fusion model" is designed in such a way as to preclude personalization and quality pedagogy. Its failures are not peripheral; they are systemic. Fusion is, at root, a business backed by an investment bank, and it shows. "Corporate," as we called it, does not care about students, much less teachers. All it cares about is its bottom line. Fusion reinstantiates, under the guise of a disruptive Silicon Valley startup, the very same cookie-cutter education methods Ruppert purports to reject.
A "semester" class at Fusion amounts to 20 to 25 50-minute sessions. A semester class at a conventional school meets for 50 minutes a day, five days a week, for 15 weeks. Thus, I was expected to cover the same amount of material that a public school teacher would have at least three classes to explain in a single 50-minute session. That is not a recipe for "quality" teaching. Most sessions felt rushed, and the same was true for many of my colleagues.
I can personally attest that the course materials and textbooks provided by corporate were outdated, inadequate, incomplete, and biased. This left us to conjure lesson plans and instructional material out of thin air on our own time-- as if teachers do not have lives of our own. Invariably, we were advised to copy material from other classes' curricula whenever possible. "Personalized instruction," indeed.
The pay is insulting, even by the standards of the teaching profession. Moreover, teachers are not remunerated for planning time. What little time we are compensated for is given over to "charting": a tedious, mind-numbing ritual whose sole purpose is to safeguard Fusion's undeserved accreditation. Obviously, some form of internal tracking is necessary for a school to function, but Fusion's protocols are invasive and excessive.
Regarding that all-important issue of accreditation: no serious attempt was ever made to see if the content and assignment pages I created in the cloud-based lesson planning system actually had anything to do with the standards I was supposed to meet. All I would have needed to do was drag the standards over to random assignments. No administrator ever even shadowed me for a full period to check to see that I was actually teaching (for the record, I was). As always with Fusion, appearance mattered more than substance.
The standards themselves are outrageous. "Students will understand the human cost of war." Excuse me? Am I supposed to show the kids pictures from Abu Ghraib? Should I walk them through casualty statistics? Or do I have them read passages from All Quiet on the Western Front? Explanations of the standards were never forthcoming. Teachers complained about their absurdity with depressing regularity.
I made around $26.00 per 50-minute session. Parents are expected to fork over around $3800.00 per semester-long class. Do the math: of that $3800.00, I would take home about $650.00. Where does that ~$3150.00 go?
I'll tell you where it goes. Fusion is reinvesting its profits into aggressive expansion: this is no secret. It's not investing in teachers. It's not investing in equipment (for a school that markets itself as cutting-edge, the laptops were just embarrassing). It's not investing in anything that could tangibly improve conditions at its schools. That is because Fusion is a business, and its schools are primarily a means to turn a profit. It has a model that works-- for shareholders.
The teacher turnover rate is, completely unsurprisingly, atrocious. Many, I was told, don't even bother to finish out their classes. They just leave. Are we supposed to believe that a chain of schools that chews through unsuspecting, underqualified, underpaid novices like a meat-grinder is going to deliver a superior educational "product?" That's ludicrous.
It's not the teachers' fault. Those who work there are trapped in a terrible and unsustainable situation. I encountered a few exceptional individuals who managed to make it work, but the ones I shadowed during my New Teacher Training were, for the most part, obviously improvising. I don't hold that against them.
Many students at Fusion struggle with major learning differences, behavioral issues, and/or addictions. We are expected not just to serve as instructors, but also as mentors. In that capacity we received next to no support of any kind from either Grand Rapids or our administrative team. There are no dedicated mental health professionals on campus. There isn't a Special Education department. There isn't even a school nurse.
The result was chaos. I can't speak for all the other teachers, but I was overwhelmed and scandalized by the dangerous behavior administrators were willing to tolerate from students. I have witnessed administrators idly stand by or tut-tut disapprovingly as students threatened physical violence upon one another and upon teachers. They impotently wrung their hands as students built modest drug distribution rings under their noses, as if they were not capable of carrying out appropriate disciplinary action. They even joked about it in the teachers' lounge. In my view, that is categorically unacceptable and sends a message to students that such goings-on are permissible.
Contrast Fusion's lackadaisical approach to student discipline with its aggressive enforcement of rigid standards of behavior for teachers. Several of my peers expressed the feeling that admin had created a "climate of fear" on campus. I agree. I was officially verbally reprimanded for making "anti-Fusion statements," whatever that means. Admin did not give me the chance to confront my accuser(s). The atmosphere at Fusion is suffused with a cloying, sickening positivity that belies the poisoned relationships between teachers, the administration, and Grand Rapids. Orwell meets Huxley.
I have seen enough in my short time at Fusion to fill volumes. I reject the notion that Peter Ruppert and his minions are acting in good faith. They know exactly what they're doing: ripping off vulnerable students, ripping off teachers, then sitting back to let administrators at local campuses take the heat for their feckless avarice. Honestly, it sickens me to see how something that clearly began as a beautiful dream has transformed into something like this. It breaks my heart. I came into this job with really, really high hopes. Fusion shattered them.
