Northeast

Classes are over-crowded, teachers do not give any individualized attention or feedback to kids, parents are treated as bothers and ignored. The worst is writing instruction which is entirely non-existent. Either you get a teacher that gives very few writing projects, so no practice and no feedback; or you get one that gives way too many but then doesn't ever grade them or give the children any feedback. We've had both kinds of teachers at Franklin. This past year my child did writing project after writing project, spending hours and hours on these. The teacher gave a single grade (no comments) on the first two in the fall, and then literally nothing the rest of the year. So these poor kids were toiling over these lengthy writing projects and then having to move on and do the next one with no idea of what the teacher thought of the one before. When my child asked for feedback the teacher snapped at her and told her to be patient. And then literally never gave her feedback. The two grades we saw had been good (4 out of 4), so when our kid got a low grade (2 out of 4) on their report card we were surprised and asked for a meeting. We were ignored. Our child asked again for feedback or whether the teacher had graded any of the numerous writing projects she had turned in, and the teacher said she hadn't gotten around to grading them yet because there were too many and she was too busy. The teacher gave her no feedback. We wrote into her with the same questions and asked if there was any specific feedback for our daughter to improve and got no response. We asked to see the writing projects that were sub-par so we could help her improve. We were told we couldn't see them. We finally gave up on getting any instruction through the school and hired private writing and math tutors.