Thinking about applying to City Year? DON'T DO IT.
I became a corps member shortly after I graduated from college and it remains the worst decision I've made in my life. I was a newly minted graduate from a nearby liberal arts college and I wanted to do some good in the world (as you've probably guessed, I was also really naive). I'd always been interested in educational issues and because I was a history major who didn't quite know what to do next, I thought it would be cool to spend a year in a school tutoring while I figured everything out.
That was a big mistake. For me the strangest thing about City Year is the level of contempt it had for education. Many corps members and staffers have never gone to college (some don't even have high school diplomas), and as such, cannot read or do math above a third or fourth grade level. There is no reading or math test given to CIty Year applicants and the City Year site has no problem placing a tutor who can barely add fractions into an eighth grade math classroom. More than once, I'd see a child actually correct their tutor on their math or tell their tutor they were pronouncing a word wrong. It's a shame, because City Year promises these schools that their tutors will help bring up test scores and providing these classrooms with illiterate tutors really damages the cause.
How unqualified are City Year tutors? One corps member on my team once wrote an entire essay without using a SINGLE VERB. Sample sentence: "My mom my hero because she strong." I'm not making this up. City Year being City Year, any corps member that criticized that fact that many corps members were unqualified were berated and told that they were hurting City Year's mission. (Notice how City Year thinks a college graduate who criticizes the organization's methods is more damaging to the organization's mission than a tutor who would write a sentence like that. It says it all really.)
City Year also has no problem letting its corps members and staff design lesson plans that are at best ineffective and at worst factually incorrect. Would you want your kid to do a lesson designed by a 19-year-old high school dropout? (Keep in mind that no one actually fact-checks the lesson plans.)
And then there's the culture of the organization. I found many City Year corps members (and a huge number of the staff) to be extremely homophobic, sexist and generally intolerant. Management turned a blind eye to it all, because they were more concerned with the organization's image than with the quality of life of their employees and addressing the homophobia problem would actually require acknowledging that there was a problem to begin with. (And City Year did not provide any training about homophobia or sexual harrassment to its managers or employees, which sounds like something that would happen in the 1970s, and not in the 2000s.)
Absenteeism was also a big problem at City Year, but no one in management really did anything about it. If City Year management likes you, you can basically do whatever you want without any consequences. However if a corps member points out that the rules are not consistently applied, they will be punished, even if your work in the classroom is stellar.
I hope this review encourages other former corps members to speak out about the insane practices that go on at the City Year Greater Philadelphia site. If I could go back in time and advise my 22-year-old self, I'd tell her to just get a 9-5 job and volunteer with Philadelphia Cares on the weekends. If I had done so, I would have saved myself a lot of grief. read more
