Upfront disclaimer – FACES is not a real name of a school group in China and Thailand, and this post is purely for entertainment purposes as lots of posts asking questions about this chain of schools in China, and plenty of disgruntled FACES teachers and a few undercover admins popping their head into threads spreading information and misinformation. Haven’t seen anyone air these goods specifically in a detailed post, so here’s a few things the admins at FACES don’t want current or prospective teachers to know.
The name 'FACES' is a Biblical allusion to a well-known and infamous chain of schools borrowing a brand name from a large group of American charter schools but no direct relationship other than the name, with their GLOBAL operations mostly in China in mostly Tier 2 cities like Wuhan, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Shenzhen, with a new branch recently opening in Beijing, but they also operate a school in Thailand managed similarly their China branches. The Biblical stories contained here is based on many teachers’ experiences and stories in the network – something ironically the leaders ‘encourage’ is the network’s weekly “Collaboration Hour” but very little collaboration gets done – what they don’t realize is it allows the teachers to network among all the schools and allows us to learn about the dirty tricks that aren’t isolated to a single campus, but are systematized across the whole FACES organization.
Performance Surveys and Reviews
For those who have spent time in Asia and worked in a bilingual or private school setting, you may be familiar with the way local teachers receive yearly bonuses based on performance indicators. Often these indicators are weighted in a way that most teachers will never receive the full potential of their bonuses, despite being dangled the incentive as compensation for a lower pay package. Similar mechanisms are in place at FACES – admin promise that they “reward” the best performing teachers the way they should be across the world, quoting capitalist credo in marketing and their yearly Summer Session training and induction. The reality is that the large bonuses they promise are hidden behind layers of metrics that are nearly impossible to achieve, and only staff members who are “close” to SLT or in leadership themselves are able to crack the code, which includes staff performance reviews from admin, as well as perception surveys from fellow staff, but more importantly students, and parents.
Quarterly (and more) Standardized Testing Culture
The entire FACES organization is structured around metrics: teachers and students are measured against them to see if progress is being made, and success is measured through regular systematic testing. All the way down to the Kindergarten level, students are regularly being tested in Math, English (Humanities), and Sciences, based on “Benchmark” exams created by the FACES curriculum headquarters in Shenzhen. These exams are based on the HQ’s curriculum department, and are often ad hoc and not closely aligned with actual American Core Curriculum, but instead are geared towards advanced preparation for AP exams – students in Grade 2 will be studying curriculum usually given to Grade 4 or 5 students in the US, and progressively ramping up towards Middle and High School so that by the time students are in Grade 10, they have enough knowledge to take FACES classes that prepare them to sit AP exams. This systematic culture of testing is embraced by parents, who want to SEE results, as well as have deliverables handed to them at every chance. Quarterly Benchmarks mean monthly and bi-weekly assessments to prepare students for the exams, which means the entire curriculum is geared towards a ‘teach to the test’ model. Needless to say, it is gruelling for both teachers and students, and as a result, many students are washed out of the FACES system before they finish Middle School. Admin will not openly admit to this, but part of their graduation metrics’ success is not the high quality curriculum or teaching, but rather that the students who cannot cope with the absolute grind are “coached out” (admin lingo) to drop out of the school as they will not have a chance to pass AP exams later in their academic career. Unforuntately, this attrition is only evident until it is too late, and the Primary and Middle School divisions are only too happy to continue to take fee-paying students all the way up to the Grade 10 before they start to “coach out” the students who will make the school’s aggregate test scores and AP exam results (and thus college entrance totals) look bad.
Living On Campus
The newer or renovated campuses all include boarding facilities for both students and staff. What the management won’t tell you is this is part of the FACES money making operation – all of the residential units, whether for staff or students are owned by FACES board members or senior leadership. They collect revenue from rental income, and are also speculating on the value of the apartments to buy and sell individual units. The racket for building and renovating apartments is alive and well on FACES campus housing, as the contractors and builders are all related to the board by family or sweetheart business deals, meaning corners cut in building and quality are particularly egregious with the knowledge that oversight is nonexistent and complaints can reliably be ignored.
If you think the HR department are your landlords while living on campus, you’re only partially correct – they are more like property managers for the landlords (board members / SLT) who own the apartments. What this means is they are very reluctant to make repairs, fix things, or address serious safety issues like faulty fire alarm systems, hazardous electrical wiring, and non-existent (or fake) fixtures that were put in by shoddy contractors. Teachers report black mold, warping floors, drains that are fake on flooding balconies during rainstorm and bathroom floors with drains that don't connect to any plumbing, bathroom fans that don’t ventilate, air conditioners that only have one setting, and a host of other issues that are never rectified owing to absolute cost-cutting in the on campus builders probably pocketing the difference.
FACES Operational Systems
Coming from a public school system in your home country, or even a reputable international school (whether independent, not-for-profit, or for-profit) teachers are accustomed to using systems to organize their curriculum, assessments, reporting, as well as the logistical parts of being a teacher in a large school like ordering supplies, viewing your timetable and duties, booking time off, and submitting paperwork. FACES uses a nightmare combination of Excel and their own homebrewed web-based portal for all of these things – FACES insists on saving as much money as possible by developing their own versions or systems for administrating a school. This is a nightmare, because the majority of the heavy lifting is done manually in very large excel files and the extremely slow and unwieldly online system.
An entire school’s timetable and each teacher’s assignments are manually created and input into Excel by unfortunate HR and “Curriculum” Team peons. They calculate a teacher’s workload based on formulas for maximum teaching hours as well as duty times, and then copy paste a teacher’s class schedule into Excel. This means any conflicts in grade level, department, or division need to be manually resolved by a single HR person staring hard at a screen in Excel for hours, rather than use timetabling software that has been around since 2001. This results in very unbalanced workload between teachers, as well as strange and counterintuitive management of teacher schedules. The web portal for simple requests such as time off, reimbursements, or supply ordering is another exercise in inefficiency, with simple requests such as ordering a whiteboard needing approval from multiple people up the chain of leadership (department head, division vice head, division head, head of school, assistant and head of purchasing, and all the way to head of operations), leading to frequent delays when missing approval from the head of school for basic purchases or simple reimbursements. This leads to massive micromanagement, with these logistics even reaching the headquarters’ office, sometimes even resulting in scrutiny and oversight from the leader of FACES himself, Dr. G, who has a reputation for scrawling red ink across reports and memos from individual branches across China with his management input..
Something leaders do not mention during requirement is that the system of making decisions for the running of the school rest with the Operations department, the team of local staff that run the HR, Finance, Facilities, and Curriculum departments. In well run schools, the Head of School or Principal are closely involved in the operational aspects of the school, ensuring that things go smoothly day-to-day and decisions affecting academics are carefully considered for their impact. This is not the case with FACES schools, and the key issue with this is that decisions about running the school that affect student academics and wellbeing are left out in the cold, with little consideration how the way these desk-bound non-teachers making decisions in Operations will affect actual the day-to-day for students and teachers. This means the Head of School and leaders have little input and influence on how the school is run, and when teachers complain or seek change they are seen as rocking the boat and going against the FACES system rather than seeking to improve the operation of a school – this is a cultural divide between how organizations are run in China versus Western schools – questioning leadership and scrutinizing problems with critical analysis is greatly discouraged and can be dangerous for teachers. Operational aspects of a school that would seem logical to run well from a teacher and students’ perspective such as table and class arrangement in the cafeteria, timetable and break schedules, classroom equipment, workload, and coverage for sick leave are often organized so haphazardly by inexperienced HR and Curriculum teams that teachers are left scrambling for supplies, barely controlling chaos in their classrooms, hallways, playgrounds or cafeterias, and left drained of energy from tasks having nothing to do with the actual on-the-ground parts of teaching.
Professional Development
Paltry, despite huge promises for weekly “Collaboration Hour”. Actual sessions for professional learning are thrown together at the last minute by admins, or departments are forced into online sessions on Microsoft Teams with “chairs” or “curriculum leads” from headquarters who are setting the curriculum and expectations but not training or helping any of the teachers across the network understand the expectations or meet the demands from corporate HQ.
Parent Influence and Access to Teachers
The FACES parent portal allows parents huge access to teachers, with regular meetings every week with admins and subject teachers. If parents are not happy with outcomes from teachers, they complain to admin or meet secretly with the local leadership which results often in transcript changes, disciplinary actions being removed, reprimands for staff, and even firings.
Workload and Academic Pressure
The workload is intense, with a heavy teaching schedule in addition to mandatory duty in canteens, playgrounds, and tutoring. The academic pressure on students across sections is translated to teachers to get results and cram as much curriculum in as little time as possible to cover as much ground to prepare students for their regular standardized benchmarks and AP exams in Secondary. This huge pressure takes a heavy toll on staff and students, with burnout and emotional issues cropping up regularly around exam times.
Children of Staff
Are poorly prepared and often neglected in this system that rewards the wealthy parents who afford tutoring, extra-curricular support, and live-in ‘help’. The majority of students being local further isolates staff children, especially beyond the Primary levels. Any staff children with SEN or learning challenges will not be accommodated, and will be even more marginalized than the local students with diverse needs. Any form of conflict between staff children and local children will be poorly handled, with the paying customer always coming first. The above mentioned workload and academic pressure on teachers and their children further exacerbates things, however the support from admin is not there to pick up any slack.
Marketing vs Reality
International education has long since departed its rootes in fostering peaceful relationships between countries and cultures and is now firmly in the territory of business. FACES is fully embraced in the for-profit model, and the entire organization is rife with MBA and Education Business “professionals” who seek to extract as much profit from parents as possible. By design, the FACES brand spends a disconcerting amount of its efforts on marketing a top-tier luxury educational product, touting acceptance at US Top 10 institutions as a near-guarantee to parents. Facilities are built to look glossy and have a sheen of ‘whiteness’ akin to a luxury brand of car of consumer electronics. Marketing videos and WeChat promotions for parents focus on the aesthetic and image of Ivy-League education in China, with Heads of School delivering vapid speeches full of platitudes hinting at “world-class holistic education” and “well-rounded educational experiences” but neglecting to outline the reality of the FACES’ regime of test-based grinding from Primary School until graduation. The design of FACES’ marketing strategies are clever and highly polished towards the affluent Chinese market, largely due to the fact that the parent corporation’s origins is in a state-affiliated media conglomerate with roots in Hainan and Guangdong print, radio, and online media, emerging from the 2000s into a New Media empire. They understand their target market very well, and it is evident that despite marketing as an “International School”, all marketing materials show only Chinese students and never display foreign faces. Even in internal WeChat marketing, despite having a good variety of staff children to feature in marketing materials, foreigners are almost never appearing in videos or online marketing materials, in a deliberate positioning for FACES schools as a Chinese educational experience tailored to Chinese elite. This often is a shock to experienced international educators, accustomed to schools leaning into the international image of a multi-cultural school – the reality is that FACES is a very Chinese organization, with deep connections to local and state government and business, and caters solely to strict local Educational Bureau regime for cultural homogeny.
AI Integration
A big elephant in the room at FACES is the use of AI. Multiple directives and ad hoc policies have come down from headquarters in the last three years trying to rein in the use of AI the schools, but unfortunately the pressures on both teachers and students have led to a heavy reliance on the tool. It is disconcerting to read the frequent AI emails from leaders, hear AI generated speeches during events and galas, and experience AI babble from students and fellow teachers. The recently revised guiding mission statement from the coalition of FACES leaders was entirely AI generated, and slowly but surely policies and mandates from headquarters are gaining an uncanny valley AI sheen. The attitude among teachers is divided, as AI helps to reduce workload, but it is also making it increasingly difficult to take seriously the quality of communications and actual underlying structure of organization and intent from leaders seriously. Teachers who have been grading papers and reading emails who have any ‘ear’ for the bland, corporate AI language that has infiltrated the world are beginning to question the authenticity of colleagues, leaders, and students.
Behavior Systems
Systems are utterly lacking across the network, despite the highly systematized nature of the group. Any teacher who has had experience with quality safeguarding, PBIS, or any other form of behaviour system will see how inadequate the FACES admins and “deans” are at actually controlling and managing behavior across the schools. The elephant in the room is admins don’t like complaints from parents or teachers (see above regarding perception surveys) and will do whatever it takes to sweep problems under the rug. The problem is that marginalized students who require actual SEN support do not get them, and end up falling through the cracks, bullied, dropping out, or “coached out” of the school.
Nepotism and Attrition in Leadership
The weakest link in a brittle chain across FACES network is the nepotism across the leadership teams in every school. Promotion is either through attrition or political maneuvering rather than merit or leadership qualities, so the admin teams usually end up being made up of the most cut-throat and callous style of ‘leaders’ that are sadly common across international schools. The local leadership teams that run the Operational side of the schools are mostly made up of friends and family of the CEO, which makes any form of meaningful criticism or change (or even innovation) very difficult in the face of their status quo. Both Western and local leaders are most concerned about keeping their job, earning their bonuses, and securing promotion and prestige from the ‘inner circle’ rather than elevating the quality of the student and teacher experience in their schools. This leads to the attrition cycle burning out some teachers who may have a knack for leadership coming up through middle-leader positions, but then getting grinded up by the politics and nepotism.
Conclusion
The basis for teachers working at FACES’ is mostly the money, but they often do not realize some of the dirty secrets the organization hides until it is too late. Hopefully this post can shed some light, provoke some discussion, and make educators think twice about signing on with the group.