So far as how they treat teachers as employees, regarding pay, hours, work rules, keeping promises, etc. the most important thing to remember is that they are franchises, so each location has a different boss. The fact that one teacher had a good or bad experience at a given chain school does not mean anything unless you are going to that specific address and the previous owner has not yet sold the franchise.
On the other hand, there is one built-in problem in that one of the services provided to the franchisees by the chain is teacher recruitment. What the overseas, central or regional office tells you about the position may have nothing to do with what you find when you get to the branch you will work at. It is not so much a question of lying as of bureaucracy: the chain bulk recruits, pools the teachers and then sprinkles them around on demand. Thus, the person recruiting you may literally not know where you are going to work: if he does know what branch you will be at, he may never have met your real boss and probably knows nothing about the place; so the recruiters tend to give stock answers which have a high statistical likelihood to vary from reality. When I was recruited by Jordan's overseas, I was very surprised that the branch franchisee whom I worked for had never seen the contract I had signed with Jordans and thus refused to be bound by any term in it!
My real problem with chains is not as an employee (they have a good reputation for paying well and on time, as they are flush with cash) but as a teacher: they are not schools. A real teacher who knows at least about education, if not about English, does not usually have the money or the inclination to buy a franchise: such a person (who usually makes an excellent boss for a teacher) usually just sets up a small independent school. Franchisees are usually successful businesspeople who know and care little about education: the Giraffe franchisee whom I dealt with had just sold his furniture factory to go into a business that was really profitable; the Jordan franchisee whom I dealt with was in the real estate business. So, for example, in the Giraffe location, the furniture was great: but my good comments have to stop there ....
Since all of my posts have to have at least one good libel in them, I personally have some doubts about the origins and real purpose of the chains. They arose at a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when no big business could become successful without close connections to the ruling Party, itself Taiwan's biggest business with the government as 1 subsidiary. The chains became very big very quickly, dealing wholly in the domestic market, at a time when teaching anything outside the Government schools or a licenced private school was illegal, which is another pointer toward heavy political influence at the time. It is also a fact that President Lee's daughter was caught owning some illegal schools in the 1990s. Without going further, I will just express the hope that the new Government's investigators into "black gold" (i.e. corruption) will have the chance to turn their attention to the English mass production market some time, to find out how much -- if any -- of it was just a giant money laundry for the previous Government's ill-gotten gains.
If you also don't care about education or child development but just want to make a lot of money and don't care what you do for it, maybe you will be happy among kindred spirits in the chain schools. However, a major facet of the chain school systems is to hire full-time Chinese teachers and basically entrust the business to them because the bosses don't know much about education and don't really trust foreigners. They work in a few hours for foreigners because, if the parents never see a foreign face, they will not pay very much per hour.
A foreign face in the same room with the children, even for 1 hour of a 3 hour class, can double or triple the hourly price parents will pay. This is because parents instinctively understand that people whose own language is English can teach their children the language more effectively than can Chinese teachers, many of whom in the chain schools have limited qualifications and have never been overseas. Thus, a foreigner -- especially a young, "active" and attractive one -- is a cash cow that no slick businessman like a chain school franchisee can overlook.
The result of that attitude toward foreigners is that the foreign teachers in the chain schools tend rightly to feel like clowns, servers in a meat market, prostitutes, etc. etc.. Since the real teaching is done by the Chinese teachers in Chinese -- including homework assignments, tests, grading, communication with parents, discipline, etc. -- neither the boss, the parents, the Chinese teachers nor the children have much respect for the foreign teacher.
This is also why foreign teachers at chain schools often get weird hours and split shifts, or even get assigned to run around from branch to branch all day: the Chinese teachers make the schedule for themselves and then throw bits and pieces to the foreign dogs under the dinner table. Usually, the foreign teacher does not even get his own class: just an hour in this Chinese teacher's class, an hour in that one.
It is also the Chinese teachers who evaluate the foreign teacher (the owner doesn't know how and the parents don't understand) while they are competing with him. Thus a successful foreign teacher in a chain school should APPEAR good enough (or not obviously bad) but not BE too good as a teacher! On the other hand, the foreign teacher is expected to keep turnover up by getting the kids re-enrolled every month (i.e. "keep 'em smiling").
Yet the foreign teacher often has no role in curriculum (one is provided by the franchise -- usually truly awful, based on rote memorisation and stupid games, most of which have proven over the past 10 years to have failed in teaching Taiwanese children anything beyond how to bark a few phrases or words on command), teaching methods, class organisation, student evaluation or anything else that a teacher usually does. The foreign face just goes in and "does a job" (whatever he is told, with a smile) and then collects a fat paycheck. Many of the chains offer "training": this is what the foreigner is trained to do, not to teach.
If you are a real teacher who cares about your student's proficiency in English, you will be rich and miserable in the chain schools. If you don't really care about anything but making money and making children feel happy, you may fit in very well in the chain school among kindred spirits oriental and occidental alike.
P.S.. None of the above applies to Sesame Street. They have a qualified group of foreigners writing their curriculum in Taichung and a graded and leveled system of placement and examinations. I have never worked with them but I am impressed both with the materials of theirs which I have seen and the children attending their schools whom I have met.
P.P.S. The above comments are a common picture of many chain schools in Taiwan but, being franchises, they can differ, especially in specific details. It is also conceivable that a franchisee who could get away with using the chain's extensive marketing and advertising benefits while ignoring its "system" of operating the school could create a good school.
