California School Of Languages

the worst experience in my life was this school full of racists teacher bad english teaching trust me there are a lot of better school to go to if your planning to go to santa monica for example ELS or EC but save your money and don’t waste it on their bad school … one of the teachers her name is cathrine she was telling us about her partying and smoking they didn’t teach us anything !!! their principal jhon was not helpful and was acting strange i will tell everyone about my experience

I had the misfortune of teaching at this joke of a school and I am writing this to warn any student who is considering spending (or rather wasting) their money there.
This school is not really a school but a scam business that has no interest in education whatsoever. It is owned by a greedy, pompous and unprofessional person whose priority is to cut every corner to make the most profit.
Result? Unqualified teachers (the things I have seen my «colleagues» do there would raise the hair on many professionally trained ESL teacher’s heads) and unhappy students who are not learning much.
One of my favorite «colleagues» was one who spent most of the class time playing on her cell phone after she gave students a board game to play — a game that had nothing to do with teaching/​learning ESL). Or another one, who would come into the classroom and ask the students what they wanted to do that day… and often suggest that the class should… go for a walk around Santa Monica! Yet another one’s idea of teaching ESL was throwing a bunch of free newspapers on the tables for the students to «look through and discuss»…
The school does not have a proper placement test and instead they use a section of the TOEFL exam for all incoming students (!). Then the students retake the same exam at the end of the course… the results not being representative of anything, really.
The students are grouped together without much regard to their level — clearly in order to maximize profit for the school (i.e. reduce the number of groups and therefore the number of teachers and classrooms used). They are known to have sent a group or two to wander around town for four hours in order to free up a classroom on a day where they school was overcrowded.
They have hardly any teaching materials available, especially listening materials are practically nonexistent. Most of the books are outdated, the terrible grammar book they offer for «free» to every student is not worth the paper it’s printed on. Most importantly, though, they have no curriculum for any of the levels and no textbooks.
They are so cheap, they will not fix the only copy machine they have, and it belongs in a museum rather than a working school. The copies, if they come out at all, are hardly legible and all crinkled — it was embarrassing, to say the least.
The lack of competence of the «Director of Education» is striking. He has no idea about teaching ESL and as far as I could tell he does not know how to write a lesson plan or design a curriculum. He demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge of ESL teaching methodology and how he was able to keep his position there is beyond me. From what I understand, even though the name of his position is «Director of Education», his job is to squeeze as many students as possible in as few classrooms as possible thus maximizing profits, which is logistics and not education-​related.
He hires people practically off the street to teach students who often spend thousands of dollars to come to the US and pay for the housing and tuition at this «school.» When I worked there, there was only one other teacher at the school with some (but not much) professional ESL teacher training. Al the other teachers were random people treating teaching there as more or less a temporary part-​time gig to pay their bills.
Most of the trips or extracurricular activities offered by this school are seriously overpriced and you can find them online at lower prices and simply go places by yourself or with a bunch of friends.
Also, I heard constant complaints from students about their host families that the school arranges for.
This place is a scam and is able to stay in business because its clients are mostly young international students who only go there once and are replaced by new ones fed to the school by the overseas travel agents that cooperate with it for profit.
To sum up, save yourself a lot of grief and money and find a professional ESL school with qualified teachers and a curriculum if you are serious about learning English.
You have been warned.