Pros
This suburban charter school attracts a fairly large number of bright and interested kids, so a teacher has an opportunity to delve deeper into the subject and use interesting projects to encourage learning. The school also believes in project-based instruction, so there is a small amount of flexibility (or, at least, there was at the time) to be slightly inventive in your teaching methods.
Cons
The school, paradoxically, was founded by evangelical Christians. While those founders are no longer affiliated with it, the school had a problem with instruction on any subject that was uncomfortable for people of that religious perspective. Christian influence at STEM School is still quite powerful; several board of directors members and the school's counsel are active in that community and seek to impose policies that limit free discussion of ideas or use of curriculum content that offends the sect. The school also experienced some financial difficulties during the first year it was open, and though those may have been fixed by now, the school has also experienced rapid growth and has continued to rely on teachers who are not experienced nor, in many cases, trained as educators. The executive director is socially awkward, has difficulty relating to others, and tends to delegate poorly to her staff and teachers. She has also developed a reputation for instructing teachers to minimize communication with parents and to rely to an excessive degree on technology as a teaching tool. Those two cultural attributes can be problematic for teachers because they can encourage conflict with parents and limit the tools available when students are not comprehending the material being taught. STEM School uses a form of the well-known Core Knowledge curriculum, so there is not much room for teachers to address Common Core goals or Next Generation Science Standards content. Teachers are micro-managed in terms of content and methodology of teaching. There is a high proportion of special needs students - perhaps as much as one-fourth of all students - and the school neither supports nor implements any effective strategy for encouraging good behavior among students. Pay is low, as might be anticipated in a charter school, and the school is part of a school district that is notoriously hostile to teachers, engaged in a long ideological crusade to give taxpayer money to religious schools and undermine collective bargaining among educators, and that has a dysfunctional school board. Special needs students get little support from educators trained to assist them and so teachers are left on their own, by and large, to figure out how to work with them.