BFC Q2) NIU expects you to meet two objectives in EPFE 201: 1) to identify a few key issues in education today and 2) to develop your perspective on those issues. Explain how you have met these objectives by discussing the most important issue we covered (Pink, concussions, funding, teacher quality, tenure, poverty in general…). What is the issue, what is the most compelling information about the issue in your opinion, and what should we do about it?

I have learned a lot about education and the problems it is facing in EPFE 201 and when I go out in the real world and see something about things such as tenure, I immediately think back to this class. Speaking of tenure, I found this concept/issue to be rather interesting. I had never even heard the word before being in this class and now I can say that I learned from lecture that tenure has a couple of myths that go along with it. It’s not impossible to be fired under tenure but it would take an extremely long process to get rid of a tenured teacher which is why this is a problem. I think some teachers take advantage of tenure and tend to slack off on their jobs. I’m sure not all of them do but in the movie “Waiting For Superman” they explained tenure and showed some animations that prove that a lot of teachers don’t try to teach as they should if they have tenure. What should we do about tenure? I think we should either get rid of it completely and figure out a more efficient way to evaluate teachers. The teachers shouldn’t be able to know what they are being tested on because then they will purposely do well in that area for the evaluation. But if we can’t get rid of tenure then we should only carefully give it to teachers that truly deserve it by having the students take surveys and having someone evaluate the teacher. Tenure is like many issues, hard to resolve and perfect but if teachers aren’t teaching students what they need for the future then what point is there in paying a ton of money for school? After taking this class it makes me thankful for the education that I received as a child because many families have it tough such as the ones seen in “Waiting For Superman.” It was impossible to not feel sorry for them but they and thousands of others are going through the same thing. There is definitely a lot that needs to be fixed in education but it’s far from easy.