Malak Abdalla

Giving Fs to Students Will Not be The Solution to Success.

In “What Our Education System Needs is More Fs,” Carl Singleton argues that strictness

should be retrieved in which failing students have to take place and be the procedure leading to

progress. He believes that students who do not know or “master” their material are the students

that deserve to be given Fs. Singleton contends that teachers pass students that do not deserve to

be passed, but in fact, have to be failed. He also assumes that givings Fs will bring awareness

and cause parents to be more involved in their children’s education, and make them spend more

time studying rather than watching T.V. to be able to master the material as required. In addition

to that, he concludes that giving more Fs will cause the principal to insure improvement for the

students, and the school as well. He concludes that failing students will be the key to the success

of education.

However, Carl Singleton had powerless points that he used as his reference to prove that

students should be failed rather than passing them. First, Singleton did not attach any statistics or

evidence to backup his thesis to make effective and prove it, which means that the reader will not

be trusted by his words, and what he says won’t be believed, nor taken into consideration.

Second, he had false assumptions in which failing grades are set as motivations to do better.

Third, he used false logic to connect to the idea of failing is the way to success.

Singleton assumes that students, parents, and principals will get motivated by failing

grades to do better, and accomplish higher levels. His point can not be confirmed by his

assumption, because there are no evidence to support his point. Moreover, that can not be

generalized for all students because they all have different abilities to learn and gain. He never

confessed that the grade letter is less important to look forward to achieving if the student does
Malak Abdalla

not understand the material in the long term effect. Alfie Kohn explains in “It’s bad news if

students are motivated to get A’s,” that studies have constantly showed that students with higher

grade letters are less interested in the learning process than other students are (0:01-0:25). That

proves how the grade letter does not necessarily reflect the characteristics of a student, and how

he or she tends to learn or master the material.

Another major problem in “What Our Education System Needs More Fs” was that

Singleton believes that receiving a grade of F on the report card will cause the motivation for

students, their parents, and their staff members to do better, and achieve higher, which is a false

logic. He believes that it will be the solution for having a better education system, but did not

prove it. He believes that when that report card has an F on it, the student will push himself to

raise that grade. On contrary, students might not get motivated, nor push themselves, however,

they will give up, or drop out believing that they can’t do it. Again, different people have

different ways to learn, and different ways to get motivated. Meaning that absolutely not all

people get motivated by receiving that big fat F on their report card. To prove that, in the article

“Holding Kids Back Doesn’t Help Them,” Stipek and Lombardo referred to studies showing that

giving failing students is basically holding them back, and may cause little or no benefits, if it

did not harm. Some evidence proved that failing students had a negative impact on their self

esteem and emotional well being. When receiving my first F last semester, thought that “I don’t

believe it because I know that I understand the lesson, and I know my material. But my personal

life is messed up now, and I have other obligations to take care of; taking care of my siblings and

their studies before mine caused me to fail.” Even though the grade dropped from a B, to a F.

Taking advantage of office hours, extra credit activities, extra math problems and one on one
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teacher assistance until the grade letter finally raised, but that experience caused the feeling of

failure, and even thinking of dropping that class because it reflects, in Singleton’s point of view,

that mastery level is not achieved. Going back to Singleton, failing students will not cause

motivation for all of the students along the line, because they all learn differently and interpret

what they learn differently, so his hypothesis can not be generalized to every student.

Singleton is misguided in his belief that the F spread out to students is the solution for a

better education system. “Students in our schools and colleges should be permitted to pass only

after they have fully met established standards” (Singleton). Singleton’s focus was all on the

grade letter, meaning that if a student has a high grade letter, he understands and masters

whatever curriculum that was taught, which is not unrealistic because a student may have an A,

and know a little or none about the material. But he did not mention based on what those

standards are. If he meant standardized testing, that will not be an effective step taken. In the

article “Teaching More By Grading Less (or Differently), Meadows and Billington claim that

standardized testings “tend to limit the types of questions that could appear on an exam.”

Likewise, Standardized tests would concentrate on a specific area of the curriculum, and in some

cases, might lead to cheating in which teachers teach the test rather than the curriculum, and will

be unfair for the student to be only taught what will give him a better grade, and give the teacher

a higher placement. Even if those tests take place in the future, there will be a difficulty dealing

with them because they are a way of stressing out students and parents. As a result, students will

not do their best on the assessments, and will have a probability of failing them, making

Singleton contradict himself by claiming that those assessments will give higher grades to make

a better education system.

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Singleton has many problematic claims, assumptions and logic problems. He did not take

the situations from different points of view, and kept on emphasizing how failing students will

help them and the education system without backing it up with evidence, statistics, or theories.

His illogical assumption is that whenever a student gets that F, he will immediately get motivated

to do better and push himself to get better. He also had a false logic believing that spreading Fs is

the way to cause the change to the better, without taking into consideration how people learn

differently, and interpret differently.

Work Cited

Singleton, Carl. “What Our Education System Needs Is More F’s.”

Kohn, Alfie. “It’s bad news if students are motivated to get A’s.” YouTube, uploaded by

alfiekohn,

27 Jan. 2009, youtube.com/watch?v=EQt-ZI58wpw&feature=youtu.be.

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Stipek, Deborah, and Michael Lombardo. “Holding Kids Back Doesn’t Help Them.” ​Education

Week,​ vol. 33, no. 32, 2014, pp. 22-23.

Meadows, Michael, and Billington L. “Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently).” ​NCBI,

2014, pp. 159-166.