Essay 1
Carl Singleton, “What Our Education System Needs is More F’s”
I suggest that instituting merit raises, getting back to basics, marrying
the university to industry, and . . . other recommendations will not achieve
measurable success [in restoring quality to American education] until
something even more basic is returned to practice. The immediate need for
our educational system from pre-kindergarten through post-Ph.D. is not more
money or better teaching but simply a widespread giving of F’s.
Before hastily dismissing the idea as banal and simplistic, think for a
moment about the implications of a massive dispensing of failing grades. It
would dramatically, emphatically, and immediately force into the open every
major issue related to the inadequacies of American education.
Let me make it clear that I recommend giving those F’s—by the dozens,
hundreds, thousands, even millions—only to students who haven’t learned the
required material. The basic problem of our educational system is the
common practice of giving credit where none has been earned, a practice that
has resulted in the sundry faults delineated by all the reports and studies over
recent years. Illiteracy among high-school graduates is growing because
those students have been passed rather than flunked; we have low-quality
teaching because of low-quality achievers who never should have been
