Whose success are we measuring?

No Child Left Behind is up for approval. I hate it that my daughter's school, which has improved performance for every category of student except one is being punished by the NCLB rules; the entire school is being labeled a failure because a group of special needs students is struggling, even though the rest of the student body is actually performing at a level higher than might be expected given the socioeconomic backgrounds of most of the students. That is a testament to how hard the students work and how good the staff at the school actually is.

I had an interesting moment in my class yesterday. As we were reviewing some basic ways to do research in the library, a student said that she wished there had been a class about this earlier in her major. Another student remarked that there are classes on how to use the library, offered by the library. I said that I wished we had the faculty to offer such a course, but that I agreed that elements of such instruction should be incorporated into all of our courses. On the other hand, I said, in their fourth year at the University, I also expected students to have made their way to the library already.
As my department engages in the very healthy exercise of reevaluating its undergraduate and graduate curriculum, we will talk about this issue, but I think it's interesting to read this blog post by John Lombardi about the idea of "Academic Entitlement" at Reality Check in Inside Higher Ed about how we collectively understand success: is the onus on students to do what they need to do to succeed? or on the institution?

"Graduation rate, for example, is seen as a measure of institutional effectiveness and anticipates that the institution will guarantee student learning at a level acceptable for graduation and successful entry into the world of work. In this formulation, the students’ responsibilities lie in attendance, but their academic success becomes the responsibility of the institution. When graduation rates are low or students fail to meet some testable standard, we assume that the institution failed, not that the student failed. Indeed, if the student fails, the remedy is to punish the institution and its teachers.

The academic success entitlement that students enjoy reflects a broader belief that institutions need to guarantee results not opportunity. This is a notion borrowed from the manufacturing world where we demand guarantees that the products we buy be free of defects and that all products of a certain type perform their functions in the same predictable and standardized way. This model, while effective for mass produced items constructed out of standard malleable materials where the producer controls the conditions of production, has little to do with high quality education. In a high quality educational context, as we who live here know, the academic enterprise requires the direct and responsible participation of student and teacher. Neither can fail, for if the student is lazy, poorly prepared, or just doesn’t care, the academic result will be poor no matter how expert the teacher. Similarly, if the teacher is incompetent, lazy, or unprepared, the academic result will also be poor no matter how responsible the student. When we place all the responsibility for academic success or failure on the institution and its teachers, exempting the student s, we create an engine capable of predictable mediocre performance."

If I give an assignment to my students that requires them to go to the reference room of the library and report back on items they reviewed there, but they don't actually go, whose responsibility is it when they don't get a good grade on the assignment? That sounds like a sarcastic question, but when the University is doing strategic planning around the goal of improving its graduation rates, but not giving serious thought to who is learning, what they are learning, or how they are learning, then the tail is wagging the dog.