LEAD 6113 Module 3 Equity and Social Justice Analysis Example

Who the Two-Failure Rule Removes: An Equity Analysis of Five Years of Nursing Program Dismissals by First-Generation Status, Race and Work Hours

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6113: Ethical Leadership and Social Justice

Module 3 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 26, 2026

Introduction

Module 1 applied four ethical frameworks to one student's appeal under our progression rule, which dismisses a student after a second failed nursing course. The ethic of critique raised a question that one appeal cannot answer: whether the rule falls more heavily on some groups of students than others. This paper answers it with five years of the composite Georgia BSN program's own data, reads the results against nursing education research and a national workforce report, and considers what social justice requires of a leader who now knows the pattern.

The Data

From fall 2021 through spring 2026 the program admitted 610 students to the nursing major. Forty-four were dismissed under the two-failure rule, a dismissal rate of 7.2%. The institutional research office linked dismissals to three characteristics recorded at admission: first-generation college status, race and ethnicity, and self-reported weekly work hours from the admission questionnaire. The program is a composite, and the figures below are illustrative of the kind of analysis a program can run with its own records. Students who withdrew voluntarily before a second failure are not counted as dismissals, which probably understates the rule's reach, since some students leave when they sense a second failure coming.

What the Numbers Show

First-generation students made up 38% of admissions but 59% of dismissals: 26 of 232 first-generation students were dismissed, 11.2%, compared with 18 of 378 continuing-generation students, 4.8%. Black students made up 31% of admissions and 48% of dismissals, with a dismissal rate of 11.1% against 4.9% for White students. Students who reported working 20 or more hours a week were dismissed at 12.6%, compared with 4.1% for those working fewer hours. The three groups overlap heavily; many students are first-generation, Black and working long hours at once. On every grouping the program recorded, the rule removes students with fewer resources two to three times as often as everyone else.

What the Numbers Cannot Show

Higher dismissal rates do not by themselves prove that the rule is the cause or that it is unjust. The groups may differ in academic preparation before admission, in access to tutoring and in time to study, and the rule may simply record those differences at the moment they become decisive. Small numbers also limit certainty: 44 dismissals spread across groups leave wide margins of error. What the data establish is a pattern that a leader is obliged to examine, not a verdict. The obvious follow-up is to set dismissed students beside retained students who entered with similar prerequisite grades; if the gaps persist among students with equal preparation, the case that circumstances rather than ability drive dismissal becomes much stronger. The institutional research office has agreed to run that comparison before the faculty review.

What Research Adds

Nursing education research suggests the pattern is not unique. Palazzo et al. (2023) argued that academic progression policies in nursing programs deserve scrutiny for their effects on equity and justice and urged programs to question long-standing practices that may disadvantage students from underrepresented groups. Edwards-Capello and Silbert-Flagg (2021), interviewing nine students dismissed from a baccalaureate program through the lens of critical pedagogy, found that students' social and cultural circumstances before and during the program shaped their trajectories, and recommended holistic consideration of those circumstances. Their sample is small, but its finding matches what our appeals letters describe: caregiving, work and financial pressure arriving at the worst possible time.

The national stakes are higher than one program's statistics. The most recent national study of the profession's next decade called for a nursing workforce that looks more like the patients it serves and for schools that prepare nurses to close gaps in health (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021). A program that admits a diverse class and then dismisses its first-generation and Black students at twice the rate of others undercuts that goal from inside.

A Social Justice Reading

Social justice asks not only whether a rule is applied consistently but whether its burdens fall fairly and whether those it burdens had a voice in it. On the first question, the data suggest they do not fall fairly. On the second, the rule was written twelve years ago by a faculty committee with no student members and has never been reviewed with outcome data. The rule treats a second failure as evidence of unsuitability for nursing, but for a student working 30 hours a week while caring for family, a second failure may be evidence of circumstance rather than ability. A rule that cannot tell those apart treats unequal situations as equal, which is itself a kind of injustice.

Objections the Faculty Will Raise

Presenting this analysis to faculty will draw objections, and an ethical leader should anticipate them honestly. The first is that the rule protects patients by stopping students who cannot master the content. That is a real concern, but the rule measures course failures, not clinical safety, and the dismissed students' clinical evaluations were no weaker on average than those of students who graduated. The second objection is that the program's licensure pass rate depends on the rule. The program has no evidence for that; the rule was adopted in the same year as a curriculum revision, and the two cannot be separated. The third is that lowering the bar would be unfair to students who met it. That objection assumes the bar measures the same thing for every student, which is precisely what the data call into question. Answering these objections with evidence rather than conviction will matter more than the analysis itself, because faculty own the rule and will decide its future.

What a Leader Should Do

Knowing the pattern creates an obligation, but not a license to abolish the rule unilaterally. Three responses follow. First, the analysis will go to the faculty curriculum committee with a request to review the rule and with an invitation to two student representatives to join that review. Second, the program will intervene before failure, not only after: students who fail one course will now meet with an advisor to plan workload, financial aid and support, since the first failure is the moment the data show risk most clearly. Third, the appeals process will be revised so that documented hardship during a failed course is explicitly considered, with the same criteria applied to every appeal, which answers the consistency concern raised in Module 1.

Conclusion

The equity question that one appeal raised turned out to describe a pattern in five years of data. The pattern does not prove the rule unjust, but it shows that the rule's burdens fall most heavily on students with the fewest resources, and it places a duty on the program's leaders to examine the rule with the people it affects. Module 4 will analyze the policy's ethical implications in full, including the high-stakes testing that often accompanies such rules. Whatever the faculty decide, the program will now publish dismissal rates by group each year, so that the question raised by one student's appeal is never again answered only by anecdote.

References

Edwards-Capello, A., & Silbert-Flagg, J. (2021). Academic dismissal from a baccalaureate nursing program: The student's perspective. Nurse Education Today, 104, Article 104996. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2021.104996

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2021). The future of nursing 2020-2030: Charting a path to achieve health equity. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25982

Palazzo, S. J., Green, C., & Davis, S. (2023). Achieving equity and justice in nursing programs: An examination of academic progression policies and changing the status quo. Nursing Education Perspectives, 44(5), 271-272. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NEP.0000000000001188