Gotta Give &apos;Em Credit: State and District Variation in Credit Recovery Participation Rates
Author: Tyner, Adam
Date: 2018-11-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: High School Students,Credits,Required Courses,Graduation Requirements,High Schools,Enrollment,Institutional Characteristics,School Districts,Public Schools,Low Income Students,Minority Group Students,School Size,Charter Schools,Urban Schools,Nontraditional Education

Since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 began holding schools accountable for high school graduation rates, multiple strategies have emerged to help more students receive their diplomas. Among the most popular and widely deployed are credit recovery programs, which allow students to &quot;recover credits&quot; from one or more courses that they have either failed or failed to complete. But heretofore there's been no systematic way to know how widely credit recovery is being used. This report uses new data to gauge the extent of credit recovery (CR) in U.S. high schools today. Retaking an entire conventional course (much less several of them) or attending summer school can hinder students in fulfilling graduation requirements on time, so CR can be a speedy and often less expensive shortcut. In theory, CR provides an ideal solution for students who are not on track for graduation. Yet the emerging market for CR services has been almost entirely unregulated in most states, and often accountability for student performance is outsourced to private vendors or state-run consortia. This means that, in practice, these courses often lack the requisite quality controls to ensure that rigor, content, and skills are not sacrificed in the pursuit of quick credits. A 2017 &quot;Slate&quot; investigative series found many online courses were easy to game, with answers found in a simple Google search, and students often allowed unlimited assessment retakes. Students relying on CR courses of questionable quality to graduate are being deprived of access to rigorous coursework while schools claim success in graduating students they didn't educate. Given that 22 percent of students entering college must take remedial courses, the proliferation of CR courses may only increase the number of high school graduates ill-prepared for college and good jobs. And if low-income and minority students are disproportionately using low-quality CR programs to earn credits, these programs could exacerbate existing inequities. The present study, released in 2018, uses 2015-2016 data from the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education to answer three key questions: (1) How many schools have active credit recovery programs, and are some types of schools more likely than others to have them? (2) How many students are enrolled in credit recovery? (3) To what extent do schools enroll large shares of their students in credit recovery, and if they do, is it more common in particular schools? The authors analyze credit recovery prevalence and enrollments at the national and state levels, as well as for the 50 largest school districts in the country. After briefly describing the data and methods, they focus on those schools that report having an &quot;active&quot; program (at least one student enrolled), examining their urbanicity; type (e.g., traditional public schools (TPS), charter, magnet, and Title I); size; and proportion of poor and minority students. Next, the authors turn to student participation in credit recovery, analyzing overall enrollment as well as the schools that enroll large shares of their students in CR, with an eye toward determining which types of schools are making heaviest use of this option. After presenting national trends, they examine CR programs and enrollment rates at the state and district levels. Finally, the authors profile the CR landscape in every state, including a snapshot of the largest district with an active CR program in each state. [Foreword by Amber M. Northern and Michael J. Petrilli.]