Giving Compass' Take:

• Nat Malkus examines credit recovery programs at U.S. high schools to determine which are helping an which are hurting - and how schools can improve. 

• Are Malkus' conclusions accurate? How can research confirm or refute his findings? 

• Learn how credit recovery can help high-poverty schools make a turnaround. 

Education reform in recent decades has focused on raising standards, pushing more students to reach them, and measuring the performance of all students. While test-score growth has lagged recently, upward progress on graduation rates has not, and record graduation rates have been offered as proof of progress. However, the fact that rising graduation rates have not been accompanied by broad-based increases in high school test scores should raise a red flag. That pattern suggests that record graduation rates flow from additional supports that schools are providing to students who—in prior years—might not have graduated without them.

Chief among these supports are credit recovery programs, which help students who have failed a class get back on track for graduation without repeating a year of school. These programs are available in approximately three in four US high schools and serve 6 percent of high school students. Despite their broad scope, relatively little is known about these programs’ effectiveness, administration, or where they are used most liberally.

In this report, I use a number of data sources to describe the landscape of credit recovery programs and participation across the nation’s high schools, focusing on those with high participation. I combine four sources of 2015–16 universe data to look at the characteristics of schools and students participating in credit recovery and how these programs operate.

Educational leaders can take reasonable steps to better understand these programs and prevent them from creating second, and inferior, tracks for struggling students who are disproportionately disadvantaged.

First, while gathering school-level credit recovery data on the CRDC is a laudable first step, gathering disaggregated credit recovery participation data—as the CRDC does for so many measures—will capture which students are most affected.

Second, how we consume graduation rates is what can drive credit recovery over the brink. Progress on graduation rates is too important not to be assessed alongside other measures. If credit recovery programs are administered effectively, we should see concomitantly higher graduation rates and test scores over time.

Third, districts should keep an eye on quality controls with credit recovery programs and be transparent about the policies that ensure them. The lack of clear publicly available information in our survey of high-participation districts’ websites makes it impossible to estimate their quality and effectiveness and suggests that too little attention is paid to these programs.

Fourth, districts should regularly survey teachers and students to assess how credit recovery programs are affecting schools. Where official reports and statistics can leave slipping quality hidden, surveys of those on the ground in school can effectively, cheaply, and easily identify problems.

Finally, districts should carefully consider reasonable deterrents to credit recovery, including fees or limiting availability to weekends or the summer. Finding the right balance will be tricky, but making credit recovery too easy for students makes failing initial courses more tempting and puts the entire enterprise of raising academic standards at risk, particularly for the most disadvantaged.