‘Credit recovery’ is no way to boost graduation rates

Recent news reports have praised the Houston area’s rising graduation rates, with most large districts in the area now boasting graduation rates greater than 90 percent. An exception to this trend is Houston ISD, where the most recent Department of Education numbers put the graduation rate at 78 percent, within one percentage point of where it was five years ago.

Yet, as administrators work to ensure that students learn more and stay in school, they must not cut corners. We raise this concern because, as the co-authors of a new national report, we find that Houston ISD is relying much too heavily on so-called “credit recovery” programs which, by design, were developed to help students graduate.

These programs enable high schoolers to gain missing credits after initially failing a required course. They are intended to be an alternative for students to demonstrate mastery of the same content and skills as the original course. But across the country, anecdotal evidence is mounting that, although credit recovery may allow kids to “recover” credits needed for graduating, it often delivers little in terms of actual learning. In some of these programs, students simply click through online tests, google the answers, or even pay strangers on Twitter to complete the courses for them. It’s little surprise, then, that research has found some credit recovery programs to be less effective than traditional classroom instruction.

Our report found that more than twothirds of high schools across the country have credit recovery programs. But the number of students enrolled in them varies substantially, with nearly 1 in 10 high schools in the U.S. enrolling more than 20 percent of students.

Yet, high school students in Houston ISD are more than twice as likely to enroll in credit recovery than the average American pupil. The district’s 32 credit recovery programs enroll 16.2 percent of all high schoolers — double the national average of 8.1 percent. Moreover, nearly a third of those schools rely so heavily on credit recovery that at least 20 percent of their students are enrolled.

Compare these figures to the much lower rates for Texas as a whole. Overall, 10.2 percent of Texas high schoolers in schools with credit recovery are enrolled in the programs, and 10.1 percent of schools statewide with the programs enroll high percentages of their student body.

These results should raise flags for educators and policymakers in Houston. Thankfully, there’s no time like the present to make sure that high schools are not abusing credit recovery programs.

To begin, state officials should vet the quality of credit recovery providers and offer guidelines for how to effectively run such programs. For instance, high schools with high rates of students participating in credit recovery warrant scrutiny, such as automatic audits of these outliers.

Next, schools should require students to pass an external test to ensure that they have learned the material. In the absence of this external check on quality, Texas officials should adopt the “ounce of prevention” rule. For example, they might stipulate, as Alabama and Tennessee do, that students achieve a minimum score in the original course so that they aren’t starting from scratch with new material. And if they don’t reach that minimum, require them to retake the traditional course to earn credit.

If a high school diploma is to be more than a certificate of attendance,” state and local officials must take responsibility for how schools award credit. Cutting corners by enrolling more and more students into credit recovery programs is not the answer. Houston ISD can do better.

Tyner and Munyan-Penney are associate director of research and development and research associate, respectively, at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education think tank located in Washington D.C. They are co-authors of “Gotta Give ’Em Credit: State and District Variation in Credit Recovery Participation Rates ,” which was released in November.