BY: Mike DiMatteo

There is a trend in education for the past number of years, even before the Covid era, wherein students that were not in class for extended periods were given an opportunity to recover their credit via computer programs. The idea was to allow students who missed significant amounts of school to recover their credit by sitting in front of a computer, reading a few passages, and then answering multiple-choice questions. There might even be a computer activity or two associated with it, the computer program devising a game or an exercise in order to help “teach” the concept. Once the student passes the requisite questions, they get “credit” for, say, a history class or a math class, as though they actually attended the classes.

What began as an attempt to help students who were chronically ill or incapacitated for one reason or another morphed into something completely different. Now, students who don’t attend school regularly for myriad reasons, most often truant or for behavioral issues, are given the opportunity to get credit through these credit recovery models. They get the same credit as though they attended the classes, but with the curriculum severely limited, and while sitting in front of a computer screen.

This is not the same as, say, home school students working through exercises via Khan Academy for enrichment purposes, or attending an online class for college credit. This is something completely different, akin to students getting out of class, answering a few rudimentary questions, and getting the same grade as the student who studies for exams, attends classes, and earns the grade they receive.

The credit recovery classes have become, in many instances, get-out-of-jail-free cards for students who are chronically absent, truant, or are chronic disruptions in class. They’re receiving the same credit, but doing significantly less work—often as little as one-third to one-half of what a traditional course requires. The evidence supports these concerns: critics have raised alarms when students complete a semester of work in a matter of weeks or even days. In one egregious example, the NCAA discovered students receiving grades and credits for a semester’s worth of work in a matter of days, sometimes hours, and in some cases just minutes. One student received a year’s worth of credit and an A-minus after completing a credit recovery biology course in four hours and thirty-six minutes over a two-day period. In Los Angeles, which reported that 16,000 students took at least one credit recovery course in 2016-2017, a student described raising his biology grade from an F to a C in one week.

In any reality, how is this fair to the students diligently doing their work, showing up for class, and completing the requirements for class passage? Taking it a step further, how is this remotely respecting the teacher’s job to teach the class when all one has to do is get into the credit recovery class, sit in front of a screen, answer a few questions, and receive credit? Come to think of it, what does it say of the school system that we’ve created which allows for such nonsense?

The answer to all of those questions is: not much. Not much at all. The data reveals troubling trends: students who fail courses and enroll in online credit recovery have lower test scores of up to two tenths of a standard deviation compared to students who repeat courses traditionally. For English credit recovery, only half of the online students passed the course compared with two-thirds of students in traditional teacher-taught classes. Perhaps most concerning, a study found that high school students who participated in online credit recovery eventually earned lower wages in the labor market. Furthermore, rising graduation rates have not been accompanied by broad-based increases in high school test scores on NAEP, ACT, SAT, or consistently on state standardized tests. In other words, diplomas have gone up, but actual learning—and national measures of knowledge—have not. Credit recovery isn’t closing the gap; it’s helping to hide it.

To be sure, there are legitimate reasons for some students to receive the option of credit recovery. Severe illness requiring long hospitalization is one of them. In the past, I’ve had students who were hospitalized with severe illnesses and simply could not get to school for weeks, even months at a time. For those students, there was always a way to help them, be it freezing their grades until such time as they could do some make-up work, curating the make-up work so as not to smother them under a pile of make-up work for multiple classes, etc. I can’t think of a teacher who would ever pile work on a student in such situations. Most will accommodate the student in the best way possible while still keeping the integrity of the class intact.

Credit recovery? Not so much.

The sad part about it is there were good intentions, but with so many things it seems, those good intentions morphed into students taking advantage of the situation, parents manipulating the situation, and schools finding the easiest way to deal with the chronically absent or disruptive student.

More than once in my professional career did I hear an administrator or department head say something like, “Look. Let’s just do what we can to get ______ out of here” for the chronically misbehaved or disruptive student.

Credit recovery, as currently implemented in many schools, has strayed from its educational mission. Rather than ensuring students master course content, it frequently serves to inflate completion rates while providing a convenient mechanism for moving struggling or problematic students through the system. Meanwhile, the students who actually need real instruction—routine attendance, teacher-guided learning, coherent coursework—lose out on the very structure that helps them catch up in the first place. True recovery requires teaching, not shortcuts.

Making matters worse is that students have discovered the flaw in the system, with some angling to get into credit recovery programs. It’s their desire as it’s easier, less stressful, and they can play on their phones or other gadgets after they’ve done what they need to do.

Just as special education programs are abused by parents and students, so is the credit recovery system currently in place in many schools across the country.

Is there a solution? There is, but just like an earlier article I wrote about suspensions and expulsions, the solutions won’t be implemented because of what I like to call Toxic Empathy.

First, ditch credit recovery programs except for the most exceptional of cases. A student develops a chronic health issue, documented by a physician. Only then can credit recovery be utilized. Second, the chronically absent (truant) or problematic student should not be shuffled through the system via shortcuts. If a student cannot or will not attend class, the appropriate response is to repeat the course in a future term—giving them a clean reset and a real opportunity to learn, rather than awarding hollow credit. That also has problems, especially with large schools, but it keeps intact the integrity of the school and class, along with the teacher. Finally, do not give in to the chirping parent who insists their student is not the problem. Forty-five unexcused absences is the problem. There is no substitute for being in class, and there is no opportunity, sans illness as described earlier, to recover credit for a class your student chose not to attend.

Implement those three things, and credit recovery might retain some semblance of credibility while holding students accountable for their actions or inaction. And if we truly want students to succeed, we must return to the foundation: real teaching, real attendance, real knowledge, and real mastery—not digital shortcuts that only pretend to educate.

Works Cited 

Bacon, John. “NCAA Probe Finds Online Credit Recovery Programs Ripe for Abuse.” *USA Today*, 2015.

Barnum, Matt. “High School Graduation Rates Have Soared. Is That Because Students Are Learning More — or Less?” *Chalkbeat*, 2019.

Heppen, Jessica B., et al. “The Struggle to Pass Algebra: Online vs. Face-to-Face Credit Recovery for At-Risk Urban Students.” *Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness*, vol. 10, no. 2, 2017, pp. 272-296.

Klein, Alyson. “Credit Recovery Programs Spark Debate Over Academic Rigor.” *Education Week*, 2014.

Maxwell, Lesli A. “Credit-Recovery Programs Get Wider Scrutiny.” *Education Week*, 2012.

National Center for Education Statistics. “Carnegie Unit.” U.S. Department of Education, 2023.

Sparks, Sarah D. “Online Credit Recovery Doesn’t Boost Student Test Scores, Study Finds.” *Education Week*, 2017.

Watson, John, et al. “Keeping Pace with K-12 Digital Learning: An Annual Review of Policy and Practice.” Evergreen Education Group, 2015.