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Leadership, Law, and Policy
June 10, 2009
By failing to set standards or even track the use of credit recovery in New York City schools, Chancellor Joel Klein has provided a convenient back door for students to pass courses and graduate without subject mastery. The State Education Department has now capitulated to this agenda by promulgating a draft policy based on unpublicized negotiations with the city Department of Education. If implemented, the policy would do nothing to stem this tide of empty credits but, rather, encourage credit recovery by officially recognizing and regularizing it but with inadequate controls and monitoring.
What is credit recovery? The term is sometimes used technically to denote a formal program, such as summer school, with specified content, attendance, and assessment requirements. But the term is widely applied to any effort to help students pass courses that they would otherwise fail because of incomplete or below-standard work. These students substitute the extra work for regular assessments by writing a paper, taking a test, or providing some other evidence of proficiency in a narrow course topic.
Under the new state policy, schools would need only create a committee (which would not include the student’s teacher) to approve a student’s customized credit recovery plan for a course. The same committee would then review evidence of student proficiency once the plan was completed. The State does not require minimum class attendance or proof that the plan addresses all subject matter deficiencies. If a teacher says a book report suffices to show proficiency, the committee would not need to inquire beyond the teacher’s word. No record of how many courses a student passed using CR would be maintained. There would be no monitoring of assignments’ rigor or the frequency of CR’s use by teachers, schools, or the system as a whole.
What is the problem, though, with giving students a second chance at passing or completing a course by filling in the gaps? First, without standards, there is no way to determine whether credit recovery assignments actually fill those gaps. Second, a course is more than the sum of its parts. For example, a student might fail a test in one unit of geometry and possibly another but if he or she understands other basic geometric concepts, they will likely pass the course. Course failure demonstrates significant overall deficits in factual and conceptual knowledge that a single assignment or mini-course can not erase. But passing the course will mean a lot to the student’s, the teacher’s, and the school’s appearance of success.
Helping students over the hump through credit recovery is not limited to New York City. Nationally, education publishers including Plato and Pearson sell credit recovery kits. But the DOE’s emphasis on data-based accountability, particularly high school credit accumulation and graduation, seems to have resulted in an explosion of credit recovery in New York. Schools are under tremendous pressure, through school report cards’ A-F rating, to produce progress in these metrics.
Credit recovery is a direct route to helping students and schools achieve the 10 credits each year that serve as the DOE’s benchmark of success. Then, with passing grades and a little luck on the Regents — often obtained through narrow and repeated test preparation — students are on pace to graduate. For hundreds of school principals, looking over their shoulders to stay ahead of the peer group against which they are measured, this is a matter of professional life and death. If one principal looks the other way on credit recovery in their schools, others are penalized for more rigorous standards. This race to the bottom will now be officially sanctioned by the State, urged on by Chancellor Klein.
If we do not reject this new policy proposal, more children will seem to be succeeding in high school and more will seem to be graduating with college- and job-readiness. But this will be a mirage. We will be gaming the system for students and administrators alike. We will be saluting proxies rather than real academic achievement.
The Board of Regents needs to put an end to this charade by rejecting this mockery and re-establishing high academic expectations for our youth.
David C. Bloomfield heads the Educational Leadership Program at Brooklyn College, CUNY and is an elected parent member of the Citywide Council on High Schools. He is the author of American Public Education Law.
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June 10th, 2009 1:55 pm
Totally agree with most of what you say, except:
“Re-establishing high academic expectations for our youth.”
Not sure it can be re-established. Needs to be established. Right now, we know that most NYC public school kids from open-admissions schools who DO graduate go on to struggle (and often drop out) of college.
In fairness to this Chancellor and all urban superintendents, they’re boxed in:
A. They have a low standards problem (and need to raise it so their alums, their “B average” kids, don’t flunk out of college once there)…
B. They have a high standards problem (the low standards still lead to a number of kids leaving, hence ideas like credit recovery).
Do you have specific ideas on what to do?
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June 10th, 2009 3:57 pm
Replying to GGW, there is no need to quibble over “establish” vs. “re-establish.” The urban superintendents’ dilemma that you identified is real but, led by the high-visibility reforms of Chancellor Klein, is largely of their own making. The basic standard should be the classic: informed, participatory citizenship including opportunities for gainful employment. But rather than adhering to these, Klein created his own metrics for holding himself and the Mayor accountable. He and similarly situated urban leaders now have to feed the public relations beast by meeting, then exceeding these proxies for real learning. So they claw for expedient routes to numeric advantage, using cynical strategies like test-prep and credit recovery, rather than concentrating on the really tough job of building students’ subject mastery through teaching excellence (classroom management skills to get kids into school and keeping them there, proficiency in multiple teaching methods, content expertise). As far as preferred teaching methods, I am a big fan of project-based learning which allows for a high degree of differentiated learning. At the high school level, this can even require as mundane a deliverable as a research paper — even the dreaded 5 paragraph essay, as long as it involves something more than consulting Wikipedia. There is also a place for more vibrant efforts such as videos, class presentations, experimental outcomes, etc. Anyway, I’ve gone on too long and there is more to say about teacher loads, etc. but let me close with a preference for “data-informed” decision-making rather than the more simplistic “data-driven” cliche, permitting a more nuanced approach to instruction, achievement, and evaluation of results.
-David -
June 10th, 2009 8:26 pm
How often do we have to say, “The emperor has no clothes”? I admire your integrity “in taking on the powerful forces at Tweed and City Hall who have politicized the public school system and in the process done serious damage to children by denying them a well rounded and creditable education. The concentration of resources on producing questionable test results, and now the back-door” called credit recovery are intended to sell to the public a false message of success.
Cramming for tests generally does not result in retainable knowledge. Ask any college student who has achieved a grade that does not reflect actual learning. The cognitive process is very complex and requires teachers and principals free from the pressures of meeting a questionable metric. Students must be engaged in the learning process by a teacher who assesses the needs and interests of the learner and successfully motivates the student(s) and provides content based instruction (language arts, math, social studies, science, music, art, health education and physical education) Formative and evaluative assessment (testing) is essential, but not the singular end. As indicated in David’s article, social skills such as cooperation and collaboration, good citizenship, commonly accepted values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are learned in the classroom as well as in the student’s cultural community. How are these aspects of a student’s educational experience “tested” or “recovered”? -
June 11th, 2009 12:16 pm
Policy recommendation by a member of the Assembly Ed Committee:
TO: Meryl Tisch, Chairman, Board of Regents
Johanna Duncan-Poitier, Associate Commissioner, NYS Education Department
EMSC Committee.FROM: Alan Maisel, Member of the Assembly
RE: Draft Proposal Policy on “Making-up” Course Credit and Receiving Course Credit for Independent Study
A year ago, as a result of a complaint by a teacher, the SED examined the “credit recovery” program at a New York City high school and found it inadequate. In the ensuing months the NYC Department of Education took no action, and, disappointingly, neither did the SED.
This year the Chancellor met with the Assembly Education Committee on a number of occasions, we asked a number of questions about credit recovery, unfortunately, the Chancellor gave vague and unsatisfactory answers.
I am encouraged that the SED has asked for comments, however I am find the draft policy proposal lacking.
For many years the Board of Education required each high school to form a Course Accreditation Committee, made of the Principal or their designee, the Teacher Union representative, the Guidance Counselor and an appropriate subject area teacher. The Committee reviewed all proposals for credit recovery, independent study and elective courses. The findings of the Committees were forwarded to the Superintendent for approval.
Bullet # 2 should be amended as follows:
A school-based panel consisting of the principal, the assistant principal (Guidance), the building teacher union representative, a guidance counselor and a teacher (not the student’ teacher) who is certified in the subject area of the course must approve all make-up credit.
Credit recovery program must be submitted to the area superintendent for approval.
Credit recovery courses shall appear on student transcripts as well as the original failing grades. Schools shall be required to submit reports each semester to the SED detailing the students in credit recovery courses by course and students who have earned credit recovery credits.
Students shall not earn course credit through credit recovery for more than three (3) credits.
If a student failed a course and was absent more than 50% of the time the student shall not be eligible for credit recovery.
Schools and school districts are encouraged to be flexible in meeting the needs of all students and credit recovery and independent study are acceptable options, however, the failure to establish clear and transparent regulations is unacceptable.
We fear that the recent increase in New York City graduation rates may be the result of unregulated credit recovery programs, and, I urge the SED to include my suggestions in their final regulations.
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June 11th, 2009 3:40 pm
How often do we have to say, “The emperor has no clothes”?
That being said, we have no choice but to repeat that statement again. Regardless, your post, like gothamschools’ attention to this issue, and the excellent recommendations above are crucial.
Bogus Credit Recovery is destructive on so many levels. GGW, it spawns the opposite of high expectations. In my district the kids say that Credit Recovery “exercizes the right click finger.” It encourages students to cut class, and cut other corners, figuring that they’ll get bailed out in the end. Some get bailed out enough to graduate, becoming the B students who then flunk out of college and ending up in debt. Some students will always dig themselves into a hole that is not too deep. Younger students see seniors walking the halls, having fun, with the help of Credit Recovery they walk across the stage. But then, even more of the younger students dig themselves into too deep of a hole.
Just as bad currency drives out sound money and bad tests drive out good ones, bogus Credit Recovery poisons the well for other self-paced digital schools. We have a lot of online tools that are not for everybody, but they could be a constructive supplement, but in this dishonest “reform” climate the potential for misue is greater than the potential good.
Besides, what is the value of the information learned by Credit Recovery, as opposed to the dangerous lessons that we teach teens - that all of that talk by adults about “consequences” is baloney? You don’t need to show up for class, the rules don’t apply to you, and you can scrape by with a minimum of effort, and no integrity.
Of course, everything I say about Credit Recovery could be applied to other results of data-driven accountability such as test prep, working off absences, and gaming the systems. But that’s the point. The lies that surround Credit Recovery like the lies that surround the other unintended results of data-driven accountability are polluting our educational values.
I know that I sound crotchety. Its hard to believe that I’m sounding so conservative, since I still believe that a key purose of education is teaching creative insubordination. But we still need the value of an honest day’s work. We still need to teach teens that there are consequences.
And finally, look at the effect on educational policy. Gothamschools is one of the few places where you can read the whole story on NYC’s miracle test scores. Its like the bubble that just burst in finance. The ideologues claimed that the system would balance itself out, and that if one part of the financial engineering was unsound, the Market would correct itself. And yes, it finally did. But the bubble grew to dangerous levels because one engineered piece of data, unrelated to reality, led to another, and another, and eventually we had an entire bloated system based on lies.
Had there been a bottom line based on reality, the system would not have grown so malignant. Credit Recovery is the tool that allows us to keep up the lies. How was it framed under Bush? “Reality is just the old paradigm.”
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June 14th, 2009 6:13 pm
[...] Credit Recovery [...]
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June 28th, 2009 10:33 am
[...] Posted by John Young on June 28, 2009 http://gothamschools.org/2009/06/10/credit-recovery-joel-kleins-race-to-the-bottom/ [...]
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June 28th, 2009 5:13 pm
This is the first year my school really bought into credit recovery. Someone told me the principal said the school had to offer it or get crushed.
As a high school teacher, I try so hard to give kids all the differentiation they need to accommodate different learning styles and speeds. I keep parents informed through progress reports and report cards of some pretty dismal record of attendance, classwork, behavior and exams. I explain over and over again when I have to, to the kids who drift in late or think we owe it to them if they’re absent half the time. I search tirelessly for yet another way to convey a difficult concept, and I correct papers at night filled with mistakes that should have been sorted out by 5th grade.
Credit recovery is the absolute wrong solution for these kids. It reinforces what they already know so well: how to shirk responsibility for their own learning and get one heckuva a freebie as they enter adulthood.
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January 18th, 2010 7:14 pm
please tell me how to i get my daughter into credit recovery program?
she really needs it to graduate on time. please help. thank you
Ana/mother 347 538 1395 -
January 18th, 2010 7:15 pm
my daugter really needs this help please advise.
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January 18th, 2010 7:16 pm
pleas help with info on this credit recovery program..347 538 1395
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Mapping the Budget Cuts
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