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Some high schools allow students who fail a class to get credit for it anyway by completing a short course or special project in a controversial practice known as “credit recovery.” But despite the practice’s widespread use, credit recovery has actually never been permitted under state regulations, which require a certain amount of “seat time” for students to earn course credit.

Now, the practice could soon get a green light from the State Education Department, which last year said it would review whether credit recovery met its standards for course completion. At its meeting this week, the Board of Regents reviewed a proposal from SED for a formal policy on what the department called “‘making-up’ course credit.” 

The proposed policy, which SED developed in collaboration with the city Department of Education, does away with seat time as a basic standard for whether students earn high school course credit. The proposal would require schools to establish committees of teachers and administrators to determine whether a student’s make-up work should receive credit. It would not require that students spend a specific amount of time making up the credit, but it would mandate that replacement instruction be given by a teacher certified in the subject. (The full proposal is at the end of this post.)

SED Deputy Commissioner Johanna Duncan-Poitier told the committee that a policy is needed because credit recovery programs are becoming more prevalent. (more…)

Inspired by a recent report that many elementary school students missed more than a month of school last year, the general welfare and education committees of the City Council just concluded a hearing about absenteeism in the city’s schools. One question that surely came up is how the Department of Education holds schools and students accountable for attendance.

The answer: not as much as it could.

In the centerpiece of the DOE’s accountability system, the school progress reports, a school’s average attendance accounts for 5 percent of its grade, the same proportion as teacher and parent surveys. The DOE chooses to base 85 percent of schools’ progress report grades on test scores because attendance on its own simply doesn’t ensure success, officials say.

“Most students do attend school regularly, but many of them do not get the outcomes we believe they should be getting,” DOE spokeswoman Maibe Gonzalez-Fuentes recently told me.

And what about accountability for individual students? Teachers can assign students failing grades for assignments they miss during an unauthorized absence. But DOE regulations don’t require students to attend school a certain amount of the time to be promoted. (more…)

Satellite Academy graduate (via flickr)

New federal regulations are going to force many states to change the way they report high school graduation rates. But not New York, a spokesman from the state education department, Jonathan Burman, said.

That’s because the state already uses a formula that Burman calls “substantially compliant” with the one that all states are now required to use to calculate their graduation rates. In fact, New York adopted the formula in 2004, even before the governors of all 50 states promised three years ago to work toward adopting it.

Not that the state hasn’t had its fair share of statistical tugs-of-war. Before last year, the city touted a graduation rate that was calculated using a formula that excluded special education students and included students who earned GEDs instead of regular high school diplomas. Critics said this rate was artificially inflated. Last year, the city DOE agreed to begin using the state’s graduation rate formula after negotiating an agreement that would allow August graduates to be counted in the four-year rate. The city was on the vanguard: the new federal regulations also permit states to include August graduates in their calculations.

Once all states adopt the same formula — only 16 use it right now — we’ll be able to see how the state’s graduation rate compares to the rest of the country’s, in addition to being able to measure the city against the state. That won’t happen until 2011 at the earliest, however; the new regulation doesn’t requires states to adopt the uniform graduation rate until they release accountability reports for the 2010-2011 school year.