Credit Recovery Meets Distance Learning

I was told recently that in an effort to provide our students with yet another chance to graduate on time, some schools across the city will be setting up online learning communities in which students will be able to participate in credit recovery. This is not new in US education. Staff members at Worthington Evening High School in Ohio have submitted a proposal for a “pilot study [that] will target fifty high school students in need of credit recovery and therefore at increased risk of high school drop-out or leaving the traditional high school setting,” and determine if offering a distance learning opportunity for credit recovery will help at-risk students graduate high school.

In The High School Diploma: Making It More Than An Empty Promise (April 2002) a paper presented to the Senate Standing Committee on Education, the purpose of high school is laid out quite clearly:

Let’s be clear for a moment on the mission of our public high school system: to make sure that our students are prepared for postsecondary education, training and the workforce without the need for remediation. When stated this simply, it seems reasonable, practical and even noble. More than that, it seems obvious: of course, we want to prepare our kids to take the next step in their lives, whether that step is into college or into the workforce. Whatever their decisions, they need to be prepared and empowered to make the choice: we owe our students at least that much.

But, does credit recovery achieve this purpose? We know that it hasn’t thus far. We know that allowing students to watch a few movies and then write a paper is not a substitute for class time. But we know, and I suspect that this will be the downfall of the credit recovery system, that students who have failed a class for whatever reason are not rushing to complete the work required to make that class up. In fact, in my school, teachers are STILL asking students for their credit recovery papers almost two months after the course was offered.

So how then is offering an online learning community a better solution? As it was explained to me, students will have to take a course for a few weeks. They will be required to respond, in a Blackboard setting, to questions regarding a specific topic two ot three times a week. They will have to submit a paper, but as of now, nothing else has been worked out. My next question was obvious- how does this replace a semester’s worth of class time? And does allowing students to earn credits in a way that is less demanding preparing them to enter college? How about the workforce? Of course I was told that these students have no plans of going to college, which is probably a sad fact. However, they will have to get jobs, and no matter how many times they are asked to bag with flourish, the lessons taught on the high school level will haunt society forever.

Be it on-line or off-line, credit recovery in Klein’s world is a joke. And while the numbers may appear to prove it a success, we know that the reality is harsh. Students are being taught to fail because failure is rewarded with easier, dumbed-down shortcuts purported to create a false sense of success. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe be told that you have succeeded is worth more than actually succeeding. Or maybe, in today;s world, they are one in the same.

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