Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The high school graduation rate has been rising each year since 2002 with new record-high graduation rates being set on an annual basis since 2011. This ever-climbing graduation rate has led many to be skeptical about how high schools are graduating more students without a corresponding rise in national test scores. Recent national media reports have indicted credit recovery as a culprit, naming this type of course as a tool high schools are using to graduate students who do not have the skills to be college or career ready. National Public Radio called credit recovery a “questionable quick fix,” Education Week wrote about it as “a scandal,” and the New York Times included it as part of a system that has produced a “counterfeit high school diploma.”

Credit recovery (CR) refers to online courses that students take after previously failing a traditional version of the course, representing a shift from students repeating courses the following school year or earning course credit in an after school or summer school program. Recent estimates indicate that CR has become a popular intervention for districts and schools. In the 2014-15 school year, about 40 percent of students in North Carolina public schools who failed a course enrolled in a CR course. CR courses, often developed and administered by private corporations, have infiltrated public schools nationwide without any evidence that the courses develop the same knowledge and skills as traditional courses or that these courses are effective at increasing the graduation rate

Using data from North Carolina public schools, this study will be the first to utilize statewide administrative data to study CR course taking from both public (i.e., state virtual school) and private providers. This study leverages the recent implementation of CR options in North Carolina high schools for a comparative interrupted time series approach with school fixed effects to explore the impact of adding CR options at the school level on graduation and dropout rates. This paper will also explore possible unintended consequences of CR implementation, including higher initial course failure rates in traditional courses and lower proficiency levels on end of course exams.

While credit recovery would theoretically lead to higher graduation rates if students were more easily able to make up course credits, there is no evidence that in practice this is the case. There are also many theoretical reasons to believe that credit recovery courses might lead to unintended consequences that would lead to school administrators questioning the use of credit recovery in schools. For instance, if credit recovery availability leads to more course failures, then credit recovery will be leading to more of the same kind of problem (i.e., students needing to make up course credits to graduate). The main contribution of this study is to give school officials more information so that they can make an informed decision about offering credit recovery as opposed to the current state where there is practically no knowledge on the effects of credit recovery at the school-level.