Credit Recovery Participation Rates

Credit recovery, or the practice of enabling high school students to retrieve credits from courses that they either failed or failed to complete, is at the crossroads of two big trends in education: the desire to move toward “competency based” education and a push to dramatically boost graduation rates. Balancing these competing demands is a challenge, but balance we must because, under ESSA, states are required to factor graduation rates into their high school accountability plans. That provides an unintended incentive for schools to play games with graduation requirements, which underscores the need to keep credit recovery from turning into a total end run around actual learning.

Authored by Fordham’s Associate Director of Research Adam Tyner and Research Associate Nicholas Munyan-Penney, this study examines whether and where potential misuse of credit recovery may be occurring. Specifically, it answers three questions:

1. How many high schools have active credit recovery programs, and are some types of schools more likely than others to have them?
2. How many students are enrolled in credit recovery?
3. To what extent do schools enroll large shares of their students in credit recovery, and is that more common in certain types of schools?

Using newly released credit recovery data from the Office for Civil Rights and demographic data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the analysis generates results at the national, state, and local levels. Namely:

1. Most high schools have credit recovery programs, although they are far less common in charter schools.
2. While the presence of credit recovery programs is generally not related to school poverty levels, schools with many minority students are slightly more likely to have active programs.
3. Credit recovery programs are less common in smaller schools. The likelihood of having an active program climbs steadily as enrollment rises to 1,250 students.
4. In high schools with active credit recovery programs, an average of 8 percent of students participate. However, nearly one in ten schools enrolls 20 percent or more of its students.
5. Higher enrollment in credit recovery is more common in large and urban schools, as well as in charter schools and schools with higher proportions of poor and minority students.