With stricter credit recovery policy comes a push to do more

An impending crackdown on how students can make up failed classes has some schools scurrying to help students rack up missing credits this spring.

Many schools allow students who are missing credits—either because they failed a class, or because circumstances kept them from attending or completing required work—to receiving course credit for completing extra assignments through a practice known as “credit recovery.” The practice, which accounted for about 1.7 percent of credits earned last year, offers students the chance to pick up narrowly missed credits without having to repeat classes, but it has also been criticized for devaluing academic credits because the make-up assignments are often less in-depth than those required in the regular classes.

Last month, following an audit that found errors and possible evidence of cheating at 60 high schools, the city announced that it would begin restricting credit recovery access to students, in part by capping the number of credits students may receive through credit recovery, limiting enrollment to students who attended at least two thirds of class they’re making up, and allowing students to make up credits only in the months immediately after they fail a course.

The new policies take effect July 1 — giving schools a four-month window to help students rack up credits before the restrictions kick in. Teachers and students at many schools said last week that they hadn’t heard about the looming policy changes. But some of those who did said the news had motivated a credit recovery spree among students missing credits—a response Department of Education officials say is inappropriate.

Students at a small school at the Lower East Side’s Seward Park Campus, said administrators had individually told students who are missing credits that now is the time to finish credit recovery.

Since the February announcement, a senior told me, “The principal went up to the students who need credits and said, ‘Talk to this teacher, she’ll give you an assignment to do, and you’ll get the credit.’ He talked to everyone that needed the credits.”

A teacher at a mid-sized Brooklyn school said the push for credit recovery has been pervasive. “We’ve had grade-wide assemblies with the students to talk about what it means,” said the teacher. “And [students] had meetings with their guidance counselors. They told them: Either get the credit now, or understand they might be in high school for another year or two, or at least another semester.”

Ninth-graders who haven’t yet fallen behind didn’t react strongly to the news, but “the upperclassmen seem to get it, and there’s a push to try to get them as many of their credits as we can accrue before June,” the teacher said. She added that next year, her school is likely to add evening classes for students who need to make up work.

Another teacher at a Bronx school said administrators have been pressing many students who were counting on credit recovery to finish that work now, saying this might be their last year to do so. In addition to capping the number of earnable credits, the new rules require students to complete more rigorous assignments, log more time in class, and obtain approval of their credit recovery work from the teacher who failed them.

Teachers from schools around the city said they doubted they would be able to get students to graduation on time without allowing them to make-up classes. The Brooklyn teacher said her school sometimes resorts to credit recovery because it would be near-impossible to re-teaching course content to struggling students who have entered high school far below grade level. Schools are penalized on city assessments when students do not graduate in four years.

“It looks so bad, but the system is so gamed to begin,” she said.

A student at Long Island City High School said teachers told students about the policy change in class last week, but did not urge them to change their practices, according to a sophomore.

“They said, whoever is behind on credits isn’t going to graduate on time,” said the student. “They were just putting everybody down. Everybody was pretty ticked off about it.”

She said most students at the large Queens school used credit recovery, but she could understand the sentiment behind the new policy. “One teacher told me they shouldn’t even be using credit recovery at all — that it’s just an excuse for kids to slack off during the year.”

Ken Achiron, Long Island City’s teachers union chapter leader, said teachers at his school were bracing themselves for the added challenge of preparing students for graduation with narrowed credit recovery options. But he said the change was a long time coming.

“Credit recovery has been an open door up until now to allow kids to work through graduation without having to worry about what they did in the classroom. It’s a sham,” Achiron said. But he also said teachers might have a good reason to try to juke their schools’ performance statistics: “Why would teachers be doing [credit recovery]? So that they won’t be put on a list saying that their school is going to close,” as Long Island City could at the end of this year, under a city proposal.

Department officials said the new policies are meant to ensure that credit recovery is used only when it is in dire need or when students are working hard but need extra time to demonstrate understanding. A spokesman also said the department would root out schools that abuse credit recovery once the new policy takes effect.

“The letter and spirit of our new policy are clear, and we will be aggressively monitoring schools to make sure it is appropriately followed,” said the spokesman, Matthew Mittenthal.