Fewer city students are earning academic credits through quickie versions of high school classes they’d previously failed, new data obtained by the Daily News shows.
Just 6,000 high school students gained course credits through the controversial tactic of credit recovery in the 2013-14 school year, compared to 9,000 kids the year before. That’s out of around 330,000 total students enrolled in those grades.
Education Department officials said the decline is due to tighter tracking and enforcement of rules on makeup courses, which critics say artificially boost graduation rates.
Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña said she’d like to see even fewer students enrolled in the shortened courses.
“This is a tool that should only be used very rarely,” Fariña said. “I have zero tolerance for any schools that are flouting our strict policies around credit recovery.”
Education Department officials said credit recovery should be used rarely to help students with good attendance and grades who miss units of study due to illness or personal issues.
But critics say some schools use it to wrongly promote students who aren’t prepared. In July, Fariña fired the principal of Brooklyn’s John Dewey High School for awarding bogus credits to scores of students who didn’t earn them.
On Tuesday, Fariña announced the creation of a $5 million anti-cheating task force to monitor the use of credit recovery, standardized testing and other academic issues.
The city’s data show that the use of credit recovery has fallen since it was first uniformly tracked in the 2012-13 school year.
Just 220 of more than 600 city high schools used credit recovery in 2013-14, down from 270 schools in 2012-13. Likewise, credit recovery accounted for 0.15% of all high school credits awarded in 2013-14, down from 0.21% in 2012-13.
Despite those small numbers, critics say credit recovery is a big problem at some schools.
Brooklyn College education Prof. David Bloomfield said credit recovery may be more widespread than the data shows because it is self-reported by school leaders.
“I respect the Education Department’s efforts to turn back the rampant use of credit recovery,” Bloomfield said. “But the city needs to verify the data schools are reporting.”
