Nearly two years of pandemic-related disruptions have caused Many young people to miss out on significant amounts of learning and instruction.
In this episode, Dr. Balfanz is joined by Educational Resource Strategies Chief Executive Officer Dr. Karen Hawley Miles and Senior Manager Eddie Branchaud to discuss credit recovery and the challenges that schools face as they help students get back on track.
Hear about what Karen and Eddie have discovered as they look closely at the strategies schools across the country are using to help students catch up and thrive.
Nearly two years of pandemic-related disruptions have caused Many young people to miss out on significant amounts of learning and instruction.
In this episode, Dr. Balfanz is joined by Educational Resource Strategies Chief Executive Officer Dr. Karen Hawley Miles and Senior Manager Eddie Branchaud to discuss credit recovery and the challenges that schools face as they help students get back on track.
Hear about what Karen and Eddie have discovered as they look closely at the strategies schools across the country are using to help students catch up and thrive.
Robert (00:03):
Welcome to the Pathways to Adult Success podcast series. I'm Dr. Robert Balfanz, director of the Pathways to Adult Success program and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. I'm delighted to have you join us today. This is the first episode in a series of conversations we'll be having with folks from across the country. We're thinking about how we can redesign our education systems. We'll talk about what it will take to create an education system that truly empowers all young people and sets them on a pathway to long-term success. In today's episode, I'll be joined by Dr. Karen Hawley Miles, Chief Executive Officer of Educational Resource Strategies (ERS). Joining. Karen is Dr. Eddie Branchaud, senior member of the ERS team, former educator and school administrator. Both Karen and Eddie have years of experience working with schools and districts to make the best use of time, people, and resources to improve student outcomes.
Robert (00:56):
So there's no one better we could begin with in our series. Karen and Eddie have been thinking long and hard about how we can really redesign our systems to work for everybody. In this episode, we'll be discussing credit recovery and the challenges that schools have been facing as they help students get back on track. After nearly two years of pandemic related disruptions, many children have missed out on significant amounts of learning and instruction during COVID. Karen and Eddie have been looking closely at the strategies that schools across the country are employing to effectively help their students catch up and thrive. As we move out of the pandemic and meet its challenges, credit recovery is providing students a second or third opportunity to pass classes, usually in high school, sometimes in middle school, that they have failed, and earn the credits they need to graduate.
Robert (01:44):
Because in our system, you get a high school diploma when you have a certain number of credits. To get a credit, you have to pass classes, and if you don't pass those classes, we have something we call credit recovery. That's what we’ll be talking about today. So with that I'm going to open it up and ask my first question which is, let's just talk a little bit more about why we need credit recovery. What is this thing credit called credit recovery? What was the practice in schools before the pandemic? And what's brought you to write guidance on this topic now, to help schools sort through how to really do this well as we move out of the pandemic?
Karen (02:17):
So I will jump in on that. We obviously know the pandemic has created urgent student needs for academic recovery, re-engagement, and social emotional support. And it's especially true for the students that pre-pandemic needed help the most: students living in poverty, black and brown students, English language learners, and those who have special education needs. We know also that these needs are going to be greatest at the early elementary level and in high school, and high school has this added bit about credit recovery and the shortened time period in which students need to get through and get the credits they need so that they can take the next steps beyond high school. The school leaders we’re working with identified early on last spring that they were anticipating a huge surge in the need for credit recovery to get students back on track and getting through high school.
Karen (03:19):
So we know we're having a big burst in that right now. Luckily we have an infusion of federal resources to support districts in responding to these needs. And those resources are going disproportionately deliberately to the districts that have the highest levels of poverty. The dollars that are going to these districts can be sometimes quite huge, translating into 10 to 15% a year of each district’s operating budget for each of three years. If it was spent equally, sometimes some districts are getting as much as a 30% increase for each of three years. So we've created a set of tools that provide concrete support to district and school leaders that get real about the spending, staffing, and scheduling. We know that credit recovery is going to be an urgent need, and we know that districts are expanding their offerings here.
Karen (04:14):
We're hoping that they use this as a moment to build toward a really different way of organizing schools, in line with the research about what works for adolescent learning. In other words, how can we implement credit recovery better now, in ways that lead to bigger change? And we're going to talk about this more as we go, but as in everything, we want to build on what the research says about what works for student learning and for adolescent learning. So first of all, the credit recovery that works, and any kind of support of just-in-time learning that works, has three characteristics. First, it's supportive, meaning there's in-person support available to reinforce it. It's not just something that's happening independently for students. It's targeted, meaning that it's addressing the specific learning needs that students have. It's not just taking the course again and again, and maybe again, to cover the things that they missed the first time. And it's flexible, meaning that it can be delivered at times and in ways that fit the different learning needs.
Robert (05:25):
Thanks, Karen. So my question then is, can we just solve this by doing more what we were doing before, but doing it at a higher volume? We know schools had credit recovery strategies. They had to write it in order for your kids to graduate. They needed to earn credits. We know kids are failing classes, it was incumbent on schools to give them second and third chance to recover those credits. Why can't we just keep on doing what we were doing pre-pandemic, maybe just scale it up?
Eddie (05:49):
We've been going into, you know, what can we learn about the effectiveness of the ways that we've been doing, and it's helpful to step back and look at this rise in credit recovery and what it used to be like. So, you know, formerly when a student would fail a course, the options really were, they were going to retake that course in the next semester or the next year, or over the summer. And there were a lot of challenges in terms of being able to schedule that and students staying on track. And then along come these online credit recovery options that allowed students to work at their own pace. And you could have a room of 25 students that are working on different courses, with one staff member to monitor it, and that really opened up options around the scheduling and the flexibility.
Eddie (06:32):
So we want to know, you know, how is this working? Is this the road we should be continuing down? There's some research so far that tells us about the effectiveness of credit recovery. And it comes down to a couple of themes that we're seeing so far. One, in terms of actual recovering credits and graduation, we see that the online credit recovery is effective in that way. Students are raising graduation rates at the schools that are adopting these online credit recovery practices. So it seems to be working in that way. When you look at student learning it’s a bit of a different picture. So what we're seeing so far in the studies that we do have, is that when you measure performance in terms of standardized tests or end of course achievement tests, then students who are taking these online credit recovery methods are certainly not faring as well as people who are students who are doing retakes or traditional methods.
Eddie (07:28):
So we've got a couple of randomized controlled trials here that can tell us what distinguishes effective credit recovery from less effective. And the theme that we're seeing so far is around the amount of instructional support. So when students have access to somebody who's a certified teacher in that area, who provides them instructional support in the content that they're learning and not just monitoring the room for behavior, we see that they are more likely to pass the courses, recover credit, and score well on the end-of-course assessments. And so, at least the piece around instructional support is an important component for schools to be thinking about.
Robert (08:05):
Thanks, Eddie. And I just want to add a little bit to what you brought up about the history of credit recovery and help our audience understand how that's brought us to some challenges and opportunities we have now. So as you said, right, somewhere between a quarter and a half of kids in a given high school might need a credit recovery opportunity. And traditionally that meant retaking the class either the next year or during the summer. And you could see, right, as he pointed out, that if a school has to do that at volume, it can constrict other offerings, right? If you have to give a lot of second chance classes, someone's teaching that class for the second time while someone's also teaching it for the first time, which means maybe there's not enough teachers then to give advanced classes or enough time in the schedule to offer advanced classes and multiple catch-up classes.
Robert (08:52):
So along came some good inventive work with the advent of technology and the spread of computing, but also broadband access to schools got better. This idea of online credit recovery, where kids could do it sometimes at their own schedule, sometimes at their own pace, sometimes in a big room with lots of other kids at the school. But maybe that was with someone that wasn't a full-time teacher, just making sure that there wasn't chaos in the room, but not really able to provide instruction. And in many ways, that seemed too good to be true to many schools, because it took something that was quite burdensome and sort of eased the friction of just offering the opportunity. But Karen and Eddie, as we all know, sometimes things that look good on paper or appealing for organizational reasons or to solve a different problem have their own unintended consequences and sort of perverse incentives. To what extent have we seen this happening with these online credit recovery opportunities, pre-pandemic, and maybe giving us pause about how to do them well, post-pandemic?
Karen (09:58):
Yeah. I'll just jump in. I think it's a really, really important point. It's a highly economically advantageous choice to choose these online credit recovery programs, especially because one of the biggest ways that high school effectiveness is measured is based on graduation rates. And you can see in a lot of places, rapid increase in graduation rates over very short periods of time. And as he said, not so much on the actual learning and test scores that measure actual knowledge and the ability of skills. So it's a huge economic incentive for districts and schools to implement this on the student side. Also, there's a way in which this could potentially create an incentive for students not to invest in the learning that they need to do to gain this knowledge, because they could learn, especially for students who are in the place of taking multiple credit recovery credits, that it's a whole lot easier to do this through the online credit recovery programs, then invest in taking the program again and doing it in a more traditional way.
Karen (11:11):
So clearly we need a reset. Clearly we need a new way of doing this. It's not just an “accelerate what we're currently doing.”
Robert (11:21):
Another challenge I want us to explore is that, you know, in a way credit recovery broadly fits under this idea of student supports. And we often find in the student support area, often very useful and very good products are developed, but this is an area where commercial solutions are often offered to schools. Someone will come up with a program or a software or a tool that's commercially developed and sold to schools as addressing a critical need. And, you know, basically, sometimes it's saying—and again, there are places where this is effective—but in my experience working with a wide number of high schools, there are also some temptations that don't always end up the best, which is sort of, “For a fee, we'll take a problem off your hands.”
Robert (12:11):
And principals are facing so many challenges simultaneously. And especially now, we all know that it's been sort of a rocky re-entry in the school. And a lot of people are exhausted and there's just so many things on their plate that sometimes if somebody can in a very softened, slick way, come in and say, “We have a solution, we'll take it off your hands. You have a lot of money now available. You won't even miss it. We'll take care of it.” What might be some challenges with this approach? Why can't we just say credit recovery is something schools could just buy a solution for?
Eddie (12:46):
I think the answer to that lies in the data that we had talked about earlier, when we see that, yes, you're going to get the results in terms of graduation and recovering credits. But the more we look at what student outcomes are, the more we have to question whether the way we've been doing this is really serving students well. There's some other folks looking at, yes, we know graduation rates are good. But then when you follow the students over the two and four years after graduation, we're seeing lower rates of degree attainment four years later. And so you may get those short-term benefits, especially under the accountability that that schools face around their graduation rates. But when we look out further and think about what what's best and what do we need for students, then this way doesn't seem to get the results that we want. Which is why we're talking about, how do we make it better? How do we think about what those supports are that we can give students before we get to that point?
Karen (13:41):
Yeah. And I also want to point out that in this particular moment, we're dealing with a huge increase in credit recovery needs because students were learning online for as much as two years. So as Bob and I like to talk about, the definition of insanity—actually Einstein said this—the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result, right? So here we had all this increase in credit recovery needs because of online learning. And then we're saying, well, let's just plug you into another online learning program. What the real need right now is, to get students re-engaged in learning, is to create relationships with students and with teachers, and to engage again, back in this longer-term endeavor of learning. So it's the moment for thinking differently about how we connect with students and how we understand their learning needs.
Robert (14:34):
Yeah. And I think that's a perfect segue. And I couldn't agree more also that oftentimes kids fail classes because of that chronic absenteeism. And so we both have to address the reasons for the absenteeism and give the credit recovery opportunity. And we know that really the best way to solve chronic absenteeism problems is essentially, you usually have to solve a problem or change a behavior. And both are hard to do if you don't have a relationship with a student, right? You can't solve a problem or change a behavior from a computer. It's the human element, it's the human connection. It's the human insight that enables you to both create the environment that enables the student to be there to learn, and then provides the opportunity to learn. So speaking of that, we've talked a fair amount about the challenges we're facing with credit recovery. Let's pivot to solutions. I know one of the things that your guides do so well is you highlight real-life examples of how it could be done better: of how time and people and resources could be used better to achieve better outcomes. And in this case, in credit recovery, I'm wondering if you could share a couple of those examples that you brought forth.
Eddie (15:47):
Yeah, certainly, we've found some great examples out there of districts working towards really thinking about how credit recovery can provide these meaningful opportunities. Based on the research, we’ve been talking about these examples of credit recovery that is supportive, targeted, and flexible as Karen was saying. So it's supportive based on the research that we know; it's going to provide the face-to-face instructional support that students are going to need; and targeted to what students really need in order to have mastery for that course content. It's not just about the number of minutes they sat in that seat. It's are they ready to move on to what's next? And flexible: you know, given the many students who had to get jobs during the pandemic, that there are so many constraints and family constraints. So we really need to think about, how many different avenues are we giving students in order to make sure that they can get back on track?
Eddie (16:43):
So a couple of examples here. One is District of Columbia public schools. So they launched a redesign credit recovery in the ’18-’19 school year, and really rebuilt their credit recovery program to be more both supportive and targeted. So the supportive piece: students have face-to-face support from certified teachers while they're doing their recovery courses. And there are credit recovery coordinators at each school that are there to support and monitor implementation. It really tracks students—is this venue of credit recovery working for them—to make sure that this is the right way for them to actually learn what's needed to move on. And then they've also created competency-based versions of their core courses, so that students can just focus on the competencies that they need to move forward and get more focused support on those pieces instead of just taking the whole course again.
Eddie (17:40):
And they've talked about the shifts that this has taken, but it's a place that they've been able to pilot these, creating the materials for that shifting the mindsets of teachers: that it's not just about the number of minutes, but it's about, is this student ready to move on? So I've done a lot of work there. Another great example, we think: San Antonio ISD is a great example of both the flexibility and the support. They've got essentially three to four layers of opportunities for students to get back on track after they've failed a course. One is an evening flex school that has self-paced courses. And then they've got this independent study where you complete it on your own time, but then you have regular check-ins one-to-one with an assigned teacher in that content area to make sure you're getting the periodic one-to-one support and that they're tracking you along the way.
Eddie (18:38):
Then they have intersession academies in which they're doing like targeted sprints on making up these course credits. So there's this number of flexible, supported options. I think one of the really clever moves to the support side is that they have made it a requirement in San Antonio ISD: If you're going to receive the lead teacher stipend then you're going to participate in some form of credit recovery, as a condition of being that lead teacher and getting that stipend. So they've really incentivized having the support that's needed there for students when they're doing credit recovery.
Robert (19:15):
And I think what's so wise about that, Eddie, is recognizing that this can't just be solved by a machine, right? It takes both high-quality interaction and well-trained teachers that know how to deal with the social-emotional challenges students bring, because once you fail a class that often stinks. You know, it's one reason why ninth-grade course failure is so detrimental sometimes, because it's not just simply your one credit shy of graduation, but you've gotten a signal that maybe high school is not for you. Maybe you're not able to do high school work. Maybe, you know, you're not smart in a given area and that can then lead to counterproductive defensive actions to prevent you from feeling that sting again. So it takes that skilled adult to both navigate those social-emotional challenges to motivation, and be able to deliver the instruction the students need.
Robert (20:11):
Because also oftentimes what happens with chronic absenteeism is that students have learned a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and they're not quite at zero. And sometimes they get insulted when we say, well, you know, you failed algebra one, so you must have little or nothing. We're going to assume you don't know anything and bring you back to zero. And then the student's like, well, I did get that part and now you're making me learn it again. So without that adult navigator, it's really hard, I think, for just the machines to do it. So we're going to conclude now by talking a little bit about the long term, and we have two questions but I’m going to ask them one at a time. The first one is, how might we reduce the need for credit recovery? I mean, come on, right? If 25 to 50% of kids need this, it tells us the system isn't working well the first time. So what can we do to reduce the need for credit recovery?
Karen (21:03):
This is where all of the things we've been talking about for the last two decades about how students learn along the way, and these just-in-time supports, kick in. And these are the things that are more often practiced at the elementary school level actually, and less often practiced at the high school level. So the practices that we are hoping folks invest in, and we're seeing the leading-edge districts do, is invest heavily even now with SR funds in thinking about how to modify their students' schedules so they can get just-in-time support for the things that they're missing, or need extra help. And along the way, and this is regularly scheduled in, it's expected that students need, at different points, at different moments, extra time to get a particular concept or skill. And so what we're seeing is schools should look different.
Karen (21:57):
They should create different sorts of schedules that have this built in, and flex blocks and intersessions along the way, in evenings and not just after the school year is over. And when we suddenly realized that they didn't get the course. This should be something that is happening along the way, and connecting to the points earlier made about the credit recovery coordinator and the navigator: these counseling resources and this just-in-time teaching support should be happening along the way. So in the end, we should be taking these resources, you know, from the end of the process and putting them all the way through the process. So that we're not having a separate credit recovery coordinator. Instead, this is integrated into the school counseling processes and resources, and into the way that teachers work with students. That means teachers' schedules need to look different.
Karen (22:52):
And we're seeing districts right now and schools right now, figuring out ways of structuring teacher time to include more time for teachers to look at what students need to learn and how far they are behind and to collaborate together in supporting students to get that help right now when they need it. Because if we're not doing this now, as students start to come back to school, to your point earlier, it's going to feel so difficult. It's so hard for students to sort of pick up again and keep on going, if they're feeling like they can't connect with what's happening right now. The third thing that we're seeing districts do now with SR money is differentiate educator roles here. And that can happen in conjunction with the two things that I just mentioned. So if we're on track with what students are needing to know and be able to do, if we have teacher time to actually think about what this means in terms of their lessons, and then if we have access to other ways to pull in educators to provide that extra support, then that works.
Karen (23:57):
And we're seeing districts pull in retired teachers, community organizations, other tutors, to do this along the way to catch that up. Two more things I want to just mention here. Technology, though we sort of poo-pooed it, still can be used as a really important resource along the way for instructional delivery during afterschool hours. And so pulling that in and relying on that, not just to the end of credit recovery, but thinking about how to pull that in afterschool and to expand hours for students in that way. And then the last thing I will say is that even though we're talking about academic recovery here, a big part of all of this has been about structures and staff or student wellness, because many of the reasons that lead to chronic absenteeism and missing coursework are those kinds of things related to student wellness. And so if those things are incorporated along the way, and just part of how we think about organizing schools, then in the end, while we're going to see an uptick in credit recovery needs, we should end up, if we invest wisely now, in redesigning to a level that's maybe below pre-pandemic in five to ten years.
Robert (25:23):
Thank you. And I just want to add one piece to that, that I think is a key critical way to have less need for credit recovery, is a broader rethinking of how we approach supporting students and moving away from reactive approaches, like waiting till they fail, waiting till there've been suspended, waiting till they hit some definition of truancy to then act. Do you use things like an another tool? I know your guidebooks mention things like early warning on-track systems where we're closely progress monitoring all kids and at the first sign—that first failed test, that first time when they miss two days of class over two weeks, the first time maybe they get in a little disagreement with someone—that's what we're proactively working to figure out what needs to change to have that outcome be a positive one and not spiral to a negative one.
Robert (26:18):
And so my last question is, even if we moved to a proactive and not a reactive approach, and we get just-in-time supports and use our strategies to have teachers have time to analyze and develop ways to keep kids on track in their learning and in their schooling, some kids will still need to recover credits though; despite all that, they'll still fail their class. And I'm wondering how we can re-imagine—we've talked about this, Karen, some before—how we might reimagine credit recovery in a more competency-based way, and perhaps even how that might be a way for schools in general, to learn about a competency-based approach to education more broadly.
Karen (27:00):
Yes. And that's one of the big reasons we picked credit recovery as an entry point right now, in terms of supporting high schools to think about how they organize their resources strategically. It’s that in the end, if we can move away from measuring learning based on how much time a student has spent doing it, then we have the opportunity to radically transform what high schools look like and what the student experience is there. And so credit recovery—you've heard Eddie's example about describing how they've taken their courses and broken them down into individual competencies, and then linked them to assessments where students together with teachers can identify what competencies they need to gain. Are you could envision this spreading across the entire set of knowledge that we want students to have out of high school.
Karen (27:53):
So, Boston Day and Evening Academy is a beautiful example of this that we've highlighted in our guide books. They've taken the knowledge for high school and broken it into 31 competency modules that describe what students need to know and be able to do when they are graduates of Boston Day and Evening Academy. And students can do those modules mostly at their own pace. It's not about recovering them in different ways. And they've also organized group activities and things like that. So we see this moment of credit recovery as potentially a big “do now, build towards” sort of thing where you can start chunking off individual courses. There's another example you and I were talking about too, which I think is another way of practicing this. In the state of Ohio, they have passed some legislation that allows schools to give credit for where you could first take two, you can now take one course and get two credits for it, if you can demonstrate how that course supports students in gaining the knowledge and skills to meet the skills that were in those two courses before. And it's the same technical steps you have to take, which is to break the knowledge and skills, break the course or the units down into what is the knowledge and skills you're hoping students can do. We haven't seen that a lot but it seems like a great opening towards beginning to do this throughout the high school curriculum.
Robert (29:31):
I really want to thank Karen and Eddie for joining us today. This has been a fascinating conversation. A first step towards putting all our students on pathways to adult success is to figure out how to enable them to build their knowledge and skills in their high school courses. The first time they take those courses, we should really figure out how that can work for all kids. And then when they need a second chance, we really need to base our credit recovery strategy start on—not just convenient, even though I recognize that convenience has its place—but really basically evidence of what actually works and is delivered in a way that really builds student agency and knowledge. And not, and none of us want this, but really to make sure it doesn't default to simply a compliance action that generates a credit.
Robert (30:14):
And I think what we've heard today is that there is an urgent need to both address credit recovery, and to be honest that we need to do it better. And there are ways we can do it better. There are clear examples of districts doing this and clear things that can be done now, and then ways we can use it as a springboard to really reimagine or redesign the schools we need, so everyone has that pathway to adult success. Thank you, and we'll be back with another podcast soon. Be well.