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[Tripon]

Forty-two percent of LA Unified’s 2016 graduates re-took a class they had previously failed or needed some other kind of credit recovery in order to graduate, district officials said Thursday.

Superintendent Michelle King announced in August that the preliminary graduation rate was a record 75 percent, but the district had not calculated how many students needed to take credit recovery courses to get across the graduation stage.

The quality of those courses, in which most of the work is done online and over a shorter period of time, has been questioned by LA Unified watchers as well as those within the district, including the school board president. LA Unified’s credit recovery policies allow students to opt out of much of the coursework if they pass a pre-test. Other districts’ policies are stricter.

In the credit recovery program, students without enough credits to graduate retake classes during free periods, after school, on Saturdays and during winter and spring breaks. Many of the courses are online and either have a teacher running the class along with a computer program — known as blended learning — or are completed entirely online, known as virtual learning. One online program in wide use by the district, Edgenuity, has students taking eight five-hour sessions. If students prove proficiency with the material they receive a C grade. A’s and B’s aren’t an option.

LA’s credit recovery “looks very fishy,” Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an editor of Education Next and research fellow at the Hoover Institution, said last year. “I think that we all need to be extremely skeptical that [LA Unified] can make that amount of progress in such a short amount of time and have it be meaningful.”

LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer said late last summer he was concerned about the district’s online credit recovery efforts and very skeptical about the programs’ effectiveness. He emphasized a need for individual education plans for students and academic counseling.

http://laschoolreport.com/exclusive...was-due-to-credit-recovery-or-makeup-classes/

 

[Risible]

I can't tell from the article - is this a public school or a charter school?

 

[Tripon]

I can't tell from the article - is this a public school or a charter school?

Los Angeles Unified as a whole.

Charter schools are considered their own entities.