Real-time Online Credit Recovery

As high schools seek to improve graduation rates, respond to cuts in summer school, and offer new options for students, they are increasingly turning to online credit recovery. I’ve always thought that this was a good idea (quality, of course, is essential).

But, a better idea would be to begin to develop preventive systems to avoid failure in the first place. If a student is helplessly off course in the first quarter of algebra, why wait till the end of the year when a student fails? Joe Beckmann, commenting on a recent EdWeek article has some good ideas:

Recovery coursework should be (a) ongoing rather than only cumulative (i.e., should address problems close to when they occur rather than a semester or year later), (b) multimodal and multi-media, with a wide range of interventions including online in-school, online at home, tutoring, mentoring, etc., and (c) topical rather than sequential, since most k-16 coursework is not particularly sequential in any case.