Math Teacher Unyuong Yi lends a hand to Junior Jonah Lachica with an assignment as part of the new intra-year credit recovery program.
By: Neval Mulaomerovic
Intra-year credit recovery is a new way for students to earn credit in a course in which they received a D or F grade during the first semester without having to go through summer school, MUSD Director of Secondary Education Gregory Barnes said. Courses, including Integrated Math I through III, English I through III, US History, and World History, are taken during second semester, he said.
Credit recovery is two hours of class time before or after school, with an hour and a half of online learning or homework per week, Barnes said. Compared with the 90 hours of seat time in an on-campus course per semester and 75 hours during summer school, credit recovery includes roughly 30 hours of seat time, he said. Regular summer school will still be available as an option to students, he said.
“We have gone out of our way to not exclude anybody,” Barnes said. “You don’t want a student who got a zero percent, for example, to feel they’re not good enough for this program. We want to give the same opportunity for any student, whether you failed it really well or got a 69% and you just want to try to get your A through G credit.”
Renovating summer school has been a concern for a while, Principal Francis Rojas said. Teachers found that students who failed a class would attend summer school, and fail the next level during the next school year without any signs of improvement, he said.
“It’s just this cycle,” Rojas said. “But say you failed at a 50%. That means you probably learned something, but maybe you just didn’t do well on the tests. So if [you] wait six more months until summer, you’re going to fail second semester. So if you can get it again quickly, there’s more of a likelihood that you will be able to move on forward with with the class.”
Credit recovery allows students to earn A through G credits for University of California (UC) requirements, Rojas said. Though a college will see the remedial course on the transcript to satisfy the necessary credits, the previous course that was failed will still appear on record, he said.
“Districts throughout the state of California are provided what we call intervention funds,” Rojas said. “Those funds can be used at at the discretion of districts with the approval of the superintendent around different ways. All of these options are for remediation and a college will see that on the transcript. We don’t delete things off transcripts because you take summer school.”
Since the classes are between five and 20 students, credit recovery allows teachers to work in depth with students to fit their personal needs, English Teacher Annie Shine said. With the help of volunteer tutors, teachers would be able to give individualized attention to students to help them understand lessons that they may not have mastered before, she said.
“You can get really in depth with each student to figure out what their needs are and give them a lot of individualized attention,” Shine said. “The idea of the program is that they sat through the first semester so they’ve at least gotten some of that material. So, this is not starting from scratch. It’s going back and filling the holes of what they didn’t understand or what they could use a little more practice in.”
Lesson plans in English III include short story discussions and online grammar practice, Shine said. Though some materials are taken directly from the English III curriculum, other short stories and lessons are selected specifically for the students’ needs in the class, she said.
“We’ll do NoRedInk diagnostic test to discover what their grammar strengths and weaknesses are,” Shine said. “I’ll be grading their writing. The real test of whether they’re comprehending that is their performance during discussions and their writing that they’ll be able to produce from these stories.”
The program has been helpful since the smaller class size makes it easier for students to ask for help and receive assistance from teachers, Junior Christina Tuazon said. With only nine students in her Math III class, credit recovery allows for more personalized learning and less rushing in the course, she said.
“[Credit recovery] made math easier to understand,” Tuazon said. “In a way it made my workload feel lighter, and made me more excited to learn. The program makes the class more intimate and motivates me to do my work. So far I’ve been getting better grades compared to when I hadn’t been in the program last semester.”
Due to the shortened hours and reduced homework, credit recovery may not give students sufficient instruction, English Teacher Sanjit Roy said. Compared with a regular English class where students read three books and write several essays, credit recovery would not be able to maintain the same level of commitment, he said.
“The qualms that I have is that there is less time and work,” Roy said. “It’s still only about 30 hours. The time doesn’t seem the same. But I think if you look at a kid who does that, the previous [D or F] grade is still on the transcript. That way it’s more fair than it was. A lot of my qualms are academic integrity, and I think they made the changes so it wasn’t going to be a system where kids could fail intentionally and do [credit recovery] to get an A.”
The program, if successful, would look to teacher and student feedback to improve in future years, Barnes said. A priority moving forward would be selecting teachers who are more flexible in their scheduling to allow for a variety of morning and afternoon classes, he said.
“If certain teachers can only do it in the afternoon,we’ve learned there are some students athletes who are caught in the middle,” Barnes said. “You can’t run track if you’re not at practice everyday. This program might unintentionally exclude you from being part of it. So what we can do next year is be more selective with offerings for morning classes so we don’t exclude students who have to work after school or who are at practice or have any family obligations.”