Diplomas Count - Issue 34, 2013 - (Page 12)

EDUCATION WEEK JUNE 6, 2013 Diplomas Count > www.edweek.org/go/dc13 n 12 | Online Providers Find a Market In Returning Dropouts Surge in credit-recovery programs worries some educators ‘Noise and Distraction’ However, he also sees “a lot of noise and distraction” in the dropout-recovery market, particularly in online and blended learning. “Funding doesn’t make quality, and my concern is a lot of these guys are going to chase the money and do a bad job,” he says. A similar opportunity arose in 2002, when billions in federal funding supported new tutoring programs called supplemental educational services, or ses. Hundreds of new companies sprang up, but the program burned itself out within a decade, hammered by the mistrust of school districts and the lack of consistent ways to evaluate the quality of tutoring programs. “We are hoping to avoid another situation like ses,” says Steven Pines, the executive director of the Education Industry Association, a Vienna, Va.-based trade group. Districts and for-profit providers seem to be more willing partners in dropout recovery than they were in the federally driven tutoring programs that drained their budgets. But then, as now, Pines says, “the expectations are hyped, and, if you don’t deliver, it sours relationships for the whole industry—the blowback can be far reaching.” Horn attributes the “ses blowup” to the lack of a yardstick to evaluate the quality of services— an equal or greater danger for dropout-recovery providers, he says. “You have to innovate around student outcomes, not just service,” says Horn, the education executive director of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a San Mateo, Calif.-based education and health research group. “We’re already behind the eight ball on the quality-control piece. There’s a reasonable concern by many people that the standards are low in some of these, that they can become diploma mills in many cases.” That could discourage returning students from sticking with the program and undermine the value of the diploma they obtain, adds Russell W. Rumberger, an education professor and the director of the California Dropout Research Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “There’s concern that the graduation rate is rising, but it’s doing so because students are able to get credit for not much work,” he says. “As far as I know, there’s no oversight at all.” That’s true at the federal level, which has no clear requirements for a rigorous credit-recovery curriculum. In general, states require only that credits earned via an online or hybrid course be roughly equivalent to the same brickand-mortar course—meaning that both must cover the same state standards. There are no requirements for the depth and rigor of that coverage. New York University education historian Diane Ravitch has seen screen shots of questions from credit-recovery courses that she says were “the lowest-level true-false questions.” “The fact that a student can make up a semester’s worth of credit in a few days or a week is reason enough to suspect that credit recovery is a scam,” Ravitch says. “The quality of the online programs was extremely low. It was an easy way to get credits and a diploma without educational value.” Providers and educators alike agree that the industry has been spotty, with limited independent validation of models. “There’s no standardization at all in terms of what credit recovery means,” says the nsba’s Barth. “We’re finding credit recovery working, not working, working under these certain conditions. There isn’t much evidence, and that’s something policymakers and parents need to understand.” The Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute is in the early stages of a large-scale study to determine the quality and rigor of the most common credit-recovery services, using Florida’s massive student-data system. Florida is one of the few states to code courses on student transcripts to note whether a course credit came from repeating a traditional course, taking a proficiency-based hybrid or online course, or learning in an alternative school, says Winkler. The study will judge the passage rates for students earning credits in different ways, the time taken to complete the credits, and students’ long-term academic outcomes. “There’s a fundamental belief that kids deserve a second chance, but is this a high-quality intervention that will help them?” says Amber M. Winkler, Fordham’s vice president for research. “If you think the be-all and end-all is to demonstrate mastery, you had better have a great independent end-of-course assessment, and right now, we don’t.” Taking Responsibility There are ways to work around the lack of standardization, educators say. Larry M. Perondi, the superintendent of the 20,300-student Oceanside, Calif., district, says the school system audits both curriculum and instructional practice in the online courses used with the 170 students in its alternative education programs. “We work really hard to maintain credibility,” Perondi says. “The worst thing that can happen to a program for dropouts is to have the kids labeled as doing something less and getting more credit for it; that would be disastrous.” Similarly, Superintendent Heath E. Morrison of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina, says he backed up academic progress reported by dropout-recovery programs by administering the Accuplacer college-placement exam to ensure that students completing the programs can go directly into higher education without getting stuck in more remedial classes. “We’ve done a bad job of selling credit recovery, because it’s actually content recovery,” says BethAnn Berliner, a senior research associate and dropout expert at WestEd, in San Francisco. “We’re setting students up for a very limited fu- By Sarah D. Sparks W hile accountability demands and economic pressures sparked educators’ drive to bring dropouts back to school, those efforts are largely being powered by online and hybrid credit-recovery programs. But the advent of such innovations also gives some industry experts and educators cause for concern: Will dropout recovery’s promise be derailed by programs that offer uneven academic rigor and insufficient social and emotional support for this very vulnerable group of returning students? “I worry that the growth of access in this space has outpaced quality,” says Michael B. Horn, a coauthor of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, published in 2008 by McGraw-Hill. “You’ve started to solidify models that focus on getting students to graduation as opposed to an outcome measure focused on the actual learning.” Dropout recovery is a textbook example of an education area ripe for disrupting traditional instructional models: For more than 40 years, high school has not worked for as many as a third of students. Because districts take a hit in both per-pupil funding and accountability ratings when students walk out on school, many are eager for outside help with tough-to-teach students. More than 60 percent of online courses now are being taken for credit recovery, according to Patte Barth, the director of the Center for Public Education, an initiative of the Alexandria, Va.based National School Boards Association, and supporting them now are “a lot of players”—nonprofit community-based organizations, schools, universities, and a “big for-profit field emerging,” she says. John Murray, the chairman and chief executive officer of AdvancePath Academics Inc., a hybrid dropout-recovery company based in Williamsburg, Va., believes a lot of good has come from new schooling models that pair proficiencybased credit—rather than seat-time requirements—with social and often psychological support. A former dropout himself, Murray says recovery programs can help students integrate education with work and family duties, as well as overcome the previous trauma or academic failure that killed their motivation to learn. http://www.edweek.org/go/dc13

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Diplomas Count - Issue 34, 2013

Diplomas Count - Issue 34, 2013
Contents
A ‘Neglected’ Population Goes Back to School
Age Can Determine Access To Free Education, Diploma Pathways
State Statistics and Strategies
High School Equivalency Test Gets a Makeover
Reasons to Stay: Tailored Interventions
Online Providers Find a Market In Returning Dropouts
Second-Chance Challenge: Keeping Students in School
A Chicago Charter Network Stanches The Flow of Dropouts
Sound-Engineering Class Hooks Reluctant Student
Teenage Father Makes Journey From Dropout to Top Student
Honor Student Disconnects, Re-engages at CCA
Graduation Rate Approaching Milestone
TABLE: Graduation in the United States
DATA: Detailed Analytic Portrait
TABLE: Graduation Policies For the Class of 2013
Sources and Notes

Diplomas Count - Issue 34, 2013