Geoff Decker's "Muted Response to Regents' Call for Credit Recovery Comments," in GothamSchools points to both an explicit and an implicit hypocrisy. The big abuse of "Credit Recovery" is the practice of awarding credits to students regardless of whether they attended class or learned the subject matter. As education expert David Bloomfield explains, providing a "fig leaf to cover administrative embarrassment" seems to be a prime purpose. Teachers are outraged by the damage it does to students, as well as the way it cripples efforts to improve test scores. "If you want to hold me accountable," a teacher complained, then you cannot, “go behind my back and pass students that I fail.” The policy wonk in me prompts another objection. The recent study by Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, "The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers," excluded classes where more than 25% of students were on IEPs. Ostensibly, the reason was that teachers in those classes get additional support, and thus share responsibility for outcomes. How can a teacher be seen as solely responsible for student performance when authority is divided between the classroom instructor and the person(s) who awards the credit?-JT (@drjohnthompson)Image via.
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