When students get their high school diplomas, you assume that they’ve all met key standards in all requisite areas. You suppose that they’ve all made the grade.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t always been the case during the past decade or so in Fresno Unified.

It all ties in with a program called credit recovery — and a set of “courses” produced by a company called Imagine Edgenuity.

As previously reported in GV Wire and elsewhere, credit recovery is a way for high school students in the district to dodge a failing grade in many of their classes. They don’t wind up with a passing mark through traditional means — retaking tests, turning in extra credit, doing well on a final exam.

Instead they attend Edgenuity sessions, where they sit in front of computer screens and complete watered-down versions of the courses they’re failing. And so, even though they might otherwise fail several important classes, they subsequently get enough credits to attend commencement and receive diplomas.

Sometimes students are able to complete such putative “courses” in record time — occasionally in a matter of days. Clearly, the curriculum of an entire semester֫֫ — in biology, say, or in American history — can hardly be covered, much less mastered, under such conditions.

53% of District Seniors Earn Edgenuity Credits

A few months ago, the Office of the Interim Superintendent issued a memo that sheds some light on Fresno Unified’s use of credit recovery.

According to the June 21 memo, FUSD paid $551,150. for Edgenuity materials and support in the 2022-23 term. In the 2023-24 term that price tag shot up to $591,850.

The memo also indicated how many students have recently participated in Edgenuity sessions. It turns out that 53% of district’s seniors earned at least one credit through the online Edgenuity curriculum during the 2022-23 term.

In the 2022-23 academic year students received, on average, eighteen credits this way. That average went down a bit last year, to an average of sixteen credits.

At present there’s no upper limit to the number of credits that students can rack up using this method.

Related Story: Only A Third of Fresno Unified Students Made the Grade in State Reading Tests

Negative Impact on Learning Culture

Using credit recovery has certainly streamlined many students’ acquisition of course credits and thus generated a significant rise in local high school graduate rates.

In addition, however, it’s impacted school culture in significant and disturbing ways.

“Doing Edge” has become a learned behavior, as one district instructor put it to me. A significant number of students — known in some teacher circles as “frequent fliers” — often use credit recovery to obtain passing grades with minimum effort. As a result, they tend to regard traditional classroom instruction as being somewhat irrelevant.

One district teacher, Jeremy Wright, addressed the school board last year and shared his concerns about this system.

In his view, the Edgenuity program has seriously impaired classroom instruction. Now that credit recovery is available, a number of students no longer see much point in paying attention in class and completing assignments, given that they can get a passing grade using Edgenuity in winter or summer sessions — sometimes after a few days’ time.

As Wright put it, “It’s insulting to us as teachers. … It’s also insulting to the kids that did work hard and pulled their grade up and got the B or C. …”

He argued that this also weakens the quality of schools, despite the appearance of student success: “[T]he product we’re putting out there is more important than a graduation rate.”

Also questionable are some additional costs linked to the way that Edgenuity has been implemented.  Consider that some teachers are paid to oversee credit recovery sections during summer school. Students in such sections, however, only have to report to class until they’ve finished their Edgenuity assignments. After reaching that milestone, they don’t have to attend anymore.

Why, some have wondered, should the district pay teachers for so many weeks of instruction and not require students to attend the sessions?

The district has a different attitude toward credit recovery. One district spokesperson told me that “[T]he use of Edgenuity software has provided our students with valuable opportunities to attain credits toward graduation.”

Her comments mirror the district’s narrative that programs like credit recovery serve students’ interests and provide them with a wide range of opportunities that they otherwise wouldn’t have.

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Fresno Unified Test Scores Reveal Serious Deficits

But recent SBAC scores tell a different story.

The SBAC exams, prepared by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, are administered each year to 11th-graders to assess their aptitude in two core areas: math and English.

In the 2023 exam, 33.2% of the Fresno Unified 11th-graders tested met or exceeded standards in English. Fewer than than that֫ — 23.31% —met or exceeded math standards.

Such results just don’t square with FUSD high graduation rates, and they suggest a gaping disconnect between credits earned and educational benchmarks that were actually achieved.

It’s hard to square the ongoing use of credit recovery with the district’s purported goal of boosting student achievement.

The interim superintendent’s memo reflects a solid commitment to continuing credit recovery in this new school year: “Fresno Unified plans to continue partnering with Edgenuity in 2024-25 to maximize opportunities for students to earn a high school diploma and access post-secondary options.”

It’s hard to see how diminishing the worth of high school diplomas in this fashion serves students’ interests. Such individuals might indeed get into college programs, but will they be prepared for the challenges that await them there?

A cross-functional team has also been meeting each month, according to a district spokesperson, “to determine next steps, trends, system recommendations, and best practices.”

Given the bogus nature of credit recovery, one wonders what the phrase “best practices” could possibly mean in this context.

About the Author

Before his retirement, Steven Roesch taught English and German for 30 years in Fresno Unified School District.

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