When an election is just two few weeks away, one thing is certain: Political ads stuff your mailbox.

The ads all follow the same playbook. They portray candidates in the best possible light, and they all make promises about what will happen should these candidates win.

School districts that seek to get a bond measure passed follow a similar strategy.

In late September, a Fresno Unified flyer came my way, one that sang the praises of Measure H. It assured me that, if passed, the bond would make “Better Classrooms,” “Better Learning,” and “Brighter Futures” possible.

Its format suggested that the district has already been “Building Futures” and “Preparing Students for Tomorrow’s Careers,” and that a victory in November will help it stay the course. But it’s hard to reconcile these claims with some of Fresno Unified’s key decisions in recent years.

A case in point: the district’s ongoing devotion to credit recovery.

So what exactly is credit recovery? It’s something that lets high school students in the district avoid a failing grade in many of their classes. However, they don’t earn a passing grade the old-fashioned way — retaking tests, turning in extra credit, and the like.

Instead, they sit in front of computer screens and complete versions of the courses they’re failing, courses produced by a company called Imagine Edgenuity.

Sometimes they’re even able to complete such requirements for a class in record time — occasionally in a matter of days.

And so, even though they might otherwise have flunked in several key classes, they can get enough credits to receive diplomas.

On the surface this looks impressive. Students who otherwise would have failed can now lay claim to success. Credit recovery, however, has troubling downsides.

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Edgenuity Insults Those Who Do the Classroom Work

For starters, students who take the Edgenuity route to graduation wind up with degraded diplomas — documents that hardly reflect the level of achievement that traditional diplomas have. And that’s just the beginning of the shadow side of “Edge.”

Now that credit recovery is available as an option for most courses, a significant number of students apparently see little value in paying attention in class and completing assignments. After all, as several instructors have told me, these students can get passing grades later on through Edgenuity.

Jeremy Wright, one district instructor, has shared his concerns with the school board: “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 … .”

Credit Recovery Program at Odds With District Goals

It’s hard to square the problematic use of Edgenuity with the lofty goals that the Measure H campaign material proclaims. How, for example, will classrooms improve if its corrosive effects on school culture continue to fester? And how can students who graduate with degraded diplomas land tomorrow’s jobs?

A closer look at credit recovery reveals even more worrisome aspects.

After GV Wire published an op-ed of mine about credit recovery in August, a district representative responded to several follow-up questions about how it works. She tried to assured me that only rarely do students complete an Edgenuity class within a few days. That, she claimed, is very much the exception.

“Each Edgenuity course,” she wrote, “is slightly different in structure and length, but nearly all of them have an expected time to completion that averages 50 hours.”

Students Enrolled in Edgenuity Need More Instruction Time, Not Less

Her response raises new concerns.

Fresno Unified’s academic calendar contains 82 days in the fall term and 98 in the spring term. Clearly, students attending “regular” courses thus receive way more than the 50 hours of instruction for those taking the credit recovery shortcut each semester.

You’d expect the opposite to be true, of course. Those enrolled in credit recovery sessions are often students who have failed a class — and thus individuals who had trouble mastering the course material. You’d expect that such learners would need more time on task — not less, and certainly not significantly less — to absorb a course’s contents.

One veteran district instructor puts it this way: “Even in the best-case scenario, Edge will be an inferior experience …  Edge is not about education or meaningful preparation for life after high school (certainly not academic college-level coursework). It is credit recovery to boost high school graduation rates.”

A Look at the Two Versions of ‘Edge’

It also turns out that there are two versions of Edgenuity.

The district spokesperson wrote that “[o]ne version is designed for Credit Recovery (CR) and is utilized after a student takes and subsequently fails a course needed to graduate … The other version is the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) version.” This second iteration “is utilized by counselors when a student needs to take a course for graduation that they have not previously taken and failed.”

Thus, it appears that students are sometimes able to sidestep traditional classroom instruction entirely for some of their credits.

In the 2023-24 academic year, Fresno Unified students successfully completed 1,332 NCAA courses and 12,027 Credit Recovery courses.

The district maintains that all of these courses are comparable with those taught in traditional classrooms; all, they note, “are US/CSU a-g certified for college admissions.” However, it’s hard to see how these courses offer comparable learning opportunities, given the truncated time in the Edgenuity model.

Fresno Unified 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.

Those are hefty expenditures — and they’re all the more questionable when one considers that this company’s products haven’t always met with universal accolades.

Are Trustees Bothered by Reliance on Edgenuity?

The online forum Sitejabber collected 387 reviews about Imagine Edegenuity and came up with a rating of 1.7 out of 5 stars. One criticism that appears in several responses: The course videos are boring. Similar complaints crop up on the GetApp site, which reports 3.7 out of 5 stars on the basis of 16 reviews.

The district has indicated that it wants to continue this offering, insisting that “Edgenuity software has provided our students with valuable opportunities to attain credits toward graduation … ”

Students, however, deserve better than these shenanigans. As the Measure H flyer puts it, they need “Better Classrooms” and “Better Learning.”

Maybe some fresh faces on the school board would help the district change course.

About the Author

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