*UPDATED

While LA Unified is firmly committed to online credit recovery classes as a means to the district’s newly stated top goal — 100 percent graduation — Los Angeles charter school operators use these classes much more sparingly, as their graduation rates tend to be far ahead of the district’s.

At three of the city’s largest charter management organizations, no more than 5 percent of students have taken an online credit recovery course. LA Unified has yet to report how many of their 2016 graduates used credit recovery to gain a diploma. A $15-million credit recovery program took LA Unified’s projected graduation rate from 49 percent last fall to an estimated 75 percent this summer, a record. The official graduation rate will be reported later this fall.

The three CMO’s also have more stringent policies for testing out of a course. LA Unified allows students to test out of much of a course if they can score 60 percent on a pre-test. The charters set that bar higher or don’t allow testing out.

“I strongly support the use of online learning, not just for credit recovery but for enrichment and for broadening the curriculum. That said, across all of our schools, only 1.3 percent of the course credits are provided through online learning,” said Caprice Young, who is CEO of Magnolia Public Schools and also a former LA Unified school board president.

Last school year, as part of a $15 million program, LA Unified for the first time implemented a major push for online credit recovery courses across the district. The move was in response to a looming graduation crisis, as the school board raised the bar for graduation requirements and installed a series of courses called “A through G.” Students would need to take and pass the A-G courses before the end of their senior year, and if they earned all C grades or above would be eligible for admittance into California’s public universities, although the district allows D’s for graduation.

The district was unprepared for the raised bar, so part way through the fall of 2015 the credit recovery program kicked in. This year the courses were offered as soon as school started.

The dramatic increase in the graduation rate has turned some heads in the academic world, with some experts questioning the validity and rigor of online credit recovery courses. In that program, students without enough credits to graduate retake classes during free periods, after school, on Saturdays and during the winter break. The courses are online and have either a teacher running the class along with a computer program, known as blended learning, or an all-online course known as virtual learning. If students prove proficiency with the material they receive a C grade at LA Unified. A’s and B’s aren’t an option.

But LA Unified is not alone in using online credit recovery programs despite their controversial nature. Most large districts across the country also use them, as do at least three of the largest CMOs authorized by LA Unified, although each one appears to use them on a far more limited basis. And each CMO — PUC Schools, Alliance College-Ready Public Schools and Magnolia Public Schools — had a different set of guidelines regarding if students could pre-test out of some course material.

PUC SCHOOLS

“We most definitely use it very sparingly. It is not our goal to use it in place of intervention and support,” said Leslie Chang, superintendent of leadership and instruction for PUC Schools. PUC operates 16 schools, of which six are high schools.

Chang said PUC used Apex Learning for its online programs, which is one of two companies that LA Unified also uses. Chang estimated that 4 or 5 percent of PUC graduates last year had taken at least one online course and said it was most commonly used when a student transferred into a PUC school already behind in credits.

“If the child is behind and we determine that based on their current schedule they may need to take an additional course, then we will offer that option to them. We want to make sure it is not the go-to for everything that is required for graduation for our schools. Typically, a select few number of students will use the blended learning approach,” Chang said.

PUC also has different guidelines on pre-testing. While LA Unified allows students to skip chapters or units if they pass at least 60 percent of a pre-test, PUC sets the pre-test bar at 70 percent.

“I think there is a place for online learning in the academic experience of every student in today’s day and age. I do not think it can replace the power and effectiveness of a teacher, and if a student is behind in credits or content, then blended learning can have a very powerful effect,” Chang said. “But they really do have to be in tandem with teacher support and done very strategically and intentionally.”

MAGNOLIA

Young said she thought that LA Unified’s approach to online credit recovery will become more balanced in time. Magnolia operates eight independent charter schools within LA Unified, and four of them are schools for grades 6-12.

“I think LAUSD is going in the right direction, and the next step is to get more nuanced in how they use it. This is pretty common when school districts implement online learning. The first year it may be overused or underused or inappropriately used, but as they get more nuanced about how to match the right kids with the right courses and the right content it makes sense,” Young said.

Magnolia has an 80 percent pre-test bar and they use Fuel Education for their programs. Young estimated that 5 percent of Magnolia’s graduates last year took an online credit recovery course.

“And that’s because kids don’t always start with us in 6th grade, they may come to us in their junior year and they are already behind and we have to help them catch up, and sometimes that requires them to essentially take more than six courses in the semester. Adding more online can catch them up,” Young said.

Young also defended the idea of pre-testing.

“One of the things that the online learning is for is at the beginning of each unit the student can demonstrate their knowledge, and then if they can demonstrate their knowledge that they know it, there is no sense in boring the student and making them retake it,” Young said.

ALLIANCE

Perhaps the biggest reason the large CMOs use online credit recovery on a more limited basis is because they tend to be far ahead of the district in graduation rates. Magnolia’s graduation rate in 2015 was 96.4 percent. Alliance’s grad rate in 2014-15 was 95 percent, and PUC says they exceed 90 percent every year. With fewer students in danger of not graduating, fewer are obviously in need of credit recovery.

“Graduation is what we do. It’s part of our DNA. It’s what we do. And it could be what LAUSD does too and hopefully they will,” Young said.

Robert Pambello, an area superintendent for Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, said Alliance’s use is “very limited. Every student has a graduation plan, and so we track students on a regular basis for being on track for graduation, and there are very few kids that actually need the credit recovery.” Alliance is LA Unified’s largest CMO and operates 28 schools. Eighteen of them are high schools.

Pambello said less than 3 percent of Alliance’s graduates last year took an online course and that Alliance does not allow pre-testing.

“We do not have that feature. The student takes the whole course because they did not pass the course,” he said. “We don’t do pre-testing at all, they are assigned the course and they work through the course at their own pace.”

GREEN DOT

Not every large CMO is as centrally organized with its online curriculum as PUC, Alliance and Magnolia. Green Dot Public Schools, which manages nine high schools in Los Angeles and Inglewood, has online credit recovery programs but does not centrally track how many students are taking them. The courses are viewed no differently than its regular curriculum, according to Sean Thibault, communications director for Green Dot.

“It’s not like there is an online department or a whole team working on online programs, this is just part of what the whole curriculum team does,” he said. “Every one of the Green Dot schools in high school are offering A-G curriculum as the baseline, there is no friendlier curriculum they could do. So all the schools are doing assessments and doing what they can with proficiency and to catch some students up in the school year.”

As far as what the guidelines are, Thibault said “as a general rule, where students need that kind of option (with credit recovery) we have made it available. I don’t think that there is a model that is enforced or universal for pre-testing, but it is more school-by-school, or depending it could be course-by-course or instructor-by-instructor or student-by-student. And that’s Green Dot’s approach, to identify the student’s needs and develop the instruction they need to be successful.”

Pacific Palisades Charter High School is not a CMO but a standalone independent charter school. While it also offers credit recovery, like Green Dot it does not centrally track how many students are taking the courses. The school has been offering online credit recovery courses for five years during summer school, but this year it also began offering them throughout the school year as well. Like LA Unified and the large CMOs, the online courses are overseen by a licensed teacher.

“We do not know (how many take online credit recovery). We don’t track it in that way, because when the student passes the course, because it has a highly qualified teacher running it, it doesn’t have a separate designation,” said Jeff Hartman, director of academic planning and guidance.

Palisades does not allow for any pre-testing out of chapters or units. Randy Tenan-Snow, an English teacher at Palisades who helps oversee online credit recovery, predicted the school will be expanding its program in the coming years.

“I believe that as we gather more data and we start enrolling more students, I see that online and blended programs will be the wave of the future for most students that are trying to do credit recovery,” she said. “It is very difficult to add a class when you are already taking six classes, so to take a class online it definitely helps our community and our students. We will probably expand as we move forward.”

*UPDATED to reflect PUC operates six high schools, not four. 

The apparent ease with which the district was able to substantially boost the number of diplomas it handed out through a $15 million credit recovery program turned heads and has some asking if the online courses are rigorous enough. Board President Steve Zimmer has questions, as did the Los Angeles Times editorial pages and some academics.

But while online credit recovery has been making headlines in Los Angeles this year, LA Unified is far from the only district using it, and one of the nation’s largest providers of online credit recovery programs has found a growing appetite for its product over the last 10 years.

Apex Learning CEO Cheryl Vedoe said the company began in 1999 by providing online advanced placement programs, but in 2005 it started providing online credit recovery programs, which have “really just taken off from there.” Before long, she said, Apex learned that when it comes to online classes, credit recovery is what districts want most.

Apex is one of two companies contracted by LA Unified to provide online credit recovery courses. The other is Edgenuity. Apex has over 1,500 contracts with school districts nationwide and is in the first year of a five-year contract with LA Unified to provide online courses. The contract for the two companies is not to exceed $5 million over the five years, and schools can choose between the two companies when selecting their courses.

Below is an edited version of LA School Report’s recent interview with Vedoe.

Q: There has been some recent criticism in Los Angeles of online credit recovery, and in particular with allowing students to pretest out of some of the curriculum. The Los Angeles Times editorial board was critical recently, and some academics have also spoken out. What is your response to the criticism?

A: It is important to take a look at the kinds of students taking credit recovery in the first place. Many of the ones in need of credit recovery, it is not the case that they didn’t learn a great deal in the course that they were in, but for what can be a variety of different reasons students haven’t passed the course. It’s not surprising that some students, when given the opportunity to accelerate through a course in order to recover the credit can do that and can do that successfully. So I think we need to recognize that. There are also some students who failed a course because they weren’t mastering any of the material.

Q: What about the fact that the NCAA does not accept credits that were received through accelerated online courses? Do you know why it does not accept them? Are you concerned if other organizations or districts began to follow the NCAA’s lead?

A: I can only surmise why that is. I can surmise that is because not all programs are created equal, and rather than having to analyze every single accelerated program to make sure that it is meeting their requirements, what they are saying is we want students to complete the entire course.

Q: What is your response to those out there asking if the courses are rigorous enough?

A: I would say when it comes to our courses, they are generally viewed as being rigorous and challenging. We develop our courses to fully meet the expectation that our students are ready for college after taking the courses… Our courses are put through a fairly rigorous review. When you look at credit recovery and students who are accelerated through courses, first of all it is not all students who are able to do that. But for the student who sat through the entire course and for some reason wasn’t successful on the final exam and now they are in a credit recovery situation, they are sometimes more highly motivated because this is what is standing between them and graduation. I think sometimes it is natural for people to question whether all students are able to do that, because these are students who weren’t successful.

Q: Are you aware if the UC system is reevaluating if it will accept online credit recovery or pretesting?

A: I’m not aware of that. The process has changed slightly over the years, but we have regularly submitted courses to the UC system. I am not aware that there have been any changes to the process. And I think it is a fairly rigorous process.

Q: What about the paranoid “Terminator 2” question: If online courses are really so effective, is this the beginning of computers and robots taking the place of teachers?

A: I don’t believe this is the beginning of computers taking over and teaching kids everything. When our courses are implemented there are teachers actively involved. What our courses do is offer an option for teachers so they can reasonably individualize instruction for every student, particularly those who have not been successful.

• Read more on credit recovery: Are the courses ‘very rigorous’?, Credit recovery starts early this year, Zimmer expresses frustration over credit recovery

LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer recently sat down with LA School Report at his field office tucked away in an east Hollywood strip mall, where there is a unique partnership with the Youth Policy Institute and the school district that hosts after-school programs, adult classes and classes for homeless youth.

During the hour-long interview, Zimmer spoke about his passion to eradicate the school readiness gap (the achievement gap between students of color from disadvantaged backgrounds as they enter the school system compared to their white and wealthier peers), the relationship between the school board and Superintendent Michelle King, who is entering her ninth month as the leader of the nation’s second-largest school district, and his experience working as a counselor at Marshall High School helping students cross the graduation stage.

Here are Zimmer’s comments on the district’s online credit recovery program, administered by companies including Edgenuity, which has been scrutinized for its rigor amid the district’s recent announcement that its graduation has reached a record 75 percent even as the bar has been raised with the requirement that students pass the A through G, the course criteria established by UC faculty. (Lightly edited for clarity and length.)

• Read more on credit recovery: Are the courses ‘very rigorous’?, Credit recovery starts early this year, Zimmer expresses frustration over credit recovery, LAUSD summer school had better teaching 

Q: We’d like to talk to you about the district’s online credit recovery program. On Tuesday (Aug. 23), you made it clear that you have concerns about it.

A: It’s a great concern to me.

Q: What are your concerns? What do you want to see done this year? What did you learn from last year? 

A: So, there’s so many places to start on where I’m concerned. But I think the most important place to start about where I’m concerned is I’m simultaneously concerned about the right now and the long view. The long view is not about how many assignments were in Edgenuity. Not that I’m not concerned about that — actually I am.

But I am much more concerned that we believe having an individual education plan for every middle and high school student is a key lever for moving the needle on this, that we have to be looking very, very carefully at career and training pathways and I don’t think we are. And as a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure we’re not.

And so, both in the immediate short-term when you’re looking at academic counseling loads and ratios, the medium-term in terms of if we do try and bring those down, do we actually have the folks who are credentialed and who intentionally want to work with our students in this way and the long-view is we know we’re going to be in a teacher shortage. I know we’re going to be in counselor shortage. What are we doing in terms of our partnerships to build the right kind of pipelines to make sure the right people are in those counseling seats with the right set of  skills, with the right asset-based mindset about our students and the right balance of a caseload where they can actually do this?

Having an individual graduation plan, as important as it might be, needs to be more important than just having a piece of paper. I mean having a piece of paper actually for urban school districts, where the belief system was not what it was in affluent school districts, is a step and an important step. Because having an individualized graduation plan, by definition, means we expect you to graduate and we expect you to graduate fully completing the A through G’s. So this is not triage or salvage work. This is intentional and very purposeful and is of high rigor and high quality all the way through. When you have a plan, there’s an infinitely better chance that the plan will be executed, as opposed to not having any plan.

Q: How concerned were you when you heard UC was looking at this credit recovery program and might reject the courses? (Update: Since this interview, a UC spokeswoman said UC has reviewed the courses and there will be no changes to the admission status of incoming freshmen accepted to UC.) 

A: So short-term obviously, we’re concerned for our students because it’s certainly no fault of theirs. They completed the courses that they were asked to complete to graduate, fulfilling the A through G’s, so I have a short-term concern, of course, for them.

Am I concerned that they’re looking at this? No. I think they should look at it. I’m very skeptical of online recovery programs. I’m very skeptical of online instruction period. I say skeptical in the literal sense. I’m not a Luddite on it. I’m not reactively opposed to it. I think that we in the new terrain that is blended instruction, blended instruction within a year or two is not going to be some kind of branded movement that the Alliance charter schools try and so, therefore, it is wonderful.

Blended instruction is going to be part of instruction. Period. In many ways it already is. Do our teachers have the right training and support to use it the best way possible? I don’t think so. Not yet. And so, yeah, I’m interested and concerned and skeptical all at the same time. It’s not necessarily negative.

Q: Will the school board be taking another look at this?

A: As it related to Edgenuity and all those contracts, the first thing to say is that let’s be clear on what everybody expected and what happened and what the narrative should and shouldn’t be around this.

Access to an A through G college-preparatory curriculum is a foregone conclusion in affluent school districts, whether they be suburban, wherever they are. Nobody asks that question. Nobody says are our students capable of this level of rigor? It’s assumed that they are. And that is, not to give a lecture, but that is just very clear exposition of systemic racism. That’s what it is and it shouldn’t be called anything else.

And so when there’s all these questions about did our students really do this? I think we have to check ourselves. And go back to 10 years ago, 12 years ago when we first passed the A through G and how much of this is going to hurt students.

Go back two years ago to the editorial pages of the LA Times where literally they said we are setting up these students or those students for failure. We still use this language today. Catastrophic failure did not happen. Let’s say it turns out that this “all hands on deck” approach that really probably the true rate was more like 70 percent than 75 percent if you don’t accept these credit recovery courses.

Q: Do you know how many students used online credit recovery courses in order to graduate?

A: No. Today on Aug. 25, I stand by 100 percent what our numbers are, but I also understand that folks are looking at them and they should. But even if the numbers were 70 percent, it’s important to understand that’s not what people thought would happen, that’s not what people thought our kids were capable of, or our teachers were capable of, or our system was capable of.

Now when there was this big panic around when the fall numbers came out and the fall numbers looked very low, that was even somewhat at the district level, both the panic around that and the misunderstanding of that was mostly from folks who had never worked graduation. I worked graduation for 10 years. I was in charge of the kids who were between 20 and 60 credits down when the fall semester started. And that’s what I did and that was a chunk of my job.

Q: What was your role?

A: I was intervention coordinator at Marshall High School. I always had that as a half-time position. I didn’t want to leave the classroom. We also had over 4,300 students. Marshall was a very different school back then. Most students from the Los Feliz, Silver Lake community did not go to Marshall. It was a very different place and so I understand what it’s like to get kids across the stage. And I understand when we were talking about two to four classes away, we were not in a crisis. We had to be very, very intentional about how it was done, but it was only because there was so much attention and scrutiny to it, now I didn’t think that that was a bad thing because that allowed us to move resources to do this “all hands on deck,” but what people don’t understand is at every comprehensive high school every spring, it’s all hands on deck. That’s what you do.

And so what happened was not this kind of miracle on ice or miracle on the graduation stage that people kind of thought. That’s what happens every year at schools because life happens to kids. Even kids that are not so far off the rails.

After spending almost 20 years working almost exclusively with adolescents, that there’s very few things that are absolutely true. But what’s almost absolutely true, if you’re going to be in high school for four years, you’re going to have one really rough semester. It’s this invisible cloud of adolescent angst, or a break-up, or a family situation, or normal stressors, or non-normative stressors, or whatever it is, it hits almost every kid at some point during adolescence.

If you have the system in place, especially family systems in place, especially family systems in place where the adults do not lose their minds when this happens, then it’s a rough time and everything’s OK. What happens in families that are already in crisis is oftentimes the entire system collapses or the perception of the student is that everything is collapsing around them, and so without a comprehensive system of supports at the school site, that’s how we lose kids.

And sure, there are gang issues, there are teen pregnancies, whatever the issues are, those issues become predominant during a time that’s fairly normative in adolescence, and so when you look at it from that view and you look at how few resources our students had and how just there wasn’t the stability that would put the guardrails around that one rough adolescent period, it was not unusual for even a fairly strong student to have failed a couple of classes because life happened and there weren’t those guardrails. So not tremendously shocking for those of us who have done this that our numbers were where they were. Certainly urgent and certainly demanded everyone’s full attention.

Q: But it was not something you hadn’t seen before?

A: Not something I haven’t seen before. Again, there was some of this that was about the increased rigor under the A through G, absolutely.

All I’m saying is is that there were other factors involved, but kind of the baseline factor very few people outside of those of us who had worked this for so long understood. There were many factors, a whole cacophony of things, that made the numbers probably a little bit more severe than they had been previously, but just at a baseline level you know that you start your senior year, you’re going to have to offer some very focused resources and some very focused attention to get kids across that line.

So there was a very public exhibition on a district-wide level of what happens at schools every year and yes, it was punctuated and maybe a little bit more extreme, but not like a new thing.

Now what was new in some ways were these online credit recovery resources. I visited a bunch of classrooms where they were doing it. You don’t learn completely about a program from visiting it for one day or even two days. Was there a teacher in the classroom? Absolutely. Did the teacher seem like they knew what they were doing? Absolutely. Would I have been thankful if these resources were in place when I was trying to get certain kids across the graduation line? Absolutely. Did it seem like it was real and there was rigor to what I was seeing students doing? Yeah. Yes. but do I know for sure? We won’t know for sure until UC takes a look at it, until we continue to take a look at it.

Q: Did online credit recovery work too well because it has taken the luster off the grad rate? Did you expect to break the graduation record?

A: I think the trajectories have been very steady. If we had gone from 64 or even 67 percent to 75. This was a clear trajectory, more resources on hand, not only the online credit recovery. I encourage you to visit what’s called an II (Individualized Instruction) lab at adult schools that’s a more traditional version of credit recovery. We opened II labs through spring break and that was one of the things behind the scenes. Sometimes, and you’ll rarely see this on the dais, but there are some things I will not just take no for an answer. The idea that we have students striving toward graduation and we were going to shut down for a week during spring break, was just, that could not happen.

Q: Does that usually happen?

A: That’s what usually happens. Even if we only served 100 kids that week, there were seven or eight centers open during the spring break and kids came. There were all kinds of things that were happening to give the proper attention to the first time under A through G. To some of the other factors, it was not just credit recovery. It certainly didn’t work too well. What we have to see is what’s the role of this. What’s the right role.

I have a particular view of how data should be used, particularly standardized test data. I’m sometimes characterized as anti-data, but I’m very concerned about the way data is used. I have strong convictions of data as an instrument around calibration and redesign vs. data as a hammer. Data as a hammer is about political agendas, it’s not about getting to better for kids. The same is true about blended learning, online credit recovery. This is part of our toolbox right now, and to toss it out of that tool box when it can really help students would be both counterintuitive and would not be fair, truthfully.

Q: What is the ultimate goal?

A: We need to design instructional programs so that we’re not in the position of doing credit recovery and certainly not credit recovery because the instructional delivery wasn’t adequate or the supports weren’t adequate. There’s going to be a degree of credit recovery that’s going to happen, as I explained before, because from my experience because of adolescence and the things that happen, there’s always going to be some credit recovery that you need to do. But our entire system should be geared towards, if we really believe these kinds of things about RTI (response to intervention), if we really believe in the differentiation of instruction and we are training our teachers and supporting our teachers well about how you do differentiation that would be what our primary focus should be, not on recovery.

Q: What would you like it to look like?

A: What I would like it to look like, again, is better professional development, better supports for teachers on an ongoing basis, I would like it to have an informational dashboard so that we know where there are problems sooner and we can do intervention rather than recovery.

This is hard work. When you’re really talking about changing mindsets when you’re talking about changing hearts and minds both in general, but at school sites. When you’re talking about constant improvement in terms of instructional quality. We have not given a lot of attention to lowering the affective filter (a term used by Stephen Krashen, which refers to negative emotional and motivational factors — like anxiety, self-consciousness— that can interfere with processing information, like learning a second language) to getting to better instructional quality. It’s not about, do you have a skill that you weren’t trained for in your teacher preparation program. That’s a very deficit mindset approach.

The vast majority of teachers want to do right by our kids. Of course, we have teachers who shouldn’t be in front of kids. We made a lot of strides in the last five years, but that’s not the majority of our teachers. The vast majority of teachers are teachers because they want kids to break through and succeed. We need to lower the affective filter among our instructors on getting to better skill sets to meet all of these needs. Differentiation is one of the hardest things, if you talk to teachers, to do. It’s very hard for me as an ESL teacher. We came to differentiation early on because by definition we’re going to get kids at very different levels especially if you’re in a very diverse ESL class, like I did.

What I want us to commit to is very honest and open conversations with our teams on the front line about what they need. Look, we had a very fear-based system under John Deasy. There were reasons why that happened. In the long run, while there were some shifts and some shaking that needed to happen in the system, we injured the profession. We injured people’s confidence, people did not believe that we believed in them and when you don’t think the leadership in the district believes in you, you’ve got a huge problem.

Coming up: More Q & A with Zimmer, as he discusses the board’s relationship with Superintendent Michelle King and his drive to eradicate the school readiness gap.

How rigorous are those courses? Do they affect the value of an LA Unified diploma?

A vice president of one of LA Unified’s main vendors of credit recovery, Edgenuity, said that no districts around the country have asked for their courses to be more rigorous, and they work with thousands of them.

“I don’t think anyone has ever looked at our courses and said these aren’t hard enough. The courses themselves are very rigorous. There is not a need to make our courses harder,” said Deborah Rayow, vice president of Core Curriculum and Credit Recovery for Edgenuity.

What is part of the discussion, Rayow said, is “what should be considered passing? How much of this do you need to master in order to earn a credit? And that’s something traditional and online teachers ask themselves all the time.”

Edgenuity provides online courses to districts in all 50 states — and credit recovery courses to eight of the 10 largest districts in the nation, including LA Unified, Chicago Public Schools and Miami-Dade County Public Schools. Besides credit recovery courses, the company offers a wide variety of others, including Advanced Placement or elective courses not available at a school. This school year, as part of LA Unified’s $15 million credit recovery program, Edgenuity signed a $400,000 contract with the district to provide online courses and training for teachers to administer them.

In the online credit recovery program, students who failed or received a D in a course can take an accelerated online version of the course during free periods, after school, on Saturdays, at summer school or during vacation breaks. A teacher either runs the class along with a computer program, known as blended learning, or the course is taught entirely online, known as virtual learning. If students prove proficient with the material, they receive a C grade; an A or B is not an option.

Some of the recent criticism of LA Unified’s online credit recovery courses stems from the ability of students to “pre-test” out of a course and skip much of the curriculum. Rayow said what constitutes a pre-test pass, or whether to offer pre-testing at all, is determined by the district, not Edgenuity. She said what districts choose for a pre-testing standard varies widely.

“It is always up to the district. We are a provider of curriculum and tools. We don’t make decisions about district policies,” she said.

While defending LA Unified’s decision to use online credit recovery, school board President Steve Zimmer said he is skeptical of the courses and thinks they should be looked at harder by the district, though he did not specify what a review might look like over the next year. Zimmer said he sat in on a few online credit recovery classes and found the coursework to be rigorous and the students to be learning.

“Am I concerned that they are looking at this? No, I think they should look at it,” Zimmer said when asked about reports that the University of California system is reviewing online credit recovery courses to see if they will be accepted for admittance into its colleges. “I am very skeptical of online recovery programs. I’m very skeptical of online instruction, period. But am I skeptical in the literal sense? I am not a Luddite on it. I’m not reactively opposed to it.”

A spokesperson for the UC system said the review will not impact the admission status of students who have been accepted to UC schools starting this fall.

Rayow stressed that Edgenuity simply provides curriculum and that the threshold for passing a course and how much a student needs to master is always up to the district.

“The rules are the right rules, so the question of what is the right passing threshold and should you allow kids to pre-test out of certain types of activities, those are great questions that all districts ask themselves, and that they ask us and that we ask districts,” Rayow said.

However, Rayow did defend the practice of pre-testing and said it is essential.

“We don’t want to waste a student’s time figuring out how to do the Pythagorean theorem when they are saying, ‘I know this, I know this, just give me the test so that I can show you.’ And that’s what pre-testing is there for. It is not a way to skip the content and get an easy grade. It is time efficient,” she said.

When asked to respond to the criticism that LA Unified’s graduation turnaround last school year was too extensive and rapid to be rigorous, Rayow said, “There is certainly always going to be criticism of any way that lets students earn a credit when they shouldn’t. The question is what constitutes earning a credit.”

She added, “I’m proud of the work Edgenuity does. I think we help a lot of kids across the country. But I am wary to ever take credit for the successes of any district, because ultimately it is the district that drives the success. We are proud to be partners with our districts, but they all implement Edgenuity differently. They all own their own successes. We are just along for the ride.”

Michelle King visits Luther Burbank Middle School.

LA Unified is wasting no time in getting students with poor or failing marks into its online credit recovery program at the start of the new school year.

A district communications representative confirmed that credit recovery began right away for any student who earned a D or F in a course now being offered through the program.

Last school year, the district did not begin offering the courses until October or November, depending on the local district, but this year it is enrolling students right away in the makeup courses. The program has proven successful in boosting the graduation rate, but the value of those diplomas has been questioned by some academic experts and editorial pages.

Last year, the district was facing a huge drop-off in its graduation rate due to the school board raising the bar for what is required. For the first time, seniors had to complete and pass all of their A though G courses, which are required for acceptance into California’s public universities. LA Unified allows students to earn D’s in the courses and still qualify to graduate, although C’s are required by the universities.

The district was ill-prepared for the new requirements and entered the 2015-16 school year with only 49 percent of its seniors on pace to graduate. But it was also the first year the district implemented a wide-scale online credit recovery program, which along with some other traditional programs was part of a $15 million effort to help seniors graduate on time. After enrolling thousands of students in the courses — which took place in classrooms in front of computers after school, during free periods, over summer school or during winter and spring break — LA Unified Superintendent Michelle King announced earlier this month the projected graduation rate for 2015-16 was 75 percent, a new record.

The district has yet to disclose how many seniors graduated due to at least one online credit recovery course, but some are saying the way the record was achieved is questionable. A recent Los Angeles Times editorial criticized the graduation rate as “not quite as remarkable as it appears” due to the apparent ease with which some students are able to complete the online courses.

Academics are also beginning to question the online courses and the high number of graduates they are helping produce. “It looks very fishy,” Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an editor of Education Next and research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, told LA School Report in February.

Still, LA Unified is marching forward with its online efforts, and another $15 million has been set aside by the school board this fiscal year for credit recovery. At total of $400,000 of that is going to a company called Edgenuity that provides online courses.

Last year, LA Unified’s Chief Academic Officer Frances Gipson said that California’s public universities had approved the online credit recovery courses provided by Edgenuity and others as acceptable for admission. University of California spokeswoman Claire Doan said recently that the university system has reviewed Edgenuity’s online credit recovery courses offered by LA Unified. She declined to say whether any changes have resulted from the review.

She said there will be no change to the admission status of the students who have been accepted to UC schools starting this fall.

For its fall 2015 class of freshmen, UC schools admitted 2,659 students who attended public high schools in Los Angeles. Those numbers do not include LA Unified high schools outside of Los Angeles, like Bell High School. It does include charter schools in Los Angeles.

In the fall of 2015, 1,504 students from Los Angeles public high schools enrolled in UC schools. Data is not available for this fall. You can search for your own school here.

“UC reviews California high school courses — classroom-based and online — according to ‘A-G’ course criteria determined by UC faculty,” Doan said in a statement. “UC only approves courses that meet those criteria. We rely on educators and administrators throughout the state to uphold the standards and rigor of those approved courses.”

Cal State University spokeswoman Toni Molle said CSU is not investigating Edgenuity courses. The university does “routinely monitor the Edgenuity site,” she said.

UC approves A-G course eligibility for both the UC and CSU systems.

Some LA Unified independent charter schools are also using credit recovery. One high school has alerted parents by automated phone calls that credit recovery will start at the campus Sept. 1, and any student who had earned a D or an F in an English, math or history class is eligible to take the online makeup courses. The classes are limited, it stated, and seniors would get first priority.