Use of online credit recovery is a growing trend across the country, with the hope that expanding credit recovery options through online courses will help students get back on track toward graduation (e.g., Atkins, Brown, & Hammond, 2007; Gemin, Pape, Vashaw, & Watson, 2015). But expanded use of online credit recovery for high school…

The consequences of failing core academic courses during the first year of high school are dire. In the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), only about one-fifth of off-track freshmen--students who fail more than one semester of a core academic course and/or fail to earn enough credits to be promoted to 10th grade--graduate high school, compared with…

Credit recovery is one strategy to deal with high failure rates. The primary goal of credit recovery programs is to give students an opportunity to retake classes that they failed in an effort to get them back on track and keep them in school (Watson & Gemin, 2008). Most recently, as schools across the nation struggle to keep students on track…