A smiling high school student with headphones around his neck stands in a school hallway

Flexible Pathways to On-Time Graduation

The Challenge

High school isn’t a straight line to graduation, and for some students, one wrong turn closes the path entirely. A failed course in the fall can put a diploma out of reach by senior year, and the students who fall behind are rarely behind by a single credit. State and district leaders need ways to keep students on track, recover lost ground, and expand access to required and elective coursework when schedule, staffing, or location make the traditional path difficult.

How Edmentum helps leaders keep graduation within reach

When students fall behind, flexibility can create another path forward. But a more flexible way to earn credit only makes a true difference when the credits represent real learning. This is why we treat access, progress, and trust as a single design problem rather than three.

Access

Courseware and EdOptions Academy provide states and districts with additional ways to deliver required and elective coursework when scheduling, staffing, location, or prior course failure make the traditional path difficult.

Progress

Courseware supports mastery-based and flexible credit-recovery models, so a student who failed one part of a course can focus on the learning they still need rather than automatically repeating an entire course.

Trust

Curriculum design, educator oversight, district implementation practices, and academic integrity safeguards work together to protect the meaning of the credits students earn.

Correlational | Promising Evidence

More success for students who need to recover multiple credits

In Baltimore, students managing multiple summer courses recovered more credits when Courseware was part of the mix.

Independent researchers at Empirical Education examined more than 10,000 credit-recovery course enrollments in Baltimore City Public Schools during summer 2024. The average student took three summer courses, so the question wasn’t whether one course worked; it was whether a heavy recovery load could hold. As course load increased, success rates in traditional-only schedules fell from 82% for one course to 39% for five, while an even mix that included Courseware held far steadier, from 75% to 65%.1 Students taking Courseware were not more likely to pass an individual course than comparable peers in traditional classes.1

Heavier loads, steadier results with Courseware in the mix
  1. 1 Summer Course*: Traditional only 82%, Courseware included 75%
  2. 2 Summer Courses: Traditional only 71%, Courseware included 78%
  3. 3 Summer Courses: Traditional only 61%, Courseware included 74%
  4. 4 Summer Courses: Traditional only 50%, Courseware included 70%
  5. 5 Summer Courses: Traditional only 39%, Courseware included 65%

Note: * For 1 course, success rate is raw percent of students passing either an in-person or Courseware course. For all other results, success rates estimated from a logistic regression model controlling for race/ethnicity, prior GPA, and other student characteristics. Probabilities estimated for Black female students with a prior GPA of 1.9 and a prior course completion rate of 50%. Model estimates used because of small sample sizes for some combinations and to account for differences between students, though results based on raw percentages were qualitatively similar.

2

Customer-Reported | District-Measured Outcomes

Indianapolis Public Schools rebuilt credit recovery around mastery, not seat time

Before Courseware, an IPS student who failed a class could be required to repeat a full 18-week semester. The district customized courses to its own curriculum maps, so recovery focused on the content a student still needed to master, while keeping classroom-level expectations and academic integrity standards in place. IPS reports its graduation rate rose from 79% to 95%, with more students graduating on time.3

Cara Hachmeister, Graduation and Alternative Services Coordinator, Indianapolis Public Schools
IPS improved its graduation rate
  1. 2022: 79%
  2. 2023: 82%
  3. 2024: 88%
  4. 2025: 93%
  5. 2026: 95%
3

Customer-Reported | District-Measured Outcomes

Avon High School scaled credit recovery more than tenfold and kept 1:1 support

Avon’s program rebuilt credit recovery around mastery, not shortcuts. Every student works 1:1 with a teacher and must demonstrate mastery on quizzes before advancing. That rigor, paired with flexible pacing, let the program grow from roughly 80 credits awarded annually to nearly 1,000, serving up to 60 students at a time, without compromising standards. The result: a 98.4% graduation rate, the highest in the school’s history.4

Denise Handlon, Online Education Director, Avon High School, Indiana
Avon High School reached a 98.4% graduation rate. Credits awarded annually in its credit recovery program grew from 80 before Courseware to nearly 1,000 after Courseware.
4

Our Approach | Stated Intent

Flexibility without compromising trust

Academic integrity cannot be an afterthought. It must be intentionally designed into the learning experience from the beginning, because a diploma should mean the same thing no matter which path a student took to earn it.

We approach it in three layers. At the center, a research-backed active learning curriculum design. That is combined with academic integrity safeguards to prevent, detect, and intervene, including enhanced assessment security, an IP registry, adjustable pretest thresholds, default assessment locking, and expanded mastery tests.5 Finally, all of that is upheld by sound policy and district practice marked by clear expectations, educator oversight, and communication with students and families about what the standard is.

A flexible path should still lead to a diploma everyone can trust.

Courses districts can use with confidence

Courseware has the most approved courses of any provider for Quality Matters®, ISTE®, and NCAA® and holds 14,000+ active approvals across 50 total lists, for a 99.86% approval rate.6 Edmentum also has the most course approvals from MoCAP, MOP, iCAP, GenNET, both UC a-g Course and School Provider lists, and more.6 Course approval indicates that a district recognizes a course meets state or organizational expectations for credit.

Approval and accreditation logos: Quality Matters, ISTE Seal (September 2025–2027), Cognia accredited, College Board, and NCAA.

Awards and recognition

Courseware and EdOptions Academy won the Tech & Learning Awards of Excellence: Best of the Year in Secondary Education. Courseware won the EdTech Digest Cool Tool Award for Best Digital Courseware Solution and the EdTech Breakthrough Award for Courseware Solution Provider of the Year. Courseware won Tech and Learning Awards of Excellence: Back to School and Tech & Learning Best of Show at ISTELive 2025 in the Secondary category.7

Award badges: two Tech and Learning Awards of Excellence Best of 2025 Secondary Education winner badges; EdTech Breakthrough Award 2025 Digital Courseware Solution of the Year; The EdTech Awards Cool Tool winner 2026; Tech and Learning Awards of Excellence Back to School Secondary Education winner; and Tech and Learning Best of Show ISTELive 25 Secondary Education winner.

Examine the evidence for graduation pathways