Acceleration, Not Remediation: Closing the Achievement Gap

Acceleration, Not Remediation:
Closing the Achievement Gap with AVID Strategies

by Robert Gira

Maximo Escobedo holds a bachelor's degree from a prestigious school of design and is close to obtaining a second degree as well. He is a graphic designer with his own graphics firm in San Diego. His former high school classmate, Clarence Fields, received his degree in business and is now an executive with one of the largest document companies in the world. Their friend, Alicia Gallegos, has a master's degree and is a human resources administrator.

All three are graduates of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) Program, which began at Clairemont High School in San Diego in 1980 and has now seen over 20,000 graduates move on to college at over a 95% figure. Most of these students are the first in their families to attend college and their enrollment rate in four-year colleges and universities far exceeds that of others traditionally under served by post-secondary education-- African American, Latino, Native American, and low income students.

Today, AVID is an international educational reform program serving over 60,000 students at more than 1,500 middle schools and high schools in 21 states and 14 foreign countries. In California, AVID is a statewide, legislatively supported initiative, part of that state's efforts to close the achievement gap and to increase access to Advanced Placement coursework. Eleven California regional centers support AVID schools. In Texas, AVID is the one of the most prominent comprehensive school reform programs for middle schools and high schools. In North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia, AVID helps students meet state standards and gain entrance to college.

How did a college preparatory program for under served students find its way out of one high school in San Diego and make its way across the nation? Mary Catherine Swanson, founder and executive director of the educational nonprofit AVID Center, created the program from her Clairemont High School English classroom in 1980 but never envisioned her efforts extending beyond that school.

"I knew that Clairemont was about to change demographically," she recalls. "I liked teaching challenging classes and I didn't want to lose our college-going culture. Luckily, I was allowed to experiment with a support structure for those who didn't have the background of our upper-income students."

When Swanson started the AVID Program in 1980, she did not foresee the economic and educational upheaval, and the increasing emphasis on accountability and standards that California and many other states would subsequently undergo. As Clairemont High School's English department chair, however, she observed that the school's student population was changing rapidly, due to the voluntary desegregation program initiated by the San Diego Unified School District. Parents from economically disadvantaged areas took the opportunity to send their students to Clairemont, which had a strong reputation for academics.

Maximo Escobedo and Clarence Fields were among that first group of students bussed to Clairemont from San Diego's inner city. Entering a school with a strong college-bound culture did not guarantee their success, however. When Escobedo first met with his counselor, he was given lower level classes that were definitely not the fastest route to college.

"I think there was a certain expectation about students like us," recalls Escobedo, who had moved to the U.S. from Mexico the previous year and was just learning English. "I was surprised at the lightness of the load."

Escobedo demanded that he be placed in a college-preparatory sequence, was granted his wish, and was placed in AVID as well.

"It made a huge difference for me," he says. "I did have family support and the expectation of going to college, but without AVID it would have taken me a lot longer to get through. It took one of my brothers nine years to get his degree."

One Teacher's Experience—No Time for Remediation

With over 14 years of teaching experience at Clairemont High School, Swanson took pride in the site's accomplishments. After all, over 80% of the previously homogeneous, middle-class student population enrolled in college. In the fall of 1980, however, a new high school received many of our more affluent students, who were replaced by 500 new young people-- most of them African American and Latino students with little or no experience in a pre-college curriculum. Given the opportunity to develop a support system for the new students who wanted a chance at college, she created AVID as an academic acceleration elective. She chose the acronym from the Latin "avidus," meaning "eager for knowledge."

"This was a challenging and fulfilling experience for me," she says, "because it required that I examine my own instructional practices and constantly reevaluate them based on student achievement. Further, I forced myself to look beyond my own English discipline and network with colleagues across campus. What did mathematics teachers require? How could I assist students in science?"

This was new territory for a teacher. Although Swanson had been English department chair and an Advanced Placement teacher, she found herself in a new role as a campus leader. In 1980, this was a rare opportunity for a teacher. Perhaps more importantly, she discovered that, to be successful in preparing AVID students for college, she had to communicate with colleges and universities to discover what her students needed to know and be able to do.

"This was eye-opening for me," she says. "When I looked at the records of my first 30 AVID students, many of them were reading below grade level, and a number of them were second speakers of English. I thought that I would spend most of my time on remediation, improving their basic skills. As I developed the class, however, and it became an academic clearing house for all of their challenging courses, I found that we had no time for remediation."

Swanson was allowed to continue her experiment for the next three years, refining her support structure, slowly reaching out to faculty, many of whom were skeptical of her work with "those AVID students" who didn't look like the traditional academic types at Clairemont. She made her mistakes, to be sure, but learned in the process. In the end, all 30 of the first group graduated, with 28 enrolling in four-year colleges. Soon, other high schools in San Diego City Schools took notice. Then Swanson, who collected every bit of data possible on her students, was asked to spread AVID to more high schools and, eventually, middle schools. What started as a small experiment became a groundswell of reform throughout California and other states.

Today, AVID's high school and middle level curriculum and approach to schoolwide achievement are formalized and recognizable to all AVID teachers and site teams throughout the world. During the program's inception, Swanson quickly discovered the key aspects necessary if the AVID elective were to assist under served students and if schools were to benefit from AVID's approach to schoolwide achievement:

To succeed in rigorous curriculum, students needed organizational and study skills. She provided them with binders which they quickly filled with notes, graphic organizers, and test-taking tips. Over the last 20 years, the AVID binder has become one of the program's important symbols and a source of pride for students. At the time, to Swanson and her students, it seemed simply a practical survival tool.

Realizing that she "couldn't do it all," Swanson recruited college students as tutors within the AVID classroom. They led subject-specific tutorial groups based on the notes students took and the questions they developed. Today, AVID holds numerous tutor training sessions throughout the U.S. and overseas, with a formalized development system for teachers, tutors, and students.

Venturing into the unknown, Swanson relied on the collaborative support of her colleagues. Faculty who had previously kept their doors tightly sealed allowed tutors to attend their classes in order to assist students with note taking and to help them grasp key concepts. Faculty members also began to participate in discussions with Swanson, the AVID students, and the tutors, focusing on what steps they could take to make students successful in rigorous curriculum. This "think tank" became the basis for the AVID site team, now a key program component. "Before this," she recalls, "the deepest discussions we had were around the allocation of parking spaces."

As an English teacher, Swanson knew that writing was an important key to academic progress. As a result, she and her tutors began to focus in the AVID classroom on numerous writing- to -learn activities. Clairemont faculty members joined college professors to discuss the writing domains necessary for success in college. These later became the basis for the writing portion of California's statewide assessment system. Further, Swanson discovered that a constant focus on inquiry and collaboration within the AVID classroom improved performance. In later years, as students increased their access to Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs, she added a reading component. Today, AVID refers to these as WICR methodologies, and writing, inquiry, collaboration, and reading remain essential to any AVID program.

As Swanson studied school reform, she observed that efforts often focused on students at the top and at the bottom of the achievement ladder. However, a large group was neglected. In fact, she found AVID works best for underachieving students in the middle. Today, the target population for AVID is indeed the students whose previous grades in non-rigorous courses have resulted in a 2.0 to 3.0 grade point average.

As AVID was broadly disseminated across numerous states, Swanson became concerned about consistency and quality. Thus, she developed the AVID Essentials and Certification process, so that AVID's approach in Fresno, California looks nearly the same as it does at a Department of Defense school in Heidelberg, Germany.

Asking teams of teachers and administrators to focus their efforts on equity and excellence placed new demands on them, Swanson found. Thus, early in AVID's dissemination, she created AVID Summer Institutes and ongoing professional development. In 2002, over 6,000 educators will attend four AVID institutes throughout the US

A Research Base

From the program's inception, AVID has based its philosophy and practices on the most current research regarding instruction and school improvement efforts. Not surprisingly, a number of prominent educational researchers have studied AVID, and their conclusions have informed our curricular revisions and approaches to student success.

Dr. Uri Treisman, a fellow Dana Award recipient and MacArthur fellow, studied collaborative practices among different groups of students at UC Berkeley, culminating in an innovative program to raise calculus achievement. His research coincided with Swanson's own conclusions that students achieve best through writing, inquiry, collaboration, and reading (WICR). Dr. Treisman continues to advise AVID's national dissemination efforts as well as AVID mathematics innovations.

Early in-depth research on AVID was conducted by Dr. Hugh Mehan, a professor and researcher from the University of California, San Diego, and director of the Teacher Education Program there. Mehan and Swanson met in the early 1980's and he became fascinated by AVID and its impact on the lives of students, families, and teachers. Beginning in 1989, Mehan and his colleagues studied AVID programs in the San Diego Unified School District, examining numerous student records and closely studying eight AVID sites. Mehan, who has a Ph.D. in sociology and is an expert ethnographer, worked with his research team to interview hundreds of AVID students and parents, along with AVID coordinators and administrators.

The result of the study was the book, Constructing School Success (Cambridge University Press, 1996). In studying AVID programs, Mehan learned that AVID graduates enroll in college at a rate two and half times greater than that of their contemporaries and that AVID coordinators redefine the role of the teacher, assisting students in navigating the "hidden curriculum" of schools. He also notes that, the longer students stay in AVID, the more successful they are.

As a sociologist, Mehan looks at AVID as a means of providing "social scaffolding," as well as reshaping the peer group and even creating a new relationship between the AVID families and the school. AVID, he says, is an "untracking" movement because it works within the existing structure of schools to place students in rigorous courses, while providing key support elements.

As AVID has spread, it has been studied by additional independent research groups, including the California CREATE group, which conducts longitudinal studies on AVID students in California. In addition, AVID has been studied by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), the Kentucky Department of Education, the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS), and by numerous school districts. AVID is also featured in the recent Secondary Education Transition Study (SETS) conducted by the Military Child Education Coalition.

Schoolwide Implications

As Mary Catherine Swanson and her professional development team have disseminated AVID, it has gained prominence as a schoolwide reform effort. Swanson believes that the lessons learned through AVID and its approach to schoolwide achievement have broader implications. These lessons include:

Schools and districts must have a vision of what they want their schools to be and a plan to achieve that vision. All other work is secondary, both in budgeting and in allocation of staff time.

Student achievement should be the sole focus of schools, with everyone held accountable for that success, including students and parents.

School staff need dedicated time to communicate in order to constantly assess their progress and make course corrections. Students and their insights are integral to this process.

All students need a support structure to achieve their goals. Different students need different approaches, but these structures must be built into the school day.

About the Author:

Robert Gira is the Director of Program Development for the AVID Center, the educational nonprofit that disseminates AVID nationally. His work includes professional development, curriculum projects, and support for AVID schools in the western US Before joining AVID, he was a high school principal and administrator at several San Diego County high schools. Find out more about AVID on their website at http://ww.avidonline.org.

About AVID's Founder and Director:

Mary Catherine Swanson taught high school English for 20 years. During that time she was instrumental in developing numerous award winning language arts programs. In 1980 she developed AVID. Mary Catherine is a recipient of the 2001 Harold W. McGraw, Jr., Prize in Education for her commitment to closing the achievement gap. She was also recently profiled on CBS 60 Minutes II in a feature which described AVID as a "fresh idea in education." Swanson was also recently named "America's Best Teacher" by TIME Magazine and CNN, "for turning thousands of average students into college scholars." Among other awards and recognition she has received are the A+ Award for Reaching the Goals of America 2000 from the U.S. Department of Education, EXCEL Award for Excellence in Teaching, Salute to Excellence from the American Association for Higher Education, and 2002 Headliner of the Year from the San Diego Press Club.

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