Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for January 12, 2006 AVID EDUCATOR

A report on "Advancement Via Individual Determination" from DelawareOnline.Com, The News Journal...

Challenging classes inspire students
Program shows 'remarkable difference' in grades, behavior

By EDWARD L. KENNEY
The News Journal

Some students think it's OK to be average. They know they could do better, but figure why bother?

Besides, it's not cool to do well in school. Their friends tell them so through classroom put-downs.

Gary Gilmer, 15, a freshman at Mount Pleasant High School, found that out when he signed up for a program the school started this year called Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID. Through AVID, school officials select average students who are making C's and D's, but have the potential to do better, and put them in honors and college-prep classes.

"They call me a nerd and stuff," Gilmer said of his friends' reaction to his AVID involvement. "They say, 'You are trying to get intelligent.' I say, 'I don't care. I'm here to get grades and stuff.' I want to earn money and buy my mother a house."

The AVID program, which has been successful in schools elsewhere in the country, tries to help underachievers by replacing negative peer pressure with challenging classes and support.

Gary's mom, Kenya, of Wilmington, has seen her son's grades rise from C's and D's to A's and B's. She appreciates what he is trying to do -- and it's not because of the house he's promising.

"I would have never thought that Gary would've been in college prep or honors programs, and he's in that now," she said. "I know he was capable. But the maturity level this year, as opposed to last year, has improved, and I think the program brought that out of him."

Mount Pleasant is one of five Delaware schools in the past two years to sign up for AVID, a private program paid for through grants and other funding.

Tracy Woodson, assistant principal at Mount Pleasant, gets excited when he talks about AVID. Watching the 20 "average" students enrolled in the program -- and, subsequently, enrolled in some of the top classes -- he sees how peer pressure can work in a positive way.

"They're around kids who are successful, and nothing breeds success like success," he said. "If you're sitting next to a student who is working his tail off and you're surrounded by those kinds of kids, you're not going to want to be the one who stands out."

Far-reaching program

A former English teacher in San Diego started AVID 25 years ago. While it is relatively new in Delaware, almost 2,300 schools nationwide and in 15 foreign countries have signed on. And the program's successes have been touted on TV's "60 Minutes II," said Barbara Smith, AVID's Eastern division director in Atlanta. Last week, it was featured on the "NBC Nightly News."

"We have a 95 percent college-going rate," she said. "They're either in a two-year college or four year-college. I'd say 50 to 55 percent [previously] had not even entertained the idea of college."

Although the program has been around since 1980, it is moving gradually into the East, Smith said.

John DeVore, assistant superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, the district in which AVID started, said the program is in every high school in that city, and in about 1,200 schools statewide. He had firsthand knowledge of how it worked when he served as principal at Southwest High School, a poor school in Chula Vista, about two miles north of the Mexican border.

About 450 of the 2,200 students enrolled at Southwest High were AVID students, he said. Not all of them got better grades. But, he added, "If they have the same grades in a much more rigorous area of study, that is also a gain. Was it working? The answer is yes. We had pretty significant results."

On the East Coast, the program has made its way into 75 school districts, Smith said.

Kirk Middle School in the Christina School District became the first AVID school in Delaware when it signed on last year, Smith said. In addition to Mount Pleasant High in the Brandywine School District, three other Christina schools enrolled this year: Christiana High School and Gauger-Cobbs and Shue-Medill middle schools. They are the only Delaware schools now enrolled in the program, she said.

Looking for achievers

Schools that elect to participate in the program seek out bright low-achievers who have the potential to attend college, maybe as the first person in their family to do so. Although many AVID students are minorities or from low-income families, Smith said, the program is intended to be accessible to all students.

Schools can tailor the program to suit their specific needs, reaching out to students who need help the most, she said. Some, such as Mount Pleasant, use AVID to help close the achievement gap between black and white students. Sixty-eight percent of white students graduate from high school in four years, compared with 53 percent of black students, according to the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan social and economic policy think tank.

About half of the nearly 1,000 students at Mount Pleasant High are black, and about half of the 20 ninth-graders in its AVID program are black, said Assistant to the Principal Marqueia Davis, who oversees the program at the school.

"We show a preference for students who are typically underserved in four-year colleges," she said.

Students at Mount Pleasant enroll in the program voluntarily, signing on for a minimum commitment of three years, Davis said. Their parents must agree to their child's participation and pledge to lend their support. Students maintain a learning log and assignment sheet. They are taught to sit in the front of the classroom if they are given a choice, to study at home even when there is no assignment and to budget their time, among other tips designed to help them succeed.

The school hired two University of Delaware students to tutor AVID students twice weekly. They all begin their first class of the day with AVID teacher Robyn Howton, who teaches them team-building, organization, note-taking and other skills before sending them on their way to honors and college-prep classes. There are usually two or three AVID students in each of those classes.

"These are average kids. They're kids who are right in the middle," Howton said. "These are kids who could have gone either way without the program. All this program is doing is giving them the support they need. They really believe this is making a difference for them.

"I think, overall, they're doing very well. We had three of them with a 3.0 GPA, which is a good GPA, and the majority of them had a 2.5 or better."

Freshman Kamira El, 15, said she has raised her grades from C's and D's to B's and C's.

"You learn a lot from the other people in the group," she said. "Also, we help each other out, because we're trying to achieve the same thing."

Davis said AVID students have become walking advertisements for the program, and other students have begun asking them how they can get into it. She would like to see the program grow.

Growing demand

Donald Patton, principal at Kirk Middle School, said his school's program started with about 25 students last year and had grown to about 100 students this year.

"There was a huge demand. It was working or we wouldn't have expanded it," he said. "Grades went up. We have kids who are getting straight A's in the program. We noticed a remarkable difference in behavior, a remarkable difference in grades.

"We actually had students come to us and say, 'I want to be in AVID. How can I get in that program?' "

Other Delaware schools are getting interested in AVID, Patton said. Smith has received inquiries from people in the Indian River and Cape Henlopen school districts.

At Kirk Middle, students in the program attend one AVID class during the school day, just like the students at Mount Pleasant High, then spend the remainder of the day in some of the school's more demanding classes, Patton said.

Because Kirk Middle School is a primary feeder school for Christiana High School, he said, many of the students will continue with AVID there once they graduate from Kirk. Because the program was working so well at Kirk Middle, Patton said, the school sought to expand the program's methodology to the rest of the school this year by spending $20,000 for binders that help teach organizational skills to all the students.

State funding earmarked for school improvements, the school's budget and fundraising have helped pay for the program, training and supplies, he said.

"I think its biggest drawback is it's expensive," Patton said.

The startup cost for a school is about $24,000, Smith said. There is also an initial district-level training fee for teachers of about $15,000 over two years, Smith said. After the startup, AVID charges a membership fee of about $2,500 each year that covers data collection and ongoing reports and training.

Granger Ward, state director for the AVID program in California, said the added cost has become routine to some school districts there.

"It is a standard part of what they do," he said. "It is a part of their budget and how they operate."

State standing by

If the program grows in Delaware, however, it will have to happen one school at a time. Nancy Wilson, deputy secretary of education in Delaware's Department of Education, said her department is keeping an eye on AVID, but is not taking an active role.

"We're very interested in seeing if it spreads further," she said. "But there is no additional funding that is in our budget to provide any expansion of this program. There's a significant cost involved."

Wilson said the education department is looking at ways to place more emphasis on "individualized focus" at the secondary school level, as AVID does, but a model for implementing that has not been chosen.

Paul Herdman also supports programs that are molded to the students. He is president and chief executive officer of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware, a nonprofit organization that supports public schools in the state.

"Trying to redesign schools around the need of the students is a direction we're going to be moving into more and more," he said. "We need to say, 'How can we redesign the system and not necessarily redesign the kids?' "

AVID could be one way to raise expectations and help underachieving students meet those expectations, he said.

"It's worth exploring. I wouldn't say I'd endorse it at this stage. It sounds like a helpful idea to explore further."