Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence

Tracking contributes significantly to the achievement gap between low-income, minority students and their more affluent peers. Ethnic and linguistic minority students from low-income backgrounds frequently remain in general and vocational education classes. As a result, they do not become eligible for college enrollment. Achievement Via Individual Determination (AVID), an educational reform program based in San Diego, "untracks" low-achieving ethnic and language minority students by placing both low- and high-achieving students in the same rigorous academic program. The program gives students explicit instruction in the hidden curriculum of the school–the implicit educational rules and expectations, such as knowledge about what courses to take for the college-bound, what teachers to take or avoid, the importance of tests, and how to study– and helps the students make the transition to college. The AVID program has successfully prepared under-represented students for college: from 1988 to 1992, 94% of AVID students enrolled in college, compared to 56% of all high school graduates (AVID Center, 1999). African Americans and Latinos enrolled in college in numbers that exceeded local and national averages (Mehan, Villanueva, Hubbard, & Lintz, 1996; Mehan, Hubbard, Lintz, & Villanueva, 1994).

As AVID is being adopted by school districts through-out the country, researchers at the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE) are examining the process by which a "design team," in this case AVID Center, exports its prototype of educational reform to new settings–three schools in California, two in Kentucky and two in Virginia. This "scaling up" study focuses on a) the interrelationship between multiple contexts of implementation, b) the degree of variation in the implementations of AVID guidelines at the new sites, and c) the contribution of institutional processes that facilitate or inhibit academic success.

This research builds upon work in the sociocultural tradition, especially Rogoff (1995) and Tharp (1997), who identify personal, interpersonal, and community levels or "planes" of interaction, and McLaughlin & Talbert (1993), who depict organizations in concentric circles, where the classroom is in the center, surrounded by the school, the district, and the community. It extends this work by explicitly calling attention to political and economic conditions that enable possibilities and impose constraints on education in general and school reform in particular.