Michele Marcus and Dennis Johnston having fun at a Florida CSS rollout session

AVID Vice President Dr. Dennis Johnston and I have been visiting AVID District Directors around the country to inform them about the changes to the upcoming 2013-2014 “AVID Certification Report and Self-Study Continuum” (CSS) and the new levels of recognition for AVID sites. This is important work as we want our AVID schools to be the best, and we want to recognize them for their success with students schoolwide.

I grew up on the far Southside of Chicago in the community of Roseland.  Because of the violence and tragedy that plague Roseland, it is not desirable for raising a family.  It is no safe haven, and day-to-day living can be a struggle.  It is a community where violence has taken over and young people are often killed.  However, every dark tunnel has a light at the end of it. I am proud to say that AVID was one of the programs that allowed me to see and reach for that light at the end of my tunnel. 

I’m always looking for districts that have a coherent approach to providing rigorous opportunities for all students and a plan for supporting those opportunities. Some districts leave this effort to the discretion of the sites, and even to individual teachers. That is not the case in Boise, Idaho, where I found a superintendent, Dr. Don Coberly, and area director, Dr. Stacie Curry (she also oversees AVID), making sure that the district leverages AVID’s support with the wealth of opportunities provided through AP® courses. I also found a district with a strategic plan that explicitly calls out both AP and AVID in support of their key imperatives. The district’s vision, as stated in their plan, is “to graduate each student prepared for college, career, and citizenship.” 

The following is an edited version of Jeanie’s recent Access article.  It contains some additional resources.

In my middle school AVID classroom at O’Banion, I wanted to empower our AVID students and substantiate their personal transformations by having them participate in Journeys, a six-week WICOR unit created by me, which chronicled their individual transformations – or journeys.  While deeply personal for each individual student, it was my hope that the safe and caring environment of the AVID classroom would facilitate easy sharing and mutual acknowledgement. 

One night after dinner at a nice restaurant in San Diego, I found a dead homeless man in the parking lot near my car.  At first I was unsure of his condition.  He just looked so still, and I just had a gut feeling he was not alive.  Next to his head was an empty large bottle of cheap vodka.  I called 911, and in a moment, sirens, police cars and an ambulance were screaming in my direction.  After a frantic attempt to revive him, one of the paramedics declared him dead.  An officer who searched his pockets had found some prescription medicine, and he read aloud the man’s name: David.  David looked like he was no more than 30 years old.

The following is a condensed version of a story from AVID’s upcoming spring Access.

When I heard Consuelo Castillo Kickbusch speak at our National Conference in December of 2012, I was determined to learn more about this remarkable leader, author, and child advocate.  What an intriguing story: One of 10 children raised in the barrio in Laredo, Texas (an area then known as the Devil’s Corner), she made her way through the hazards of poverty, drugs, and violence, on to college, and then became the highest-ranking Hispanic female officer in the Combat Support Field of the U.S. Army.  Today, as a motivational speaker and consultant, she is equally comfortable working with families in migrant camps, speaking with schools and districts, or inspiring the leaders of corporations.

As teachers, we are pulled in many directions by different priorities, and not all of them play well together: standardization vs. personalization, curriculum, content standards, college and career readiness, test scores, rigor, creativity, critical thinking, real world relevancy, 21^st century skills, and new campus or districtwide initiatives that seem to pop up at every other staff meeting.  What are we supposed to do?

Speeding along the winding desert road to Marrakesh, we were three graduate students plus gear crammed into an ancient Mini Cooper. Suddenly, the Mini started to drag and list to the right.

I swerved over to the side of the road and we all wiggled out.  Oh, a flat tire.  No problem, we can fix that.  I opened the boot, pushed our equipment around, and quickly found the tire iron.  Now where’s the jack?  No jack: I hadn’t checked when we bought the car back in England.  We were 200 miles deep into the Great Sahara – literally, in the middle of nowhere -- without a brick or a stick to use as a lever. 

How do I ensure every student in my class is challenged with rigorous material and is able to be successful?

I asked myself this essential question when I had my AVID students participate in a videotaped Socratic Seminar on the Allegory of Plato’s Cave. Three conditions were needed for the lesson to have rigor and for all of my students to be successful:

1. My students and I had to believe that they could be successful.
2. The material had to be rigorous and engaging.
3. I needed to provide scaffolding, ensuring every student understood the components of the Allegory and could engage in meaningful dialogue.
]]>http://avidcollegeready.org/college-career-readiness/rss-comments-entry-33170217.xmlAVID CenterFri, 22 Mar 2013 18:37:06 +0000http://avidcollegeready.org/college-career-readiness/2013/3/22/no-excuse-to-fail.html669355:7808221:33096189Ben Solomon, Project Manager, AVID Center



Five years ago I attended a leadership conference. One of the speakers there spoke about a highly successful prison outreach program¹ she had launched. The moderator of the event asked her, “The national recidivism rate of prisoners is about 50%. Graduates of your program have less than a 10% recidivism rate. What’s made the difference?” She responded, “We provide extensive business training for these men while they’re incarcerated. And then once their incarceration is over, we continue to support their re-integration to society through coaching, mentoring, housing, and financial support if necessary. Basically, we feel like our job is to leave them no excuse to fail.”

I felt like I had been slapped in the face. That year we were pursuing an AVID Demonstration School designation, but had to stop when we analyzed our data and found that only 62% of our AVID students had passed all their classes for the year. A light bulb went on for me – we were allowing our students too many excuses to fail.

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