Minority Students Avid Fans of College Readiness Program

Geometry has no appreciation for cultural differences. You could ask a Chinese-American like Tania Haw, or a Japanese-American like Runa Saito. Or you could ask Stella Simone, who immigrated with her family from Italy, or Loan Nguyen, who came here as a refugee from Vietnam.

The four girls, sophomores at Clairemont High School, were sitting around a table the other day, commiserating about their geometry troubles. Still, they said they felt lucky to be in that particular classroom, and they wondered whether a fifth friend, Debbie, could transfer in.

Tania gave Stella a puzzled look. “Does Greek count?” she asked.

Tania, Runa, Stella and Loan are participants in AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination), a much-praised program designed to place minority students and those from low-income families on a fast track to college. They are among about 125 students who every day go to Room 206, the province of teacher Mary Catherine Swanson, for extra help with their studies and a bombardment of encouragement about the value of higher education.

At the moment, AVID is available only at Clairemont High in the San Diego schools. But there are discussions aimed at expanding the AVID concept into other schools. Educators and trustees in the San Diego Unified School District see AVID as a means of furthering integration in the classroom.

Although San Diego officials have won praise in recent years from court officials for their efforts to comply with court-mandated integration, “re-segregation” at the school site remains a sore point.

Under the guidelines established by the federal Office of Civil Rights, a classroom is considered ethnically balanced if the ratio is within plus or minus 20% of the ethnic makeup of the school’s student population as a whole. The most recent survey of the San Diego schools, conducted in 1983-84, found 6% of the 14,260 individual classes to be ethnically imbalanced. That figure was encouraging to many officials--but it still meant that 835 classes were imbalanced.

Moreover, 745 other classes were found to be ethnically imbalanced for “justifiable” reasons--though “justifiable” is a debatable term. For example, it is clear why ethnic imbalance occurs in bilingual classes or a course like AVID. But some people wonder why the court and the Office of Civil Rights consider such an imbalance justifiable in the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program. Indeed, district officials have been engaged in an active campaign to identify and recruit more minorities into the GATE program.

To many, such ethnic imbalance represents a vestige of institutional racism in San Diego schools. While regular course offerings tend to be balanced, they say, Anglo students predominate in the advanced courses and minority students predominate in remedial courses. Many educators and parents believe that minority students are often unjustifiably “tracked” into remedial or regular courses and should instead be in more accelerated courses.

In the educational lingo of San Diego schools, this issue is known as “equity placement.” The debate has raged for months. One side urges action to erase what it sees as unfair practices, and the other side urges caution, warning that the curriculum may be “watered down” if minority students allegedly being “held back” are moved too swiftly into more advanced courses.

The push for a demanding education is a constant in debate over ethnic balance. “Very often I think students are not pushed into challenging enough courses,” said Supt. Thomas Payzant. His statement closely reflects the trustees’ stance.

Two weeks ago, San Diego school district trustees finally managed to hammer out a policy definition for “equity placement”:

“Equity in student placement means equal access to the highest degree of quality education for all students. Access is here defined as entrance to courses based on meeting established criteria for enrollment.”

As the debate continues, district officials are trying to figure out a way to implement the policy. And that is where AVID may come in.

“From what I’ve seen of the model at Clairemont, I think it has a lot of potential,” Payzant said. “We could have similar programs, and it may vary from school to school.”

Trustee Kay Davis has proposed that the district allocate funds to expand the AVID concept to all 15 comprehensive high schools in the district in 1985-86; the program would be extended to every junior high school in the 1986-87 school year.

While district officials say they are supportive of the idea, Payzant stresses that budget constraints might limit the program, which requires extra funds to pay for tutors. District officials are also negotiating with private foundations to provide grants to expand AVID.

“It isn’t all that costly,” Payzant said. “We can probably get a program started at a high school for $15,000 or $16,000. It’s not big money in a $350-million budget (the district’s current budget), but it becomes big money when you carve the priorities pretty finely. There may be a lot of things that would have the same kind of support that AVID would.”

Swanson, who founded AVID five years ago at Clairemont High, believes the concept would work well as a means of further integrating classrooms. In fact, AVID was created because of the impact of ethnic changes on the Clairemont campus.

In the 1970s, Swanson recalled, Clairemont was a predominantly Anglo, upper-middle-class school with strong academics. Then University City High was opened, and the new school siphoned off much of Clairemont’s Anglo student body.

The voluntary busing program then brought hundreds of minority students to Clairemont. According to recent figures, the school now has 1,376 students, of whom 48.3% are Anglo, 36.1% Latino, 9% black, 6.4% Asian and 0.2% American Indians.

With the changing ethnic population, academic standards suffered at Clairemont, Swanson said. But she and officials at UC San Diego believed there was untapped academic potential in the minority population.

Swanson designed the program to have college students work as tutors, helping students with their regular classroom studies. In addition to the tutoring, there is a flow of information about colleges and scholarships, an occasional guest speaker to discuss career opportunities, and a special field trip or two.

As college students themselves, the tutors serve as role models and can answer questions about college life. A few of AVID’s graduates have become AVID tutors.

The tutors are also enthusiastic about AVID. They say it is gratifying to watch the often dramatic improvements made by the students. “I used to work in retail,” said Judy Riffle, an AVID tutor. “This sure is more satisfying that counting socks and underwear.”

UC San Diego, wary that it could lose federal grant money if its minority enrollment slipped, was initially interested in funding AVID, Swanson said. But as it turned out, UCSD was unable to provide money, and Swanson instead got a grant of $7,000 from the Bank of America.

The program started with fewer than 30 students five years ago and has grown steadily to 125 students. It received regular district funding of $14,000 for the first time last year. Before then, “I was scrounging for funds from every source imaginable,” Swanson said. AVID students hold bake sales and car washes to raise money for field trips.

Swanson said that every student who has completed the program has gone on to college--128 in all. However, she adds, a few drop from the program each year. “I have so many kids who want in the program,” she explained. “Those who don’t do the work, I’ll drop.”

There are continual testimonials about “C” students becoming “A” students, and students moving from regular or even bilingual courses into accelerated studies.

“I was getting around a D (in geometry),” said Tania Haw, who wants to be a physician. “So my teacher talked to me and said this program would be good. So now I’m getting like an A or a B.”

Eddie Padilla said the program has helped him mostly with biology. “I’m getting a B minus,” he said. Without AVID, “I think I’d be getting a D like everybody else.”

Swanson keeps track of her students. In 1984, the program graduated 26 seniors with an average grade-point average of 3.13 of a 4.0 scale--”a really good GPA when you consider they were taking advanced courses,” Swanson said.

Of those 26 students, 14 are now attending San Diego State University, seven are at UC San Diego, one is at UC Berkeley, one at UCLA, one at UC Davis, one at Mesa College and one at Southwestern College. The AVID graduates also averaged $4,551.03 in scholarship and grant money for their first year in college.

Last year’s class was fairly typical, Swanson said, although the UC San Diego students outnumber the San Diego State students. This year, two AVID students have applied to Stanford, apparently inspired by a four-day field trip last spring that took them to that campus as well as to Berkeley, Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, UC Santa Barbara and UCLA.

Swanson stresses that some minority and low-income students may be doing too well in school to be recruited for AVID. For example, Hector Rios is in the program, but his older brother, Daniel, wasn’t.

Daniel, a former GATE student who now attends Stanford, “didn’t need us,” Swanson explained. “He always got straight A’s without us.”

A look at the ethnic balance in advanced courses at Clairemont could give some clue to the effectiveness of AVID as a tool for classroom integration. While recent figures show 51.7% of the Clairemont students are minorities, 41% of the students enrolled in advanced classes are minorities.

Those figures place Clairemont, as a school, well within the definition of having achieved ethnic balance in the classroom under the Office of Civil Rights guidelines of plus or minus 20% of the ethnic makeup of the school as a whole.

The ethnic balance still varies considerably among individual classrooms. Some advanced foreign language classes--including German as well as Spanish--are imbalanced with more minority students. In advanced English courses, there is a close balance, with 44% minority students.

Advanced sciences, U.S. history and social sciences may be considered imbalanced, with minorities accounting for only 22% of the students in those classes. Math classes and two community college courses offered on campus--honors calculus and political science--have a minority composition of 45% to 50%.

While the vast majority of AVID students are minorities, several “majority” students have qualified on the basis of financial need. Students who participate in the free and reduced lunch program are allowed into AVID.

Swanson said she thinks it’s unfair that so many Anglo students aren’t able to participate in her program. But for a new program to earn funding, it needs to serve a specific, clear purpose.

So whether Debbie, the girl of Greek heritage, can get into AVID depends on whether she would qualify for the free and reduced lunch program.

Regardless, Debbie still has to take geometry. Her friends in Room 206 think its unfair that she can’t join them for extra help.

Stella Simone, the girl from Italy, even wrote an essay about it.

“It isn’t fair,” she said. “It’s like . . . what do you call it?”

She paused. Then, triumphantly, she remembered the phrase.

“Reverse discrimination!”