Gamble Pays Off Big for Teacher, Students

In 1980, Mary Swanson took a chance.

She was an English teacher at Clairemont High School. Like her colleagues, she had many students with unspectacular grades, some of whom weren’t coming to school regularly, most of whom had trouble speaking English.

The underachievers came disproportionately from poor families and communities of color. They seemed to have problems that school wasn’t equipped to fix.

They were students who made a teacher’s job seem thankless--and the day seem long. The ones who would have been easy to brush aside.

She bet they could all go to college.

Ask her now if gambles pay off, and Swanson will tell you about a $50,000 jackpot.

Against the odds, Swanson, now an administrator for the San Diego County Office of Education, founded the Advancement Via Individual Determination program, which revamped her school’s approach to teaching low-income and minority students.

Today, Swanson is to receive a $50,000 cash award for the AVID program she developed to prepare those students to enter college. The prestigious national award by the Charles A. Dana Foundation is the largest ever to go to a San Diego educator, county officials said.

When she first presented her idea for the AVID program, “some people thought I was crazy,” Swanson said. “They said I was setting these kids up for failure.”

AVID originally grouped 30 ninth-grade students, most black or Latino and from low-income families. They were not enrolled in courses required for college entrance, and their grade-point averages were between 1.5 and 2.5 (out of 4.0).

The students then entered classes for the gifted, with the most rigorous curriculum and the heaviest homework loads. To help them cope, the program included an elective class in which students formed study groups and were tutored by college students trained and paid for by AVID.

“It was big risk, because . . . the program wouldn’t get a second chance if these students failed,” Swanson said.

In the writing-intensive elective class, students were taught to take notes, ask questions, express thoughts and participate in their education, Swanson said. They were given binders and record-keeping forms, and instructed to document their days. In journal-like entries, they chronicled, for instance, the difficulties they had dissecting a math theorem or a biology lab specimen.

“By making them explain what they are hearing in their own terms, they began to understand why something works,” Swanson said. “Until they could put it into writing--in their own words--it wasn’t theirs. Just regurgitating what the teacher puts up on the blackboard is not learning.”

The combined grade-point average for the first AVID class was 3.2. Of the 30 original students, all went on to college--28 in four-year schools, two in community colleges.

AVID has spread to more than 100 schools in about half of the county’s 43 districts; 5,449 students are now enrolled in AVID classes.

Since that first year, 816 students have completed the AVID program, with a college entrance rate of 98%--nearly double the county rate of 56%.

In other California counties, an additional 84 schools have AVID programs, and the program is in use in the Defense Department Dependent Schools in Germany.

Officials at the county Office of Education likened the award to the Nobel Prize for education.

Jim Esterbrooks, a spokesman for the education department, said Swanson’s initiative in setting up the program serves as an example for teacher involvement with the educational system.

“It shows what a teacher can do if she cares,” he said.

The award goes to Swanson personally, who can spend it on whatever she wants. Swanson plans to plow the money back into the program, to hire grant writers.

AVID has been recognized by the state Department of Education, and was the basis for twice-vetoed state legislation in 1990 and 1991 that would have raised funds to start AVID programs in more California schools.

The state estimates the program would cost an additional $120 a year per student.

“We’ve tried to get additional funding,” said Barbara Brandes, the state Education Department’s manager of high school programs. “But it is a bad fiscal time.”

The Dana Foundation has been awarding grants to innovators in health and education since 1986. The foundation’s namesake is the founder of the Dana Corp., a manufacturer of auto parts based in Ohio.