AVID Learners

Hoover Senior High School in San Diego is the alma mater of legendary Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams, but if he were to visit the school today he would scarcely recognize it, so changed is it from the 1930s. Then it was a launching pad for white kids taking off into the middle class; now it's a "gateway" school of great diversity, serving immigrants from all over the world: Mexicans, Ethiopians, Russians, Chinese, Filipinos. Some don't even have the English language in common.

But one thing 170 Hoover students do have in common is AVID, a college-preparatory program for disadvantaged kids that was pioneered in San Diego more than 15 years ago and is now in more than 500 schools in California and beyond. Since 1990, a remarkable 60 percent of the program's 5,000 graduates nationwide have gone on to four-year colleges. And of those, nearly 90 percent are still there or have earned degrees. If not for AVID, many of these students would have wasted away in shop and bonehead math classes.

Hugh Mehan, a sociologist and teacher educator at the University of California at San Diego, has studied AVID. The program, he writes, "pulls out the rug from under the assumption lurking in American education that ethnic and linguistic minor-ity kids can't do...