HOW IT BEGAN
AVID’s history started in 1980 with Mary Catherine Swanson, an English teacher, at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. She wanted to find a solution to the chronic academic underachievement she saw in her class amongst students from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds. Her strategy was simple: enrol students in rigorous classes and provide them with the support and strategies to learn – and it worked. Out of her first 32 students, all of them went to university (most to prestigious and Ivy League schools).
Over the following decades, AVID has continued to calibrate its approach and have built an effective and scalable model of school improvement that has been successfully replicated in close to 7000 sites across the USA and Australia.
