C onstructing School Success: The Consequences of Untracking Low-Achieving Students is a detailed portrayal and evaluation of a high school untracking program called Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID). Outlining a number of the theoretical assumptions that underpin the disadvantages of tracking ethnic and language minority students, the authors illustrate how AVID successfully placed previously low-achieving, low-income, ethnic and language-minority students in the same college preparation academic program as high-achieving students. Mehan, Villanueva, Hubbard, and Lintz describe how these students were selected and recruited from a low-track, noncollege-bound program and, with added academic support, competed successfully in a high-track, college preparatory program.This review considers the various social and academic supports of AVID from a sociocultural and programmatic perspective. We first describe the need for minority support programs; then we define AVID and the research project concerning this program. Next we address implicit sociocultural, parental involvement, and organizational features of this program. Implications of AVID for educational practice and for theories of educational inequality follow. We close with a critique.
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