Supporting College-Going Pathways in SFUSD: Longitudinal Evidence from the AVID Program

The Stanford-SFUSD AVID Partnership analyzed 18 years of SFUSD administrative student data (2006–07 through 2023–24) to examine patterns of AVID participation and associated academic trajectories. This longitudinal study included 9,885 AVID students and 111,573 non-AVID students across middle and high schools. The sample was balanced across gender, and most AVID students participated for one academic year, accounting for approximately 62% of participants. The primary outcome is semester core GPA, calculated from grades in subjects like English, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies courses.

To estimate academic trajectories across high school, we used multilevel growth models that account repeated GPA observations for students who take AVID for multiple academic years.These models estimated: overall GPA change across grade levels; differences associated with AVID participation; whether effects differed for students with an 8th grade fall GPA below 2.0. In SFUSD, this GPA threshold is one of two indicators used as one of the Early Warning Indicators (EWI) for identifying students entering 9th grade who may need extra academic support during high school to graduate on time. Two types of counts appear in this brief:

• Distinct student counts (students who ever took AVID)
• Grade-level AVID enrollments, where students may appear in multiple grades if they took AVID more than once.