Is AVID just another APS boondoggle?

Journal editors are on board the APS AVID train, link.
APS is spending a lot of money and intends to spend a whole
lot more, on a program called AVID, link, and link.

They are spending so much money, in these hard times, that
they haven't told us how much they've spent, or intend to spend
in implementing the program in the APS.

AVID, Advancement Via Individual Determination, has proved pretty conclusively that, if you can identify students who are willing to work really hard and make a number of other important sacrifices in order to graduate high school and go to college, and then give them a whole bunch of resources and individual attention, they will succeed.

It is roughly the same kind to straightforward approach that APS used to raise its graduation rate; they took those least likely to graduate (students who had already failed the first year of high school) and dropped them out of their sample.

The good news, a lot of folks from AVID get to travel all over the country at taxpayer expense, and lot of APS administrators (and some teachers, I suppose) also get to travel on the taxpayer's dime, to "trainings" in different fun to visit locales.

Don't get me wrong. If you can identify students who really want to succeed, and who are willing to work hard in order to do so, by all means spend some money on them.

Just don't spend a bunch of money trying to make it look like
rocket science.