To IB or not to IB: is the International Baccalaureate Program worth it?

    So our school board wants IB, the International Baccalaureate Program.  A cadre of teachers also want it.  Some kids and some parents know about it.  Some are receptive, others have questions.  Most teachers at my site are somewhat welcoming, often indifferent, and a few, downright hostile. I'm not sure where our administrative team stands, though understandably, their job is to provide leadership in goals established by the school board.

    The debate about the place of IB at our school has been going on for over a year.  Proponents justify the program's place as expanding choice for students.   Choices, options:  somehow the more the merrier.

  Teachers who are enthusiastic about its adoption claim that its internationalist, integrative, and thematic approach to teaching is innovative, challenging, and engaging.   (Still, I've never heard specific reasons why International Baccalaureate offers a better way--the reasoning tends to sound circular to my ears).   Provincial and stale topics like U.S. History are revitalized and reshaped by "History of the Americas".  I didn't know, for example, the KKK were quite active in Canada.  The KKK, in Canada!?!?!?!  I guess Canadians are not enlightened and immortal aliens come to save our planet from disaster in 2012.

    Late last spring our superintendent announced that we couldn't go forward with IB because of the budget crisis.   Summer rolls by.  Now the word  is that "they" are rolling forward with IB, at least in terms of getting teachers trained, and getting the schedule figured out.   Sometimes "they" use the word "we".  The royal we.  I think "they" means the school board, and we have an activist board at that. 

   I've read the book,  Supertest, IB's own account of itself.  While there seem to be a lot of positive features to the program, I would recommend that a second edition be published, this time with the help of an editor who would spin or remove some sections that, upon closer look, reveal an organization with management problems, financial difficulties, and academic legitimacy issues.  Supertest, in some sense, offers, indirectly, the best criticism of  IB.  Having taught at a private boarding school in Europe for a year, I'm not surprised that such a program would emerge from the peculiar environment of small international schools.    Peculiarity has its benefits and drawbacks.

   It works something like this:  over a few years, students take a battery of courses on topics that are spokes on a wheel, and in the center of the wheel sit the requirements that seem to make IB "IB":"  Theory of Knowledge, Creativity and Community Service,  and the Extended Essay.  "TOK" functions like an eye in the storm, a class where students share ideas about how knowledge is produced in different disciplines.  There are "internal assessments" for the classes, which are controlled by the individual teacher.  There are also "external assessments", which, kind of like Advanced Placement, are sent in to external IB reviewers for scores.  I think our kids' external assessments will end up in Geneva.  Wow.  Top tier universities and colleges like to see all of this, of course, on student applications--or at least this is what I've read and heard.

    I'm still on the fence about IB.  I've listened to valid arguments from both sides.  The most valid ones, at this point, come from its proponents.  At least they sound valid.  Here's the International Baccalaureate Organizaton's Mission Statement:

The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.
To this end the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.
These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.

    I hate the way they spell program, but this mission statement sounds nice.  Faculty, students, and parents who like this "programme" believe that it helps participants to become well-rounded, thoughtful, and internationally-minded young adults.  Good attributes for the 21st century.

    The main opposing voice belongs to an organization, "Truth About IB", which is most a collection of right wing paranoid rantings, a la Glenn Beck.  That said, individual national newspaper articles that get caught in Truth About IB's dragnet do show some clear and reasonable criticism by educators and citizens at other points on the political spectrum.  These are worth a read--just forget that you found them on Truth About IB.    I imagine there are mainstream conservative or mainstream liberal teachers who don't like IB.   Worth nothing: it's not only nutjobs that oppose IB.

   Is IB worth it?  At this point, I think it's been a giant pain in the rear.  Its effect on my campus has been divisive. Okay, anything worth doing can royally mess things up.  But still,  I've seen the "IB process" already begin to divide old friends.   I'm mad at the school board, even though I pretty much like all of them.  Many teachers are getting more territorial--not a good thing in a comprehensive public high school.  Snobbery is on the rise.  Students do not benefit from the presence of unpleasant adults.

    Our school board says, among other things, that it's all about choice.  Choice?  The International Baccalaureate does expand choice, but for whom, in the end?  I read Matthew B. Crawford's The Shop Class as Soul Craft, a meditation on vocation, and its implicit call for the need to expand choices for our less well-served students.  This ought to be a direction our board and community vigorously supports.  This is not to say that expectations are lowered (no soft bigotry of low expectations here), but while everyone could benefit from a liberal arts education, not everyone wants one.  Why be a lawyer if your passion is carpentry?   What's wrong with waiting tables and shaping surfboards, and surfing?  And while we're at it, why not emphasize local knowledge as much as international awareness?  There are a lot of avenues out there.  We do a fine job preparing kids to be college-ready, but there are other possibilities as well.

    A few years back, the then Supe wanted to introduce a vocational academy.  The Board found it financially unfeasible, and from what I understand, not aligned with their preferred curricular emphases.  Well, if that didn't work, maybe something else would have,  and something different than yet another program for the top echelon.   They could've tried harder, darn it.  The result is that we don't have real programs for our at-risk kids: instead, we provide supports for them so they, too, can go to college, and become part of America's grotesquely out-sized white-collar sector.  I should say that a fair few of our at-risk kids come from the same families that produce our Ivy bound scholars.   It's part of the package you get when you teach in an affluent suburb.  Strange, but true.

  Here's something:  every kid should have to take a class we adults all wish we would've had--   let's say, an introductory home repairs,  or auto-shop class.

Note:  there's a poll at the bottom of this page.  Feel free to click on your answer.

 

Welcome and Good Night

This is a blog about the ordinary and often surprising and sometimes troublesome issues faced by teachers. I'd like to think that this is a blog about things that happen which matter a lot--which in some ways can have an impact on teaching and learning--but don't make the headlines.

I am a Social Studies teacher in a mid-sized public high school in an mid-sized town in an affluent suburb somewhere on the West Coast. Many of our students have been raised in affluent settings. Parents of our students have become successful in their careers. They've high expectations for their children, and by and large their kids turn out well. By and large the support of our parents has been beneficial and welcome. Their success has been my good fortune--our school's financial health is closely tied to the property value of the local community. I should have it easy. In fact, I do have it easy. And this is why I don't want to let this record devolve into a long rant about how America's heroes have been done wrong.
I'm not a hero. I'm simply a trained, experienced teacher.

But I do enjoy reading, writing, outdoor sports, and watching mindless television. I can do the latter and grade papers at the same time. I'm pretty uninspiring in this way.

I am happily married to a marvelous, interesting, attractive woman whose level of toleration is saintly.

I am a good teacher. I'm interested in the content, primarily. A generalist at heart, I enjoy the sweeping vista that social studies instruction allows:  the Defenestration of Prague, Sacco and Vanzetti, Boss Tweed, Federalist 78: I like bouncing around topics.

And this, abruptly, is all for tonight.
So, good night.