What the Heck is “IB”?
Decatur Metro | July 4, 2010I have a confession to make.
I still don’t really understand what “IB” is. And when you reply “International Baccalaureate”, I become even more confused.
Is that a new reality show on ABC?
Coming across a conversation on the City of Decatur Schools teaching program feels sorta like being a cool kid at a Star Wars convention. I recognize that you’re speaking English, but I don’t really understand anything that you’re saying.
Thank goodness for this New York Times article from yesterday, which discusses the “lesser-known” I.B. program and its growing popularity in the nation’s schools, giving a decent overview along the way.
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Oh man, the IB program.
My class was the first at my alma mater (Marietta High School) to participate in IB. (I graduated with an IB certificate and AP credits.) If you ever need a firsthand account, DM, I’d be happy to give you my experience, though now it’s about 10 years old. The way some people talked about it at first, you’d think it was going to be the knife in AP’s heart and students who went through the program were guaranteed a spot at Harvard. It was new and seemed very prestigious — two things we used to LOVE in the ‘burbs. The Times story was a good overview, I thought.
I’d be happy to share my experiences as well. I really hope the Decatur schools have IB in place by the time my son is in school. I received my IB diploma from a Florida high school. It was rigorous, but prepared me much better for professional success than my university did. It’s an incredible program and I am still amazed by how much I learned during those years almost 20 years later. Our school had pre-IB, so we were in IB-type classes in 9th and 10th grade as well.
I have never heard the criticisms mentioned in the NY Times article. Our program was certainly not anti-American and did not seem to have any kind of agenda.
IB is a waste of tax dollars. As far as college admissions, it will only truly benefit the small number of students that actually go for the diploma program. The ones that take a few IB courses may benefit from having a rigorous class here and there, but they would get the same benefit form taking a regular AP class or two.
IB is an entire curriculum that cannot be replaced with a couple AP classes. The program as a whole was extremely rigorous. On average, I had to study / do homework at least 4 hours every night. We were required to take 4 years of a foreign language, 4 years of science (with 2 hours of chemistry or biology in our senior year) and 4 years of history. In our senior year, we had to complete a 5,000 word senior thesis. In our senior year, we had an entire month of AP and IB exams. I went to the University of Florida and I was never challenged as I was in the IB program and it wasn’t until law school when I felt like I had a significant number of intellectual equals in my classes again. My friends from high school are mostly professors, lawyers and doctors.
I hardly think it’s a waste of tax dollars. Our school had over 100 people in the program and consistently sent students to the best universities all over the country. The program brought in a higher quality teacher and those teachers would teach some of the non-IB classes as well. If Decatur high doesn’t have IB in place by the time my son’s in high school, I’ll probably have to send him to a private school to approximate the level of education I received in my public high school. To me, that’s a waste of my tax dollars since I moved to Decatur and agreed to pay higher taxes for the schools so that I wouldn’t have to send my kids to private schools.
I understand that the diploma program is much more rigorous than taking an AP class or two. That was sort of my point, but I was coming from a different angle.
Frankly, I don’t think that we will have more than maybe 20 students per year tops graduating with a full blown IB diploma. In fact, I think it could be as low as a dozen. Maybe there will be more when the big classes of 250 kids or more get to high school. I just wonder about the wisdom of spending what is a very substantial amount of money on a program that will probably truly benefit less than 10% of students. I have NO problem with IB from grades 4-10 when it benefits everyone. In fact, I strongly support it. However, the diploma program will not benefit anywhere near everyone, and stand-alone IB classes don’t have much more real world benefit than stand alone AP classes. Maybe I’m off base, and there are lot of people who want to spend precious school funding dollars on 10-20 kids a year. I’d just rather see it benefit a wider swath of kids.
Of course, I’m saying this as the mother of a very bright 6th grader who probably will be in the IB diploma program, so he would benefit from other people’s tax dollars. It just gives me a bad taste in my mouth to take so much scarce money for so few kids when we are looking at potential teacher furloughs.
Isn’t Glenwood an IB school? what is IB in elementary school?
I thought IB meant Ida Beth.
IB is a framework that is based on providing students with a high quality education that goes beyond the basics that are mandated by the DOE. It does not indoctrinate students, but rather promotes critical thinking, global understanding and a deeper appreciation for learning. Parents who have children in an IB school are guaranteed that their student is being taught at a higher level than students at a non IB school. The IB programs are inclusive of all students through the 10th grade. The students who go on to the diploma program can expect to leave high school with an education equivalent to that of one year of college. The same students who can succeed in AP, can also succeed in IB. The difference is that they can expect to get more college credit for the work they do. CSD is working hard to be sure that as many students as possible are eligible for the diploma program (definitely more than 15 or 20). I have been through 5 yrs of training for IB & can tell you that there is no secret UNESCO agenda. As a teacher I have learned to organize my teaching so that it is more engaging and more rigorous. Hopefully, folks in Decatur will come by Glennwood or Renfroe to see this in action!
Druid Hills High began the IB program 5 years ago. Prep classes have started to incorporate IB at Shamrock Middle and Fernbank Elementary. Many students who go through the program do not graduate with an IB diploma because they fail to successfully complete their major paper. Yet they still benefit from the rigor and study habits that are required to complete the course work.
IB seems to be a good program. Of course, that’s not the question. The better questions are: is the benefit worth the cost, and why can’ wet do this — or something like this — ourselves. Without hard data, it’s hard to answer these questions. So, I’d just like some hard facts. How much does the program cost? We make a large payment to the program. We send teachers to training. We convert at least one working teacher — and maybe more — to become an IB administrator. I’d just like to see all of the costs totaled.
Then, I’d like to see the benefit side. How many kids are served? Compare the fairly strong performance of our graduates currently with how they will perform under the program.
When we have that information, it seems that the discussion could become a little more informed. We can look at whether the cost-benefit ratio is fairly low, making it a worthwhile addition. Or we may decide that, for the cost of the program, we could add 5 more parapros to help struggling elementary school kids with reading skills. The value judgments we reach at that point may differ, but we will be making more meaningful decisions if armed with that data.
I don’t have that data now. All’s I know is that the IB program took one of the high school’s most talented teachers, a chemistry teacher, offline as a teacher so he could help other teachers implement IB. I have to admit that the administrative overhead additions of late– the Renfroe principal and now this — make me nervous. It may be worth it, but I thought principals were supposed to help do that job. If more rigor and better study habits are what we’re after, the proper question for me is whether this is the best way to get it. Maybe it is, but it begs the question of why we can’t do much of that now and devote the funds, time and other resources absorbed by IB in other ways.
I also keep hearing about how the program teaches folks new ways to think. Of course, that makes me wonder why we aren’t already teaching kids challenging ways to think. The NYT article talks about a person having to take a position on health care reform that was contrary to his real position. Gee. I know that’s far from a complete picture of what IB does, but learning to see all sides of an issue doesn’t seem like such a stretch for our schools without the IB labels. For folks familiar with the book, “Schooling in Capitalist America” by economics professors Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, the IB program, for all of its admitted strong points, sometimes does seem to be a way to give an extra label of achievement to many kids who already are good at setting themselves apart academically. I know it can be designed to be targeted to traditionally underachieving kids, but that is a new twist, not the tradition, of the program.
Moreover, the introduction of IB in our system was, I have to admit, strangely done. We started it at the 4th-5th grade school where students and parents are either just coming or just leaving. It seems like a strange place to introduce an academic program that you would think would work best with continuity further up the grades. One could not help but get the feeling that starting IB at Glennwood was an attempt to justify that school’s existence — and our chopped up grade configuration — by the administration.
At any rate, there are great arguments on all sides. I just would like some more data.
The CSD has a video on IB at Glennwood Academy and Renfroe and Expeditionary Learning at the elementary school level that explains these curriculum connections. It was the spotlight at a CSD board meeting last fall. You can see the video in the Vdieo Gallery on the CSD website at http://www.csdecatur.net/video
website for IB is
http://www.ibo.org/
Hey teach- I’m teach. Would you please use a slightly different name?
At least some of the teachers are very sold on IB, evidently to the point that we’re told that they are hurt if anyone challenges IB or the 4/5 Academy concepts. That impresses me. However, as a parent, I never see anything tangibly different. Can’t tell if that’s a curriculum or communication issue. In addition, it seems like gifted services and services for learning disabilities are completely disconnected from IB and are more about MAP and CRCT and other testing. So it’s all feels disjointed and confusing. So far, if resources are dwindling, I still vote for putting resources into keeping class sizes at current levels or smaller and putting more paraprofessional support into the elementary school classrooms (and I mean INTO the classrooms, not providing clerical support for the school office) rather than into new curricula or teaching approaches. No matter what curricula are used, students benefit from reasonably sized classes and sufficient teacher support. Without those, any curriculum is hard to implement.
But I’m also open to data and what experience Decatur has with IB. At the junior/senior high school level, I too worry about an IB diploma that only benefits a tiny proportion of students. If having the diploma option really has spillover benefits for all students, those benefits should be defined, measured, and documented.
Tom Stubbs wrote:
All’s I know is that the IB program took one of the high school’s most talented teachers, a chemistry teacher, offline as a teacher so he could help other teachers implement IB. I have to admit that the administrative overhead additions of late– the Renfroe principal and now this — make me nervous.
Clarification…
There is an Instructional Coach position at all the schools. The position at DHS that the chemistry teacher is filling is not a new position or “overhead addition”. The instructional coach who was at DHS moved to a position at the Georgia DOE.