The materials provided to date by the official IB organization contain mainly broad language about vision and mission, but are short on the specific details of how an IB program would be different than what is currently operating at Pioneer High School or Huron High School. There are, however, a few details which are beginning to emerge.
First, there is an extended research and writing project which seems to be a centerpiece of the student’s senior year. Second, there is an emphasis on close reading and textual analysis in the foreign language (‘world language’) curriculum.
To the latter point, it seems that students are to read one or two pieces of literature in the target language and create analytical essays, in the target language, about what they’ve read. A German teacher, for example, might assign Goethe’s Faust and Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and the student might compare the two in an essay written in German.
Money is, naturally, an issue. An IB program will cost something: fees must be paid to the International Baccalaureate organization, e.g., for the administration of standarized IB tests. The AAPS will need additional materials for classrooms.
Beyond those costs, a different sort of cost will be incurred in terms of which programs will have to give way in order to make room for IB. If Huron High School and Pioneer High School stay at approximately their present size - students bodies of around 1,600 - certain courses and curricula currently offered may disappear upon the arrival of IB.
The district is currently holding community meetings to gather remarks and comments from parents and other stakeholders. One comment which has already appeared several times questions whether the district will be able to continue to offer the wide range of AP courses which it currently maintains. Another remark questions whether or not retaining AP courses is, or should be, a high priority.
At this early stage, and in this continuously changing set of economic and political variables, it would be inappropriate to speculate about the exact details of a future IB program in Ann Arbor. Indeed, the purpose of the next year or two is to carefully investigate precisely that question.
Written IB materials include frequent mention of ‘philosophy’ in the International Baccalaureate curriculum. The AAPS will need to discover exactly what the IB means by that word. Teachers currently in the district who hold a State of Michigan teaching certificate in the content area of philosophy are few in number; one of them is Andrew Smith. Teaching certificates in that subject matter are rare.
To what extent does an IB certification indicate a “raising of the bar” in terms of how an outside governing body will examine the district?
The district has long been subject to accreditation audits, first by the North Central Association (NCA), and then by its successor organization, ‘AdvanceED.’
The State of Michigan has also monitored schools districts, and over the decades has done so with increasing levels of scrutiny.
Will the IB program bring more rigor to external reviews of the AAPS program? If, this would greatly serve the district’s purpose of attracting more students: being able to demonstrate that the AAPS offers a program strong enough to withstand IB scrutiny would be a feather in the district’s metaphorical cap.
By contrast, the examinations by the NCA and AdvancedED have been easy enough that passing them is no great achievement - after all, thousands of other high schools pass those same reviews. Likewise, the State of Michigan’s oversight is nearly meaningless, with constantly changing and irrelevant metrics which yield letters of reprimand precisely to those schools which are doing a good job of educating students, while allowing mediocre schools to pass.
(The letter of reprimand and threatened disciplinary action handed to Pioneer High School and Huron High School was based on bizarre statistical calculations; in reality, the average - mean, median, and mode - students in both schools were above the statewide averages on all relevant metrics.)
What remains to be discerned: more concrete and precise details about how an International Baccalaureate program would play out in the classroom, and whether the scrutiny of the IB organization is rigorous enough to ensure that passing IB reviews is something about which the AAPS can truly brag.
Over the coming months, a disciplined inquiry will, one hopes, yield this information.
[Andrew Smith is a German teacher at Pioneer High School and Huron High School.]
