The International Baccalaureate Organization and Its Diploma Program: Anecdotal Evaluation

There is no end to the evaluation of educational systems. Books and articles flow ceaselessly, analyzing and appraising educational schemes.

The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) has been marketing its Diploma Program (DP) since 1968. In that year, the DP was launched as an experiment, and was launched as a mature plan several years later. The IBO prefers the spelling ‘Programme’ for the DP.

In the following half-century, reams of prose have been published about the DP, some writers praising it, and others damning it. No attempt is here made to summarize, or give an overview of, the mountains of text which describe the DP.

Instead, five brief observations:

• One strength of the DP is its emphasis on Foreign Language instruction. Especially in the United States, any trend which energizes World Language instruction is welcomed.
• Another strength of the DP is its unabashed and explicit focus on high-stakes standardized examinations as exit tests. This prepares students for professional board and certification tests, and for the tests which they will face both in the university and in their efforts to gain admission to graduate schools.
• One weakness of the DP is occasional confusion of form and content. In some ‘Language Acquisition’ assessments, it is possible for a student with lower language skills to earn a better grade by mouthing IB doctrines about various topics — the importance of environmentalism, etc. — while a student with stronger language skills might earn of lower grade by choosing to talk about modern architecture or 19th-century poetry.
• Another weakness in the DP lies in its directing students away from practices which would foster academic competency. Regarding the ‘written assignment’ for language acquisition, for example, the IB instructions state: “A formal (literary) essay is not an acceptable text type for the written assignment.” Students are then allowed to choose how they will structure their writing, but the one option which they may not choose is the one which they will need for their university careers. (This assignment was replaced for the examinations starting in springtime 2020.)
• One more flaw in the DP is the manner in which teachers are prepared to instruct in the program. A careful analysis of the DP reveals that effective teaching will focus on giving students the skills necessary to achieve on the assessments which will earn the Diploma. Yet many of the seminars which claim to prepare teachers for the DP direct teacher attention away from test preparation and toward a multitude of other topics and activities.

Happily, many teachers have developed ad hoc approaches to accomodate for the weaknesses of the DP while retaining its strengths.

No educational program is perfect. In choosing an education, students and parents must simply decide which set of problems they can accept. The DP has both advantages and disadvantages. Wise students and parents will find their own ways of compensating for the DP’s weaknesses while enjoying its benefits.

Educating for the Future: Really?

According to a famous proverb, a good education teaches the student ‘how to think, not what to think.’ Most educators, and most other people, will agree. Yet the concrete application of this proverb remains elusive.

Criticizing schools which either teach a narrow and specific set of skills, e.g., how to write in C++ for various operating systems, or teach lots in information, scholar Noah Yuval Harari describes a common sentiment that schools should teach the broadest and most flexible skills:

So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

Yet precisely those schools which claim to implement the idea ‘four C’ education are in fact violators of those very principles.

Schools which present themselves as teaching ‘critical thinking’ often use various slogans - ‘inquirers, risk-takers, thinkers, open-minded, balanced, reflective’ - but in reality have a set of axiomatic beliefs which together constitute a worldview: a worldview which they seek to inculcate into the students.

This becomes clear when examining political, religious, and social questions. If one examines how a school indirectly and subtly nudges its students toward various viewpoints, it becomes clear that the school is not teaching a neutral skills of ‘how to think critically,’ but is rather seeking to indoctrinate.

Likewise, schools may claim to teach the skill of communication, but often shy away from the rigor needed to give students the ability to write clearly and concisely. Whether writing persuasively or informatively, a student needs a facility for spelling, grammar, mechanics, vocabulary, idioms, devices, and styles.

Many schools, however, avoid the discipline of teaching clear communication, claiming that instruction in composition is ‘oppressive’ and an exercise in imperialism.

Is it possible to have schools which are truly neutral purveyors of thinking and communication skills? Or would it be better for schools to simply and openly state their cultural and social prejudices so that parents and students become informed consumers?

Doing the Wrong Things for the Wrong Reasons: American Universities Lose Their Sense of Mission

The urge toward universal education is a clear pattern in American history. At first, it meant striving to keep all students in school until eighth grade. It grew to include high school, and the desire to see all students complete twelfth grade.

This trend emerged before public education was a widely-embraced concept. When most schools were local and parochial, the society and its institutions felt responsible to provide assistance to whichever students might not readily be able to afford education.

The distinction between ‘public school’ and ‘private school,’ as we’ve conceptualized it in the early twenty-first century, was not an articulated categorization earlier in our nation’s history. From today’s perspective, many of those early schools were neither strictly public nor strictly private; they were hybrids of the two.

In any case, the urge to expand universal education eventually grew to include post-secondary. The debatable and debated desire appeared, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, to see every student attend college.

As noble as the intentions behind this desire may have been, it led to the dilution of the university’s purpose, as scholar Tom Nichols writes:

Part of the problem is that there are too many students, a fair number of whom simply don’t belong in college. The new culture of education in the United States is that everyone should, and must, go to college. This cultural change is important to the death of expertise, because as programs proliferate to meet demand, schools become diploma mills whose actual degrees are indicative less of education than of training, two distinctly different concepts that are increasingly conflated in the public mind. In the worst cases, degrees affirm neither education nor training, but attendance. At the barest minimum, they certify only the timely payment of tuition.

As increasing percentages of each year’s high school graduates matriculated, the impact on the university became noticeable. The desire to have ‘everyone’ attend college has changed college.

When comparing the university of the past with the university of the present, there are two errors which threaten: either to see the past as superior in all ways to the present, or to see the present as in all ways superior to the past. We can achieve a sober analysis by steering between the two.

The features of the university which have largely disappeared are catalogued by scholar Robert Bork:

The difference between education today or education in the last sixty or seventy years and what it was before that is to be measured in light years. The future novelist Willa Cather’s studies at the University of Nebraska in 1891 included three years of Greek, two years of Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Robert Browning and the nineteenth century authors (Tennyson, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Ruskin), French literary classics, one year of German, history, philosophy, rhetoric, journalism, chemistry, and mathematics.

It’s worth noting that chemistry and mathematics were included in the education of a student who would make her career in literature. This reflects the university’s goal of imparting both thinking skills and the mastery of bodies of knowledge.

It was not unusual for a student working toward a doctorate in British Literature to be required to do a semester of calculus, or a student studying theology to complete courses in physics. Such was the university’s understanding of itself and its mission.

An Alternative to High School Athletics: High School Physical Fitness

In the early twenty-first century American high school, athletic programs continue to attract large numbers of students. But what about students who don’t participate in team or individual sports?

In many high schools, the student body is divided into those who are part of a sports program, and those who aren’t.

Students who aren’t part of a school’s athletic system are still in need of exercise. But there are very few avenues for physical fitness apart from sports teams.

Many high schools have reduced the number of required semesters of physical education or gym class.

If organizations outside the school could coordinate with schools, there might be an opportunity to encourage bicycling, hiking, canoeing, etc., for high school students.

This need is all the more pressing inasmuch as a significant demographic segment of teenagers spends much, or even most, of its time interacting with some electronic device. Sedentary lifestyles are leading to obesity and diabetes among an increasing number of teenagers.

Athletic programs seem to persist through good times and bad, because there is a consistent desire for them. Physical fitness programs may require more intentional encouragement from adults.

Resources directed away from high school athletic departments would not endanger sports programs, because such programs always find a way to continue.

Such resources could be directed toward physical fitness initiatives, which often tend to be less expensive, because they do not require stadiums, arenas, or much specialized equipment or coaching staff.

Communities might be well-advised to spend less effort on high school sports and high school athletics, and more effort on high school physical fitness.

A Symptom, Not the Underlying Cause: Common Core Isn’t the Problem

Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, there was debate about an educational initiative known as Common Core.

The debate was and remains fierce, with some passionately opposed, and others enthusiastically supporting. State legislatures accepted, rejected, or proposed compromise modifications of Common Core.

But whichever side one takes in the discussion about Common Core, it’s possible that citizens are missing the real point. Common Core is merely one example of a larger phenomenon.

People might be focusing on a tree but not seeing the forest.

There is and has been a plentiful supply of educational initiatives: Outcome-Based Education, New Math, Every Child Counts, No Child Left Behind, Authentic Assessment, Mastery Learning, Inquiry-Based Education, Purpose-Centered Education, Saxon Math, Small Schools Movement, Standards-Based Education, Student-Centered Learning, and many more.

Each of these, and the countless others which could be added to the list, contains a few nuggets of wisdom buried in a large amount of nonsense.

The problem isn’t Common Core. The problem is the tidal wave of programs and trends which regularly deluge public, and sometimes private, schools.

These schemes can, and should, all be dismissed out-of-hand. Why?

The problems with such strategies are at least twofold: first, they are formulated at the national level; second, they involve the legislative and executive branches of the federal and state governments.

Any nationwide proposal necessarily neglects the local variables. Schools are organized best when they are organized locally. Each city, town, or county has its own unique character, and effective education must pay attention to the features which constitute that spirit.

There will be significant shortcomings in any educational plan which was created by, or processed through, either the legislative branch or the executive branch. Education is best done apart from the government.

The Northwest Ordinances of 1787 and 1789, as well as the Land Ordinance of 1785, provided for public education, but did not presume to direct the nature of that education. The shaping of the school was left to the local community, and out of the hands of state and federal governments.

While it is certainly a fine intellectual exercise to analyze various educational proposals, it’s important not to get too caught up in the advantages and disadvantages of any one plan. Any initiative that’s a product of the political process, and any initiative which claims to be a nationwide solution, is a priori wrong.

Concerning the Common Core program in particular, a report from Mercury Radio Arts states:

Stanford professor emeritus James Milgram was the only mathematician on the Common Core Validation Committee, and he refused to sign off on the proposed standards because he believed they were too weak. In testimony to the Texas legislature, Milgram explained that the standards were “in large measure a political document that … is written at a very low level and does not adequately reflect our current understanding of why the math programs in the high-achieving countries give dramatically better results.”

Local, not national, efforts offer the best results in the global educational competition. To be sure, education is a competition, on both national and international levels.

If each town, city, or country has the opportunity to explore its own academic programs, then many different initiatives can be simultaneously explored.

One of Milgram’s objections was that the standards instruct schools to not teach algebra until ninth grade. Milgram and other math experts note that saving algebra until high school means that students won’t be introduced to precalculus until college (assuming they even choose that route).

One perennial concern which reappears in these discussions is that America might be sending too many students to college. Which percentage of high school graduates needs a four-year degree? Are we producing too many university diplomas?

Meanwhile, we might have too few skilled workers in those fields which don’t require four-year degrees. Welders, tool and die makers, draftsmen, etc., are in short supply, and despite our transition to an information economy, are still needed.

This does not come as a surprise to those who put Common Core together. Jason Zimba, a professor at Bennington College and the lead writer of the math standards, acknowledged as much to the (Baton Rouge) Advocate. “If you want to take calculus your freshman year in college, you will need to take more mathematics than is in the Common Core,” he said. Zimba also admitted that students following Common Core would likely be precluded from “attending elite colleges” since the Core is “not aligned with the expectations at the collegiate level.”

Each city, town, and county should wrestle through these questions for itself, and ignore national and political proposals. Indeed, there should be no national or political proposals.

How can we bring an end to ceaseless production of such schemes? Perhaps the simplest answer would be to give them no attention: no media time, no public debate. Ignore educational theorists. Starve bad ideas by giving them no consideration.