In a large black-and-white photograph hanging in Jane Stassenâs office, 1930s-era construction workers perch on a thin steel beam some 70 stories above New York City, precarious but undaunted as they read newspapers and eat lunch on a break.
Itâs no accident that Ms. Stassen, the director of curriculum and instruction for the 3,200-student South St. Paul school district, keeps this image on view above her desk. She sees a parallel to the cash-poor districtâs plan to become what would apparently be the first public school system in the nation to offer the demanding International Baccalaureate program to all its students by next fall.
âWeâre going confidently out on a limb,â Ms. Stassen explained. As to why a small community best known for its long-gone meat-packing plants would choose to put itself in the vanguard of education reform, district officials say the driving force was pretty cut and dried: the need to prepare students to compete for 21st-century jobs.
âWhat we want is for all our kids to pursue postsecondary [education],â Ms. Stassen said. âIn order to prepare them for that, we need to offer them rigorous, challenging academic experiences, and thatâs basically what [IB] is all about.â
The perception that the Geneva, Switzerland-based offer just what American students need in todayâs more globally competitive environment seems to be catching on.
After decades of obscurity and slow expansion, the pace of growth in IBâincluding courses of study for the primary and middle school years as well as the better-known high-school-level programsâhas quickened considerably.
Favorable word of mouth among educatorsâalong with an endorsement from President Bush and glowing accounts in national magazinesâhas helped catapult IB into U.S. classrooms. More than 225 American schools so far this year have started offering at least one IB program, bringing the U.S. total to 800.
The process of becoming IB-authorized and offering IB classes can be expensive and time-consuming, and the research base on IBâs efficacy in the United States at this point is thin. Still, more and more schools seem to be arriving at the conclusion of Kathleen Johnson, South St. Paul Junior High Schoolâs head of school: âThis is probably the best K-12 education you can get.â
Different observers have different theories about whatâs behind IBâS faster growth in recent years, given that the program does not actively advertise.
Jeffrey R. Beard, IBâs director general, says the International Baccalaureate Organizationâs goalââto prepare students to assume a meaningful role in todayâs global societyââmeshes well with Americansâ heightened awareness that they must compete for jobs with people on other continents, and that they need a world-class education to succeed.
For years, there has been only a sparse International Baccalaureate presence in the United States, but the number of U.S. schools offering at least one IB program has recently shot up.
NOTE: Figure for 2007 is as of this month.
SOURCE: Courtesy of International Baccalaureate Organization
Mostly eschewing multiple-choice tests in favor of research papers and oral presentations, IB aims to teach critical-thinking skills, partly by training students to examine the bases of truth and bias.
âThese are skills that typical adults donât achieve until their 30s or 40s,â Mr. Beard said. âParents tell us, âI canât believe my kid is thinking this way.â â
IB offers programs for all three main segments of K-12 educationâprimary school, middle school, and high school. The latter, called the Diploma Program, is the most common of the three in the United States.
Offerings vary from school to school, but each IB school must offer at least one course in each of IBâs six content areas, and fulfill uniform curriculum and course guidelines.
⢠About 90 percent of schools in the United States that offer at least one International Baccalaureate program are public.
⢠About 30 percent of IBâs U.S. schools receive federal Title I anti-poverty money.
⢠About $10,000 in application fees is required to have a school considered for IB authorization, not including $1,000-per-person IB professional-development courses and other expenses.
69´ŤĂ˝ enrolled in the two-year IB Diploma Program must take a sequence of subject classes, plus a Theory of Knowledge class, and write a 4,000-word research paper on an approved subject of their choice. Diploma candidates must also participate in 150 hours of what IB calls Creativity, Action, and Service, which includes extracurricular arts, sports, and community service.
Alternatively, although all IB schools must offer the full Diploma Program, students can opt to take individual IB classes.
The Diploma Program culminates in studentsâ senior year with three to five weeks of oral and written assessments, which count for three-quarters of their final grades.
To earn an IB diploma, students must score at least 24 of 42 possible points on exams across each of IBâs six content groups: one first language; one acquired language, in which students must be fluent; individuals and societies, including business, philosophy, and history; experimental sciences, including physics and design technology; the arts; and mathematics and computer sciences.
69´ŤĂ˝ can receive up to three additional points for their work in the Theory of Knowledge class and for their Creativity, Action, and Service participation.
South St. Paul is smallâjust over 20,000 peopleâand it takes less than a minute to drive from the district office to South St. Paul Senior High School, a red-brick structure that graduated its hundredth class last year.
International Baccalaureate began operating in 1968 largely as a way for the children of European diplomats, business executives, and other professionals to keep up with their college-preparatory studies during time spent abroad.
The first IB graduates received their diplomas in 1970âthe year Peru, Ill., publisher M. Blouke Carus happened to see a tiny story about IB in the International Herald Tribune newspaper. The program got started in the United States a year later.
âBlouke was probably the major reason [IB] came to the United States,â said IB Director General Jeffrey R. Beard. âHeâs always been concerned about international competitiveness.â
Mr. Carus is American, but he studied for a semester in 1939 at a school in Germany when he was a boy, and was struck by how much more challenging the academics were there.
After getting his bachelorâs degree at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, Calif., and studying further abroad, Mr. Carus went on to develop and publish, among other education titles, the Open Court 69´ŤĂ˝ series now published by SRA/McGraw-Hill, a division of the New York Citybased McGraw-Hill Cos. Inc. He worked to persuade IB officials in Geneva to branch out to North America, and the first U.S. IB schoolâthe United Nations International School in New York Cityâ was authorized in 1971.
South St. Paul, Minn., began offering IB at its high school in 1986, after David Metzen, then the districtâs superintendent, happened to see an IB class in action on a bus trip to inner-city Milwaukee.
âIâd never seen kids and teachers so turned on,â he said. âI said, âWhat is this?â and they said, âInternational Baccalaureate.â I said, âInternational what?â â
Mr. Metzen, now a regent of the University of Minnesota, managed to persuade the school board to give IB a try, though, he added, âIâm the first one to say I didnât know if it would be successful.â
âScott J. Cech
Inside on a recent school day, the hallways were swarming with students, faculty, and administrators wearing maroon-and-white âPackersâ sweatshirts and jacketsâa show of school spirit for the boysâ soccer team, which had a big game that afternoon.
One of those soccer players, 18-year-old Keith Lowery, was sitting at his desk in teacher and IB coordinator Angie Ryterâs IB Biology 2 class, dividing his attention between the dayâs lesson on evidence for evolution and integral problems in his Calculus 2 textbook.
When he transferred to South St. Paulâs public schools from a local private school in 7th grade, he found the academics âway too easy,â and when he got the chance to take IB courses, he jumped.
âI like being challenged,â said the senior, who plays goalie and said heâd like to study engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, or maybe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass.
Nevin Shenouda, a 17-year-old girl of Egyptian heritage who sat up front, said she was also drawn to the program for the challenge, and compared it favorably with Advanced Placement classes, which friends outside the district have taken.
âIB makes you think,â she said. âAPâs just a lot of memorizing and then writing it down.â
Then thereâs the college-tuition factor. Ms. Shenouda has already been accepted by the University of Minnesota, which sheâs weighing attending, in part because if she earns a score of at least 30 out of 45 possible points on her IB final exams, sheâll be eligible to skip up to a year of classes there. She said the university gave her sister, who graduated in 2006, $1,000 in scholarship money just for having taken IB classes.
Other universities offer even more. At Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore., an IB final-exam score of 30 or higher confers automatic admission, a yearâs worth of creditâworth about $6,000 for in-state students and about $18,000 for students from out of stateâand a minimum of $2,000 in scholarship money, renewable annually so long as the student maintains a 3.0 grade point average.
âDoes it help with recruitment? Yes,â said Michele Sandlin, the universityâs director of admissions, but she added that only about five incoming freshmen per year manage to score a 30 or above. Ms. Sandlin said Oregon State offered the credit in part because IB-graduate freshmen were testing out of so many classes.
Because IB has only lately popped up on many educatorsâ radar screens, there have been no national studies of its relative effectiveness in educating students or preparing them for college.
But Ms. Sandlin said sheâs impressed with the quality of IB-educated applicants she sees.
âThe IB students that we get are very prepared for college,â she said.
While IB has grown markedly in the United States, itâs still dwarfed by Advanced Placement, the Goliath of college-prep programs.
More than 15,500 U.S. public and private schools offered AP exams last year, a number thatâs roughly equivalent to the number of high schools offering an AP class, according to the New York City-based College Board, which sponsors the AP program.
While IB and AP are sometimes mentioned in the same breath, said Carolyn M. Callahan, the chairwoman of the department of leadership, foundations, and policy at the University of Virginiaâs education school, in Charlottesville,Va., both programs are strong, but not really comparable.
âI wouldnât say [IB] is AP on steroids so much as a different kind of program across the board,â she said.
Still, Ms. Callahan said IBâs reputation has grown as the luster of AP courses has dimmed a bit. Amid complaints that AP courses have become less challenging as more students enroll in them, as well as a series of AP exam-scoring gaffes last year, âAdvanced Placement came under considerable criticism,â she noted.
Ms. Callahan, who is one of a very few impartial researchers in the United States to have extensively studied IB, said the College Board has actually âtried to mimic IB,â by establishing the Advanced Placement International Diploma.
âI think IB has taken on a mantle of prestige,â she said.
Spokesmen for the College Board did not respond to requests for comment on that view or to a request to comment generally on IB.
Some schools have dropped IB, though, because of community preference for AP.
W.T.Woodson High School, a highly regarded public school in Fairfax,Va., decided eight years ago to discontinue its IB offerings after parents complained that the program allowed less flexibility for studentsâ extracurricular activities than AP.
âUltimately, I believe the consensus was that Woodson had an AP program already in place that was very successful,â said Robert Elliott, whoâs retiring as the principal of the school next month. âThere are aspects of the IB program that are ⌠uniquely great,â he added. âI think many people in the community wouldâve liked to offer both programs, but thatâs hard to do, especially in these financially tight times.â
Ms. Callahan believes that the cost of IB, as itâs currently set up, will prevent it from ever growing as widespread as AP.
âItâs an extremely expensive program,â she said of IB. âSadly, many communities are not willing to invest.â
It costs about $10,000 in application fees to get a school considered for IB authorization, and that doesnât include the travel and other costs of sending the schoolâs teachers and coordinators to specialized three-day professional-development courses, which cost $1,000 per person. Even after being authorized, IB high schools must pay $8,850 a year in fees. Middle and primary schools must each pay $5,220 annually, though schools with more than one IB program get a 10 percent overall fee discount.
69´ŤĂ˝ must also pay additional fees per student and per subject, and those costs donât cover mailing expensesâall exams are physically mailed to graders, many of whom are overseas.
To hear South St. Paulâs Ms. Stassen tell it, money wasâand continues to beâher districtâs biggest problem in implementing IB.
âThe local pushback has been, âCan we really afford this?â â she said.
South St. Paul Superintendent Patty Heminover said the district has spent about $626,730, supplemented with money from the nonprofit South St. Paul Educational Foundation, on IB just since the start of this school year. Thatâs not small change in a district that shares its headquarters building with a drugstore. South St. Paul schools spent a total of $30 million for all of the 2006 fiscal year.
âWhat we had to do was take a look at our resources and reallocate,â Ms. Heminover said. Since 1997, the district has halved the percentage of budget it spends on administration, letting its communications and grant-writer positions go unfilled and tightening up its already lean finances elsewhere.
Financially, âitâs a difficult thing to be a small district,â Ms. Stassen said. But she added: âEveryoneâs just one step from the classroom, and thatâs what makes a differenceâ what happens in the classroom.â
Although the IB organization expects to continue to grow aggressively in the United States, IB leaders intend to expand the programs with a specific type of student and school in mind.
While âwe get the label of being elitist,â Mr. Beard said, about 30 percent of IB schools in the United States receive federal Title I anti-poverty money. The organization would like to dramatically increase the overall proportion of IB students who are eligible for free and reduced-price lunches.
âWeâre focusing on schools with Title I,â Mr. Beard said.
Some high schools require prospective IB students to pass an entrance test before allowing them into the Diploma Program, he said, which tends to screen out those with lower incomes: âWhat weâre telling [high schools] is, let them all in.â
Ms. Ryter, the biology teacher, noted that, if all goes as planned and the districtâs elementary and junior high schools are authorized by the IB central office to offer full IB programs starting next fall, much of the intimidation that keeps more students from taking International Baccalaureate in high school will likely disappear.
Because, unlike in high school, all students at primary- years IB schools must take IB, âthey wonât see it as, âOh, thatâs only for the smart kids,â â Ms. Ryter said.
Indeed, when asked to compare IB classesâ difficulty with that of non-IB classes, a group of 11-year-old students from South St. Paulâs elementary-grades Kaposia Education Center just gave quizzical looks.
Because theyâve been in classes already ramping up their academics as part of Kaposiaâs IB candidacy, they donât know anything different. To them, the academically demanding, internationally oriented curriculum is just the way school is.
