OP-ED: Kicking the Tires on International Baccalaureate

With all the academic changes in our District there are educational fundamentals we all agree: Our District is in dramatic need of reform; changes must include higher academic standards and more challenging curricula; and, all students should be engaged in highly challenging academic programs.

These common threads break down regarding how these goals can be accomplished, fostering divisive and divided lines. Yet, these discussions are too important, too complicated to be reduced to sound bites of level or delevel, honors or college prep, black or white. These conversations are more about the HOW and less about the WHAT.

Historically, our District is light on details and metrics (the HOW), which requires stakeholders assume a starting presumption of capability, if not excellence, delivering on the promises of rigor, excellence, equity and differentiated instruction.  Instead of providing context, content and critique of academic programs (i.e., SmartBoards, iPods for Math and LevelUp for 7th grade), more involved and elaborate programs are proposed.

International Baccalaureate

The latest car on the school reform train, introduced in December, includes additional deleveling within the middle schools (including eliminating levels in Language Arts, Science and Social Studies while retaining levels and acceleration in Math) while bringing the International Bacculaurette Middle Years Programme (IB MYP or IB) to our schools. 

Word leaked before the December meeting that IB MYP was being recommended. Quick research revealed Cherry Hill, NJ, was the only NJ school with IB MYP.  The Cherry Hill district used to have an IB offering from K-12 but voted to phase it out in all but one of their three middle schools (Rosa International Middle School), but as a magnet school.  As a former Cherry Hill BoE member said “IB isn't for everyone, and wasn’t for us. It ended up being a little club of scholars.”

Discontinuing IB in Cherry Hill, with the exception of the one middle school, was largely about cost; at the discontinuation vote, they had spent $515,000/year on IB in one high school, two middle schools and two elementary schools (note: $515,000 was their IB maintenance costs as all teachers had been trained prior to the vote to discontinue).

Surprisingly, no one involved in recommending IB MYP for SOMSD researched, visited or talked with Cherry Hill prior to presenting their recommendations to the Boiard of Education in December. Strange at best considering the seismic shift of IB MYP. Stranger, still, that the first visit didn’t happen till the middle of February – less than three weeks before our March 5 Board of Education vote to implement or not. 

Our two middle school principals have experience with IB, including Principal Uglialoro having taught at Dwight School in Manhattan for two years. The Dwight School is a private school, with admission requirements and tuition in excess of $40,000 a year.  Both principals have been consulting with IB experts since the fall of 2011 and joined the IBO-sponsored “IB Answers” network for additional research opportunities.

The lack of IB in New Jersey provoked the need for additional research and since January, I have made personal visits have been made to seven school districts including Cherry Hill, Locust Valley (NY), the Dwight School (NYC), Biotechnology HS (NJ), the Whitby School (Montessori, IB MYP/CT) among others.

EFFECTIVENESS/PERFORMANCE

Any effort at school reform must have measureable expectations to Increase Student Achievement – otherwise, why do it? IB promises academic rigor, provides critical thinking skills, increases second-language skills, and creates an understanding of other cultures. According to Elizabeth Brock, head of research, development, and communications for IB North America:

“IB is committed to providing rigorous, international education to students from around the world. In the US, IB has received much support from governments and policymakers, including the U.S. Department of Education and local school districts, to increase student achievement and to turn around low-performing schools.”

My research, however, uncovered only one study of IB effectiveness showing the opposite outcome (Deborah Jackson, doctoral thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 2006). Her study showed the outcome of IB MYP group on standardized exams did not achieve a “level of statistically significant difference (<0.05)” compared to those not in the IB MYP group. The lack of difference between IB MYP and non-IB MYP was consistent among Black, Hispanic and White student comparator groups.

There is almost no evidence IB increases proficiency in reading or math for academic strugglers or helps close the achievement gap in districts similar to SOMSD. A Greenwich School District guidance counselor (they voted in October to not expand IB from middle school to the high school) said “I’ve never heard anyone associated with an IB school claim they could or were closing any achievement gaps with the program.”

COST

IB has a reputation as one of the most expensive educational reform programs available. A quick review of the IB website creates a tally for SOMSD upwards of $3M before the IB MYP is fully rolled out into our middle schools (see attached table). Adjusting for the foreign language salaries, the cost is more than $150,000/year for – triple what the District estimated at $54,000/year. For context, our training budget for the entire district is $200,000 or $415/teacher.

For comparison sake, the Greenwich (CT) School District voted in October 2011 to implement IB MYP in one middle school (Western Middle School). The school has 485 students and 26 core subject teachers needing IB training. According to their district administrative offices, they’ve “allocated $100,000 for IB training for 2012” or $3,800/teacher.

In Stow, OH, where they are still in ‘candidate’ status for two of their six elementary schools, they spent $103,000 from May 2010-May 2011 on IB training for 66 teachers or $1,515/teacher.

In Cherry Hill, NJ, as previously stated, the Board voted to discontinue IB in large part due to cost having spent $515,000 annually on the program even after all the teachers were trained.

IMPLEMENTATION

Rigor. Challenging. Global curriculum. On the surface, IB sounds like a prestigious addition to any school district. And, implemented well, it might be a sound addition to the South Orange-Maplewood School District. The holdback is there is no proposed measurement or timetable to understand what IB is expected to bring to SOMSD. Additionally, besides a reputation for being expensive, IB is also widely considered a replacement for honors classes. Again, it sounds good, but honors classes are not for everyone and the concept of too challenging can be very real in this case.

A look back on our District and Superintendent shows a poor track record of implementing new initiatives well or holding academics to high standards. For example, the single year of Level-Up data available signals both grade inflation and a drop in NJASK scores indicating our implementation skills are not yet at competency levels. And, Level-Up is just one example. 

Running parallel to our implementation challenges – or classroom “unevenness” as a parent recently described – is the reality that implementing IB is simply not easy.  A Cherry Hill assistant principal regrets “not managing the expectations of our parents” because “the culture shock for many kids and parents caused an relentless pushback on the program.” A Locust Valley School District curriculum coordinator cautions “parents need to be prepared for a lot of bumps and bruises as IB takes hold” because the process has a rough start and takes “upwards of five years to settle into to normalcy.”

Tales of caution abound across multiple public school systems. A NJ high school IB coordinator explained, “IB is challenging for even the most academically proficient kids” and counsels that IB, on average, “takes 5 years to establish itself fully in a school” but “parent enthusiasm and well-managed, long-term expectations [with teachers, students and parents] balance any lack of IB experience.”

As the District begins the multi-year process of bringing IB to the South Orange-Maplewood School District there are many unanswered questions: 

• IB is expensive and a cost that continues the life of the program; is it not possible to bring rigor and challenge to our kids without this real and repeated expense?
• IB is hard to implement (even IB says it takes five years for the program to smooth out); with divisiveness already well established in our towns, can the Board/Superintendent tackle having IB well accepted?
• IB requires a whole-school approach – not just to teaching, but for fundamental implementation, yet implementation might be our biggest growth area; why hasn’t there been a detailed implementation plan, with well-defined metrics and clear timelines for set expectations?
• IB is not well adopted in the Northeast, New Jersey or our District Factor Group; SOMSD has never been an outlier in terms of educational programs, should this be the thing we walk in unchartered territory? Especially considering SOMSD would be the only MYP in the state?

Seems we’re about to buy a Cadillac without a test drive. Isn’t it time our Board of Education and parents start kicking the tires?

- Marian Cutler, South Orange