International Baccalaureate

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

The International Baccalaureate (IB) refers to a rigorous program of study for students from pre-school to the senior year in high school. The program is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and licenses schools around the world. IB curriculum emphasizes introducing children to a global perspective and courses draw from multiple disciplines. The program seeks to produce students who are not only involved in their own communities but also aware of how communities fit within much broader social and cultural contexts.

Overview

The ideals of the IB program were first fostered in the difficult and often tense interregnum in Europe between the two world wars. French educator and human rights advocate Marie-Thérès Maurette (1890-1989) created the first broad template for what would become the IB program in an effort to argue that national boundaries and political divisions were essentially dangerous and destructive fictions created to sustain impractical and often violent regimes of narrow vested powers. The age of kings and countries, she argued, was over. Indeed, Maurette posited, the danger of national borders and national governments was evidenced by the continental-wide wars that had regularly ravaged Europe over the more than a century of nationalism since the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. She envisioned a world where people were able to communicate and understand different cultures, different perspectives, different religions, different value systems.

Early Years. In 1968, after more than a decade of strategic planning and international cooperation, the International Baccalaureate program was created. Its headquarters are in Le Grand-Saconnex, one of the most cosmopolitan and multicultural sections of Geneva, itself one of the most culturally diverse cities in Europe and the headquarters of numerous international bodies. Initially the program focused on students entering the final phase of their public education, what in the United States is high school. Students who completed the challenging program would receive (in addition to their school diploma) a special certification that, in turn, could be used as an element of their application for advanced study at the university level.

The IB certification quickly became a mark of prestige, recognizing students for completing a program that became known for its discipline and its uncompromising academic rigor. “Important ingredients of the IB diploma programme were developing intercultural understanding, learning about global issues, learning at least one other language, and understanding the human condition on a global scale” (Hill, 2012). Students developed not only their intellectual range but also their emotional register as they were introduced to a wide variety of perspectives. They were expected to study those perspectives with an open mind, then challenge them in robust and vibrant classroom forums. The goal was for students to understand alternative perspectives and ultimately to shape their own philosophy based the widest possible context.

The initial philosophy of the IB program asserted that a student must be defined holistically—that is, it was impossible to separate the mind from the heart, that intellectual growth meant moral and ethical growth, that education meant developing the ability to think critically and analytically. The goal was to produce students capable of complex thinking but who were also compassionate, humane, principled, and ethical. It was and still is, by any measure, an ambitious agenda (Korsmo, 2012). At the completion of the program, students were expected to demonstrate their command of the material by completing not only a battery of assessment tests but also some significant individual project, ranging from organizing a community service project to mounting an exhibition of original creative work to developing a research paper that looked at either an historic or a contemporary issue. Completing the program would “provide students with a single acceptable recognized qualification for university entry” (Fitzgerald, 2015).

From its modest inception, the IB program has become one of the most widely used and respected alternative programs of study. Since 2011 alone, the program has nearly doubled internationally. As of 2016, the IB Foundation authorized just under six thousand scholastic programs worldwide that involved more than 4,500 schools. Just over 60 percent of those programs are located in the United States; 25 percent are in Europe and the Middle East; and the remainder are in the Pacific Rim.

IB Today. Much like the Advanced Placement program in the United States, the IB program is now offered as a kind of supplement to schools interested in providing a specialized certification for its most promising and brightest students. “In a globalized world, traditional education methods are found to be increasingly insufficient for educating well-rounded individuals who can contribute to their community. To develop the skills that will benefit students for the future with skills such as critical thinking or time management, more and more educators and parents believe that international education is crucial” (Sagun, Ateskan & Onur, 2016). The certification has become a benchmark for college applications to some of the most prestigious universities in the United States and abroad.

The teachers of IB courses are trained and certified by the IB foundation. The program controls and directs what has become an international educational program. Students who complete the program are expected to develop a working respect for the complexities of the international community, a marked asset in a world that is increasingly interconnected as a result of the revolution in digital technology. The hallmark principles of the IB program are summed up by its guiding mission: Inquiry, Reflection, and Action. Students in the program are expected to read widely, discuss critically, think carefully, and then act in ways that benefit the widest and broadest range of communities, In short, the program seeks to produce a generation of students willing to think and act globally.

The IB courses involve the traditional areas of study: literature and language, sociology, mathematics, the hard and soft sciences, and the arts. Each subject is presented in a global context. For example, the literature class would involve not only the traditional works of the English-language canon but also a sampling of works from other cultures and other civilizations; the mathematics courses would locate the roots of mathematical logic not only in Europe but in the Middle East and the far East. The core requirement of the program, not surprisingly, is fluency in a selected foreign language. Because the course materials can be changed to match classes and/or current events, the IB program is seen by educators as being not only rigorous but also “engaging, relevant, challenging and significant” (Jamal, 2016).

Students are asked to think critically from a global perspective, to respect ways in which humanity can work together, to see some of the most difficult contemporary issues— the environment, human rights, government, terrorism, economics—in a broad context that manages rather than avoids complexity. In the process, students are introduced to the process of learning itself. Unlike more traditional classrooms in which instructors are routinely expected to simply move information to students who, in turn, ingest that material and then periodically regurgitate it on examinations, IB students are expected to think about knowledge itself, to always be aware they are in a classroom and that environment directs how the mind works toward its core principles by critical and analytical thinking. For the IB program, thinking involves students weighing all sides of issues fairly and openly as a way to prepare that student to succeed not only at the university level but also as a professional in an increasingly globalized marketplace.

Applications

The IB program, since its inception, has developed into four signature programs, each aimed at a different level learning audience. The core program is the IB program for the equivalent of high school students (ages 16-19), a two-year broad-based arts and sciences certification program known as the IB Diploma. This is the program most associated with the Foundation. In 2012, however, the Foundation launched IB in Career-Related Programs, which tailored the IB program and its mission to career-specific programs such as business administration, computer science, environmental studies, life sciences, or engineering—programs offered at the high school level to prepare students for professional success even before college. This preparation is designed to make students more attractive to colleges looking for candidates in very competitive programs (Ryan, Heineke & Steindam, 2014).

In the 1990s, the IB Foundation, recognizing the need to shape minds at an early age and to create students who from the very beginnings of their education were open to the broad issues of a global community, introduced programs designed for younger students: IB Middle Years certification (for ages 11-16) and IB Primary certification (for ages 3-12). These early learner programs offer the Foundation’s core principles adjusted for age; young students are engaged by complex general concepts such as self-identity, nationalism, culture, economics, and governance. At each level, students are introduced to the foundational principles of a foreign language. These programs are geared to making students aware even at a relatively young age that the world is complex and diverse.

To complete the IB program at the high school level, students are expected to produce one of three major individual projects as a way to summarize what they have learned: (1) a major research paper (usually in the 4,000 word range) that includes an extensive bibliography and often serves as the seed idea for later post-graduate at the master’s or doctoral level; (2) a public exhibition of a cycle of thematically related creative works usually encompassing a variety of media and accompanied by a catalog-styled explication of the works; or (3) a multi-leveled community service project in the student’s area. For example, an environmental engineering student might undertake a targeted evaluation of a local endangered ecosystem as a way to create a broader contextual reading of the area’s biological health.

These projects are evaluated not only in areas of competency and knowledge but also by how clearly these projects underscore the concept of globalization. Projects, together with the standardized assessments administered by the foundation, define the student’s level of achievement and serve as critical tools in the application to universities. The Foundation claims that students who complete the IB Diploma program are more than 45 percent more likely to be admitted to their first-choice college.

Viewpoints

In addition to its wide range of publications (many of them education theory books as well as workbooks and supplemental materials such as study guides for the courses themselves), its sponsorship of conferences and workshops internationally, and contributions from businesses, global conglomerates, and individuals vested in the program, the Foundation draws most of its income from the fees charged to schools and in turn to students to participate in the program. The average fee for a student enrolled in the IB Diploma program is, as of October, 2016, set at approximately $1,200 per year.

As Gardner-McTaggert (2016) and Bunnell (2015) conclude, this fee essentially divides schools between the rich and the poor, thus even inadvertently creating an elitist class of students (and school districts) able to afford the prestigious program. This two-tiered education system, critics cite, creates tension within and between school districts as they must compete for state funding in order to establish the program on any long-term basis. Within this logic, given the IB’s reputation for rigorous study and for developing independent thinking, the more familiar (and far cheaper) state-based curriculum programs can be seen as somehow second-rate. It is argued, in turn, that the IB program necessarily favors wealthy school districts and by far tends to be the curriculum of choice of private schools.

More than money, however, critics, particularly in the United States in the decade since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, have seen the program as anti-American. In very public campaigns to rid school districts of the program in Michigan and then in Pennsylvania in the late 2000s, critics argued education funding would be better spent in shaping intelligent American students rather than intelligent students with a global bias. A more nationalistic curriculum, these critics argued, would in the long run produce not only better students but also better citizens. Ironically, isolationism and nationalism are at the core of the very problem the IB program has long sought to address.

Terms & Concepts

Advanced Placement: A curriculum of study offered in high schools in both the United States and Canada that offers college-level courses in a wide variety of disciplines as well as providing a system for assessments.

Assessment Examination: An organized battery of performance-based tests in which a student is asked to complete work that can be both objectively and subjectively evaluated for its content and its value.

Curriculum: The program of study, often involving multiple disciplines, as well as a mission statement that accounts for program, adopted and endorsed by a school.

Globalization: The complex process in which nations come to rely on each other and to develop with each other economically as well as socially and culturally.

Holistic Development: The process by which a person, most often an adolescent, is measured as a complex of different levels of significant growth that each inevitably impact the others, including emotional, physical, intellectual, spiritual, and social evolution.

Standardized Test: A computer-based examination in which students are given the same multiple choice questions as a way to measure student competence across a broad spectrum.

Xenophobia: An unreasonable and often reactionary fear or distrust of foreign peoples or different cultures.

Bibliography

Bunnell, T. (2015). The rise and decline of the International Baccalaureate diploma programme in the United Kingdom. Oxford Review of Education, 41(3), 387–403. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=102810678&site=ehost-live

Fitzgerald, S. (2015). Perceptions of the International Baccalaureate (IB) in Ontario universities. Canadian Journal of Education, 38(3), 1032. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=110208952&site=ehost-live

Gardner-McTaggert, A. (2016). International elite, or global citizens? Equity, distinction and power: The International Baccalaureate and the rise of the South. Globalisation, Societies & Education, 14(1), 1–29. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=113207022&site=ehost-live

Hill, I. (2012). An international model of world-class education: The International Baccalaureate. Prospects, 42(13), 346–359. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=82504879&site=ehost-live

Jamal, S. (2016). From theory to practice: A critical review of the IB Primary Year Programme. International Schools Journal, 35(2), 22–37. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=114806670&site=ehost-live

Korsmo, J. (2012). Mission possible: The efforts of the International Baccalaureate to align mission and vision with daily practice. International Schools Journal, 32(1), 29–39. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=85869126&site=ehost-live

Ryan, A. A., Heineke, A. A., & Steindam, C. C. (2014). Preparing globally minded teachers through the incorporation of the international baccalaureate. Journal of Education, 194(3), 39–51. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=103434182&site=ehost-live

Sagun, S. S., Ateskan, A. A., & Onur, J. E. (2016). Developing students for university through an international high school program in Turkey. Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice, 16(2), 439–457. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=115006794&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Grant, M. (2016). The International Baccalaureate: Guidance counselling, predictions and the Middle Years Programme. International Schools Journal, 35(2), 76–81. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=114806675&site=ehost-live

Heydom, W., & Jesudason, S.. (2013) Decoding theory of knowledge for the IB diploma: Themes, skills and assessments. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Ripley, A. (2014) The smartest kids in the world: And how they got that way. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Savage, M. M., & Drake, S. M. (2016). Living transdisciplinary curriculum: Teachers' experiences with the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Programme. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 9(1), 1–20. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=119048188&site=ehost-live

Tough, P. (2013). How children succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character. New York, NY: Mariner.

Walker, A., Lee, M., & Bryant, D. A. (2016). Development and validation of the International Baccalaureate Learner Profile Questionnaire (IBLPQ). Educational Psychology, 36(10), 1845–1867. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=119451065&site=ehost-live