By Marcy Stamper
International Baccalaureate (IB) started 46 years ago as an international school in Geneva, Switzerland, primarily to provide consistent education for the children of businesspeople and diplomats.
Since these people often got placements in different countries, their kids would be enrolled in new schools with a variety of curriculums, according to Robin Khan, marketing communications manager for IB Americas.
In the 1960s, educators put together their ideas to devise a consistent curriculum and a diploma that would be recognized wherever those students went, said Khan. IB’s first program, the diploma program, came out of this process.
The two lower-grade levels, which the Methow Valley School District is considering, came later – the middle years program, for seventh through 10th grade, in 1994; and the primary years, for kindergarten through sixth grade, in 1997.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was involved during the earliest research into an international educational model in the 1960s. UNESCO helped finance studies on access to higher education and helped pay participants’ travel costs to meetings, according to a history of the IB program, The International Baccalaureate: Pioneering in Education, by Ian Hill.
In the 1970s, UNESCO was asked to underwrite IB to develop a common program of education and standards across the world, according to Hill.
“This did not occur and a number of reasons have been suggested,” wrote Hill. While part of UNESCO’s mission was to improve educational systems in individual countries and to eradicate illiteracy, UNESCO viewed education as a national prerogative, wrote Hill. Moreover, UNESCO did not have the resources to finance the IB project.
“To have taken on the IB would have been to deny, to some extent, the value of the national systems UNESCO set out to improve,” wrote Hill.
Today, the only connection between the two organizations is that UNESCO provides grants for IB educators to train other teachers in developing countries, said Khan.
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For the other two articles published on this topic this week, see The IB framework: how the program is intended to work and School district info meeting draws IB skeptics – and supporters.
Click to see all Methow Valley News articles about the proposed International Baccalaureate program in the Methow Valley School District .
