Serious effort to remove IB from FCPS?
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Anonymous
Don’t need to love, just transfer to AP school which is why the boundary changes cannot be to “dump good kids into bad schools” bc if go to IB school and don’t want IB, can transfer out. |
Anonymous
It’s obvious also from IB classes getting less college credit compared to AP ones. IB SL classes are a joke, same as Theory of knowledge and CAS. |
Anonymous
That implies the inconvenience of adding to the commute time at the expense of sleep hours. Why not just take the input and choose whatever the students and parents prefer? Given the choice, the vast majority would prefer AP. The issue is a the administration thinks they know better. Keep one or two magnet IB high schools if the enrollment is there, which I doubt. The argument in the thread is that it doesn’t matter, IB vs AP is the same they’ll all learn something (the same thing?) in the end. First this is not true, the inflexibility of IB make it a bad choice for most students. Second let families decide on their own. And third all things being equal IB is more expensive so why not go with the most cost effective option and offer AP uniformly throughout the district. There’s no reason to keep IB unless you talk to some delusional parents that think an IB diploma with drastically increase their kid’s chances to an ivy school. |
Anonymous
Problem is that the closest school --usually the one that the child was redistricted from--is not available for transfer. |
Anonymous
May ask which school was the AP one and which one was IB? |
Anonymous
Why are SL classes a joke? Are they not in depth? What is your experience with them? Not arguing, trying to understand IB better. |
Anonymous
Wish school board would listen to you and #s do not support keeping any IB schools. The only reason they do is they try to have every kid take 1 IB class- could be IB art or music so can say big % of school participates but reality is like Lewis where hardly any do full diploma work- recently was a only 4 that did. I’d buy the argument that if IB so good, why wasn’t TJ set up for it. And IB is miserable for any kids with accelerated math. |
Anonymous
Ok that’s the dumbest argument in this entire debate. Top schools are directly correlated to SES. If Langley was IB, it would still be a top school. If Annandale was AP, it would still be at the bottom. It’s not rocket science. |
Anonymous
DP. It’s not such a dumb argument when you consider that FCPS thought IB programs would attract families to lower performing schools. Not only did it not do that, for the most part, it may accelerated their decline. Also, if IB were perceived as a stronger program that prepared students better and helped kids with college admissions, Langley and its peers like McLean and Oakton had 20 years to ask FCPS to swap IB for AP. That never happened - and those parents aren’t exactly shy. |
Anonymous
IB SL classes generally don’t get any college credit. So if you’re set on taking an advanced class a la carte, it makes most sense to take the AP class instead. |
Anonymous
Not really. The high SES parents see right through the hype and are savvy about making good educational choices for their kids. Its mostly the high SES parents advocating for AP. |
Anonymous
I think part of the issue is that FCPS allows students to just take an IB class here or there rather than requiring he entire diploma in order to access the classes. Other school districts in other states don’t do this at all. Then they should just designate a few schools as IB and students who want to pursue that degree can transfer there like an academy school. This will never happen. But I’m just saying that this is an odd thing that FCPS does with IB |
Anonymous
Making the diploma program participation a requirement is worse. It would not serve the students that can’t handle a large load of advanced coursework, which benefit from taking an a la carte class here and there to get a taste of college coursework and get some rigorous preparation under their belt. The problem is that for a college level class they’d have to take an HL which is two years, a large time investment for these students, so they dabble in SL classes that are not even close to the required rigor, and won’t get them any college credit. I’m guessing the hope is making diploma required weeds out the students that drag down the participation statistics that make the IB program look bad. But if you’re offering only one advanced coursework program to a high school, you need to choose one that serves most students the best, not a very narrow slice of the cohort. The rigidity of IB program make it a poor choice for many students. The point is IB is not as good as AP, it’s too expensive to maintain two advanced programs, so given the option the district should go with what works for most of the student body. |
Anonymous
Which is why IB only magnets won’t work, unless it’s a very specific kind of magnet like humanities, but even then you still need to do the six courses for diploma and can’t specialize too much. IB is so rigid and prescriptive that it doesn’t work well for students that want to specialize. IB is a program designed in the 70’s, education changed a lot in the past half century. |
Anonymous
| You can debate the merits of IB all you want but it’s more expensive and less flexible, and it’s in a smaller number of schools. If FCPS wants to change boundaries efficiently, they need to get rid of it. |