Reply to why do people prefer AP schools to IB?

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Reply to "why do people prefer AP schools to IB?"

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[quote=Anonymous]there seem to be several issues wrapped up in this AP v IB discussion; (1) neither AP nor IB is more appropriate or successful for most low SES students - both IB and AP are demanding curriculum taught at fast pace and require lots of additional support to the student to be successful.  To the extent IB may be more "writing intensive", it may be even more difficult for those students who are not highly capable in writing english. (2) IB was put into low SES schools in FCPS to attract higher SES/more ambitious students - apparently, it was not intended to be utilized by the majority of the "regular" students - so the differentiation between IB and "regular" students was an inevitable distinction.  Attracting higher SES, more capable/motivated students to IB in lower SES HSs was, in part,  simply a way to meet accreditation and testing benchmarks   (3) it is inappropriate to gauge the success of the IB programs by looking at overall school metrics (NMS, SATs etc.), given the small and distinct population of these students described before. (4) low SES students need much more support and remedial work to be successful in competing with high SES students (this is a generalization for discussion purposes - there are clearly exceptions in both populations).  Jay Matthews is a well known proponent for challenging all students and has advocated that VA replace the recently abandoned HS History SOL with a required IB History class.  His point is, apparently, that encouraging critical thinking and a broad perspective, are fundamental to learning - so, even if the students fails to pass the exam, the exercise of trying to grapple with the material and different perspectives and to write about them is productive of "learning".  (5) the arguments for consolidating IB programs into a few schools makes economic sense - it would also make clear the weaknesses of the several schools where IB students bring up the overall benchmark scores.[/quote]

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