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][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]

Is this your personal opinion because:

(1) Probably most would agree with this.

(2) IB was installed more to retain higher SES students than to attract them, although that's semantics.  Is there any evidence that having IB at any high school has actually helped those schools meet accreditation or testing benchmarks?  The high schools in FCPS that have flirted the most with non-accreditation, like Stuart and Mount Vernon, are IB schools.

(3) That's a matter of opinion - if IB schools did, in fact, serve as magnets that attract high-performing students , you might expect to see overall improvements in broader test scores and you'd certainly expect to see more than a dozen or so NMSFs coming from the eight high/secondary schools with IB programs (each of the top AP schools often has this many alone).

(4) This is probably true, but over time Matthews has simply moved towards the view that it's good to expose lower SES students to either AP or IB classes, regardless of whether they can pass the exams.

(5) This is debatable, because the lowest performing IB schools currently lose many students to AP schools, whether through people pupil placements or avoiding neighborhoods zoned for those schools entirely.  [/quote]

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