Teaching Your Children Well

At Dartmouth, Wersal’s writing skills have been equal to the challenge. He tested out of the school’s freshman writing program and entered a two-semester humanities seminar. When the professor met with him to discuss his first paper, Nathan recalls, she asked him what he had studied in high school. When he mentioned IB, she said that he and a student from Colorado had written the “most highly developed papers” in the class—and that the Coloradan was an IB grad as well.

This fall, Allie Hamilton began her junior year at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Allie is a graduate of Minneapolis’s Southwest High, where she took the entire IB curriculum, but chose not to seek the IB diploma because she wanted to pursue other academic interests and extracurricular activities, including volleyball and singing the lead in several school musicals.

As did Nathan, Allie found the academic preparation she received from the IB curriculum “excellent, particularly the writing,” and at Northwestern she has maintained close to an A average.  She too says the quantity and pace of the required reading in college has been a surprise. But, clearly, her IB work at Southwest prepared her well for the challenges of college.

Bariituu Adam, a 2005 graduate of Robbinsdale Cooper High, attends Columbia University in New York. She started the venerable Ivy League institution this fall, embarking on its premed track, intending to become a physician and eventually work for the United Nations. Bariituu’s parents immigrated to the United States from Ethiopia, ending up in Minnesota.

Bariituu says she sought out the IB program because she was “motivated” to take her school’s most accelerated classes. She chose IB over Cooper’s Advanced Placement Program because of her “international perspectives.” She says she “wanted to learn from many different areas.”

And what do colleges think of IB and IB graduates?

Jimm Crowder, director of admissions at Macalester College in St. Paul, says, “Personally—and many colleagues in admissions agree—I know of no other academic curriculum that better prepares high school students for a selective college. [IB] students will have better writing skills and superior critical-thinking skills.” Asked how he would compare an application from an IB student with one from a prestigious private college preparatory school, Crowder replies, “That’s difficult to say, because there are so many different academic models in private schools. But IB is certainly academically comparable.” He says IB’s “standardized, well-formulated curriculum” is a plus.

Macalester gives advanced credit for a number of high school experiences, including IB and Advanced Placement courses. “But when I’m evaluating an application,” Crowder says, “I’m drawn to an IB candidate because I’m confident of the academic background the student has been given. When we see graduates of IB, we know what those grades mean—they meet the highest international academic standard.”

IB programs operate within their individual schools somewhat the way private schools work—by a self-selection process that attracts academically motivated students and their families. Holly Lewis, the IB coordinator at Robbinsdale Cooper, reports that IB students commonly form study groups and attend the same challenging classes and activities throughout their entire IB experience.

Of course, IB is only one among many roads to academic success in Minnesota’s public schools. Many more schools offer the Advanced Placement Program—the more traditional path of high school academic rigor, created by the College Board. Nationally, far more public school students take AP classes and exams than private school students do. (Sadly, the Ventura and Pawlenty administrations reduced state support for both AP and IB programs, which had included paying test fees for students who can’t afford them. But because of growing public interest in both programs, some of that money was restored during the 2005 legislative session.)