Reception
| Country | Primary | Middle | Diploma | Schools |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| USA | 281 | 445 | 751 | 1,297 |
| Canada | 56 | 146 | 142 | 311 |
| United Kingdom | 11 | 11 | 219 | 225 |
| Australia | 63 | 42 | 62 | 130 |
| Mexico | 41 | 22 | 57 | 86 |
| India | 27 | 8 | 73 | 80 |
| China | 39 | 23 | 73 | 99 |
| Spain | 4 | 8 | 54 | 54 |
| Germany | 18 | 7 | 48 | 51 |
| Argentina | 7 | 3 | 47 | 48 |
| Ecuador | 4 | 5 | 47 | 48 |
| Total schools | 805 | 902 | 2,291 | 3,264 |
| Countries | 93 | 81 | 139 | 141 |
The IB Diploma Programme (IBDP) was described as "a rigorous, off-the-shelf curriculum recognized by universities around the world” when it was featured in the December 18, 2006, edition of Time titled "How to bring our schools out of the 20th Century". The IBDP was also featured in the summer 2002 edition of American Educator, where Robert Rothman described it as "a good example of an effective, instructionally sound, exam-based system." In 2006, as part of the American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI), President George W. Bush and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings presented a plan for the expansion of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate mathematics and science courses, with the goal of increasing the number of AP and IB teachers and the number of students taking AP and IB exams, as well as tripling the number of students passing those exams. Howard Gardner, a professor of educational psychology at Harvard University, said that the IBDP curriculum is "less parochial than most American efforts" and helps students "think critically, synthesize knowledge, reflect on their own thought processes and get their feet wet in interdisciplinary thinking."
In the United Kingdom in 2006, government ministers provided funding so that "every local authority in England could have at least one centre offering sixth-formers the chance to do the IB." In 2008, due to the devaluing of the A-Levels and an increase in the number of students taking the IB exams, then-Children's Secretary Ed Balls abandoned a "flagship Tony Blair pledge to allow children in all areas to study IB." Fears of a "two-tier" education system further dividing education between the rich and the poor emerged as the growth in IB is driven by private schools and sixth-form colleges.
The IBDP, in the United States, has been accused of being Marxist, foreign, globalist, and anti-American. These accusations resulted in an attempt to eliminate it from a public school in Pittsburgh. Some schools in the United States have eliminated the IBDP due to budgetary reasons and low student participation. In Utah, funding for the IBDP was reduced from $300,000 to $100,000 after State Senator Margaret Dayton objected to the program, stating, "I don't want to create 'world citizens' nearly as much as I want to help cultivate American citizens who function well in the world."
Read more about this topic: International Baccalaureate
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)