As ASD continues to move towards being a fully IB district, many community members are left wondering why the schools are headed down this path.
AHS has offered the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme since 2001. It is a 2-year combination of rigorous classwork, research, and service designed for students in their junior and senior years. International Baccalaureate or IB is a globally recognized education system that aims to not just teach students content, but also how to think. Since its first implementation in 2001, the Aspen school district has continued to expand IB offerings, including making all three schools IB for all. As a result, IB theology has been implemented into elementary, middle, and early years high school classes through the Middle Years Programme for students in 6th through 10th grade and the Primary Years Programme for students in kindergarten through 5th grade.
There is no question that IB is an extremely rigorous pathway with engaging class offerings, but there are still questions of why ASD chose this path when it is not the popular US option. Many students and parents in the ASD community tend to think of AP as the rigorous pathway for high school classes and earning college credit, leading to some confusion about why IB for ASD?
The beginning of IB in Aspen started around the year 2000, when the community was looking for something beyond regular high school classes.
“The school was looking for some more continuity, and looking for rigor within that continuity.” Jamie Evans, English teacher and AHS graduate, said.
One common misconception is that AHS used to offer AP or advanced courses and then switched to IB later on. In reality, IB is the only education system that the district has ever adopted.
In addition to IB, “There was a local person pushing concurrent enrollment with CU, and the teachers were a little resistant,” Evans said.
The decision to make AHS and ASD more rigorous and organized was essentially unanimous, but the reason IB stood out was its seemingly perfect fit for Aspen.
“Aspen has these pillars of what they’ve always wanted to be: mind, body, and spirit. And IB strives for those goals too,” Aspen School Board Vice President Christa Gieszl said.
The Aspen Idea, or these three pillars, is a lens that citizens can use to make the world a better place, which fits exactly with IB.
“The IB’s mission statement is about making a better world and seeing other people’s points of view,” said AHS IB Coordinator Eileen Knapp.
Students at AHS have embodied the IB ethos and are learning how to think and problem solve, not just memorizing information. Evans, Gieszl, and Knapp all mentioned experiences with AHS graduates who had come back from college and say they feel prepared for college and maybe even more prepared than other students in their freshman classrooms.
“AP, you can buy a study guide online, you don't have to take the class, you just sign up for a test. The ultimate goal is passing a test, where IB is a two-year-long journey where students are investigating with curiosity, creating experiments and investigations through the IAs [Internal Assessments “IAs” are independent research papers that IB students complete in every class], which support inquiry,” Knapp said.
IB is the more rigorous program, and for most students will result in early success in college, so that opens the question, why are students and families frustrated with the program?
While in the long run, students may benefit from IB questions that require in-the-moment problem-solving rather than information or skill recall, in the short term, it can feel impossible to study for these tests. Every IB test will have questions asked in completely different ways. This means there is no study guide. While students are supposed to develop these skills over the two-year program, most will struggle at the beginning of the program, and this can be incredibly discouraging. Even with the implementation of the MYP and PYP prior to the DP, many students find that there is little connection between the age groups.
“The MYP is far more creatively driven, and the DP does not have that criterion,” Evans said. And according to Knapp, many students do not believe that doing the full MYP certificate helps with DP courses or exams.
To many students, the programme seems to be designed in a way that is incredibly time consuming and discouraging. The DP in particular has the class requirements, but also a 3,000-4,000-word independent research paper called the Extended Essay and a program called CAS, which stands for Creativity, Activity, and Service. To fulfill CAS requirements, students must participate in a project of their design for one month and record CAS experiences that fulfill the three pillars over 18 months.
Evans worries that for some students, the workload may teach them more about ignoring their needs and focusing on a marker for success rather than how to truly be an inquisitive world learner.
“We’re producing high school seniors who let the diploma tell them who they are,” Evans said. “For example, students say everything I like to do outside of school has been turned into a CAS experience.”
The IB exam grading system can also be degrading. Exams are set up to be challenging and have questions that students have never seen before. Then the scores are naturally distributed instead of being based on percentages. As a result students feel like they are competing against each other on random guesses and not on their ability to use the skills learned in class. Many students still succeed in these exams, but it leads to a lot of frustration and loss of confidence in the process.
“Students walk out of IB exams thinking, 'I failed that. But then end up scoring higher than they thought.’” Knapp said.
While the IB system, as it is implemented at ASD, has benefits and tensions, many happy and frustrated students and families find themselves comparing the programs to AP, so below is a guide to AP vs IB.
