All American trouble

Furious row as US school board drops International Baccalaureate for being 'too foreign'. By Joanna Walters

A US school district has banned the International Baccalaureate after officials condemned it as "un-American" and Marxist, sparking outrage among pupils who are studying the increasingly popular diploma.

A group of parents yesterday joined forces with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to sue the school, demanding reinstatement of a curriculum even President George Bush encourages.

The broad-range and demanding curriculum has been the subject of debate in the UK as a candidate for replacing A-levels and is expanding around the world, including in the US.

There was uproar at the Upper St Clair high school in a prosperous suburb of Pittsburgh last month when board members governing the local school district voted 5-4 at a heated meeting to throw out the IB.

It was agreed that sixth-form equivalent students who were already studying for their diploma could finish, but those joining the sixth-form this autumn would be offered a conventional programme.

In the Upper St Clair district, the IB curriculum is also offered to junior and secondary pupils and will be cancelled at the end of the summer term, affecting around 750 students aged between six and 18.

Police had to be called to the normally genteel high school after the district meeting broke down in chaos as almost 1,000 pupils and parents who wanted to save the IB heckled the board.

Death threat

Since the vote, one of the board members who opposes the IB and calls its internationalist, pro-egalitarian ideals "Marxist" has received death threats.

"I don't think we can change the board members' mind, but we hope we can get the programme reinstated by taking issue with how and why they made this decision," said Vic Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania branch of the ACLU. "These are extremists opposing a curriculum that focuses on an inquiry-based type of learning, rather than just giving students a bunch of facts."

The lawsuit was filed in the federal court in Pittsburgh yesterday. Trouble over the IB began brewing in this wealthy, conservative suburb last autumn. Many parents move to Upper St Clair, and put up with stiff local taxes, in order to send their children to the six highly ranked schools, including three that teach the IB.

When Republicans Daniel Iracki, William Sulkowski, David Bluey and Carol Coliane won election to the board of governors, alongside incumbent Republican Mark Trombetta, last November, they promised to rein in education spending that was helping to keep taxes high.

But during election debates, some of the five also hurled accusations at the IB's content, claiming that its teaching is anti-Christian, un-American and Marxist.

They object to the largely secular, multi-cultural bent of the curriculum and its emphasis on international institutions and pacts such as the United Nations, or the Kyoto protocol to reverse global warming, which opponents argue undermines American sovereignty and nationalism.

As for the charge of Marxism, this principally stemmed from the International Baccalaureate Organisation's support for the Earth charter, a global set of aims devised in France in 2000, which, Trombetta was most concerned, called for people worldwide to protect the environment, oppose militarism and promote equal distribution of wealth.

And, at that time, Iracki said: "Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values and we have to be careful about what values our children are taught."

Trombetta, the board member who has received death threats from angry parents, had further complained that the IB tests "were developed in a foreign country".

But since the election in November and the sensational vote to ban the IB, the board members refuse to talk about the ethics of the IB and argue, instead, that they were motivated by a need to cut costs, as the baccalaureate is a relatively expensive programme.

But the local Pittsburgh Post Gazette newspaper has been avalanched with letters supporting the programme, its rigorous standards, broad range of subjects and outlook, and its sound reputation with universities from the Ivy League down.

"Putting an end to this diversity in education only fuels the school's past, present, and (apparently) future reputation of nurturing isolated, sheltered and coddled children," wrote Brittainy Hambelton from the suburb of Shadyside.

One Upper St Clair resident wondered if Trombetta, in particular, would revise his vote if the curriculum was "called the Ronald Reagan programme", while another wrote to complain that: "Based on scant analysis and arbitrary name-calling, and a little over a week of discussion, five directors chose to abort a programme that has exploding popularity and support."

This is not the first time the IB has raised eyebrows in secondary education for its provocative approach to topics such as conflict, environmental destruction, economic exploitation and world religions.

A recent row that failed to overturn the IB in the Fairfax district of Virginia also had opponents accusing the curriculum of promoting "disarmament, socialism and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty".

Most of the complaints emphasise the IB's teaching of a theory of knowledge course on philosophy and ethics, and that it offers subjects such as environmental systems, technology and social change, peace and conflict studies and experimental science, with an international flavour, alongside the "drier" subjects such as English, maths, history, geography, physics, chemistry, biology and foreign languages, that stir less debate, but are actually a much larger part of the core curriculum.

"Some people claimed the IB was an international conspiracy," said Janice Leslie, director of instruction for the Fairfax district.

In a similar row in Minnesota parents opposed to the IB declared it promoted atheism and "one-world government".

But supportive teachers in the US cite the benefits, for example, of IB pupils studying the US civil war and comparing that internal conflict with others around the world, seeking common causes and consequences, rather than having a purely domestic perspective.

"It teaches students to think about problems for themselves and research their own conclusions. It gives a different angle, from a global and a multicultural perspective. I didn't do the IB, but in college I took a course in Marxist thought and actually concluded that Marxism is fatally flawed - knowledge and inquiry are not the same as propaganda," said the ACLU's Vic Walczak.

If the lawsuit fails, Upper St Clair's schools will strive to continue teaching their curricula in as close a style to the IB as possible, one source close to the debate told the Guardian, while asking not to be identified because lawyers have advised those involved not to discuss the issue while legal action is pending or under way.

"Do you have this problem with the IB in England? It's so embarrassing. It's so parochial. We have a strong international interest and want to push a broader perspective," said the source.

He said that plans at the high school to start teaching Japanese, Chinese and Asian studies, while continuing to promote French and German, would continue.

"But we won't be able to call it the International Baccalaureate and have that prestige attached to it," he said.

The IB was designed in Geneva in 1968 to act as an internationally recognised qualification for the children of diplomats, who were always shifting location but wanted to get into universities.

Broad appeal

It has since expanded to be offered in many ordinary schools, with its appeal of six subjects across a range of disciplines, an element of community service and a 4,000-word, self-researched essay assignment for sixth-formers, along with its ideal to promote international understanding through education.

Around 2,000 schools in 122 countries now offer the diploma programme, including 600 schools in the US. The number of IB students worldwide grew by 73% between 2000 and 2005, from 36,350 to 62,885, according to the International Baccalaureate Organisation.

Even the proudly conservative evangelical stronghold of Colorado Springs is expanding the IB because of its high quality and its standing with universities.

The irony for Upper St Clair is that the Republican district board members who have banned the IB are going against the views of the president. Despite his disdain for the UN, the Kyoto protocol, the International Criminal Court and many other international institutions, Bush specifically called, in this year's state of the union address in January, for expansion of the IB programme.

Despite the cost of the Iraq war and America's ballooning deficit, which is robbing social, health and educational programmes of funding, he announced an extra $380m to boost IB initiatives and a homegrown alternative called Advanced Placement.

Supporters of the baccalaureate say the Upper St Clair board's decision just does not add up. "After a week of being called a Marxist, anti-Christian and anti-American, I pulled out my passport to remind myself I am an American," said Bradley Richardson, regional director of the International Baccalaureate office for North America and the Caribbean.