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I vaguely remember International Baccalaureate CompSci classes were spinning up when I was leaving high school. Did those stick? Are they measurably harder or more focused than AP CS?

http://www.ibo.org/diploma/cur...
https://www.ibo.org/myib/digit...

I vaguely remember International Baccalaureate CompSci classes were spinning up when I was leaving high school. Did those stick? Are they measurably harder or more focused than AP CS?

http://www.ibo.org/diploma/cur...
https://www.ibo.org/myib/digit...

The American standardized testing is severely infected with political correctness, in the sense it's intelligence testing more than academic testing. But, the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) has a traditional "grammar school" curriculum that is uniform across the world. The IB Diploma matches nearly exactly to the Abitur/matura grades, which are national standards for matriculation examinations in many European countries. IB is slightly more demanding than the U.S. high school programme. There are over 1100 public IB programmes in the United States.

The easy way? IB schools. They are headquartered in Switzerland. Mission statement:

The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.

To this end the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.

These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.

My last two years of HS, my teachers were all college professors, many were Ph.D. candidates in their subjects, and the curriculum stressed primary sources and thought. We even had a class called the Theory of Knowledge to teach logic and critical thinking.

I figure that there should be mandatory classes, at the mid to upper high school level,
in basic epistemology and metaphysics (i.e. meta-level topics such as)...

Visit your local IB (International Baccalaureate) high school, and you'll find that IB students are required to take two semesters of "Theory of Knowledge" that covers the topics you mention. Unfortunately, asking to make such courses mandatory is akin to expecting regular high school students to be able to construct a logical geometry proof or to perform a critical analysis of a literary work (both of which appear to be lost art forms in most high schools).

And IB (International Baccalaureate - http://www.ibo.org/) is the same way, but while it has smaller "market share" of "advanced" courses, from what I know it's growing at a faster clip than AP in schools. Besides certificates in particular courses/subjects, there is also a diploma programme: complete a four-year set of Pre-IB and IB courses and you graduate HS with this magical Diploma that makes college easier. I had friends that graduated with an IB diploma and depending on which college they went to, they got anywhere from two years of courses waived to only getting courses waived that paired with HL-level (similar to AP's AB level) exams. Plus the school had to pay a full-time coordinator for the program, plus the money, time and effort into the certification process, and arranging transport for students outside that school's district. After going through the programme myself, I'm not sure it's really worth it for the students or the taxpayers (since the schools usually pick up the cost of the exams and teacher/course certifications).

Sure, you'll learn valuable material and occasionally come across great teachers who have a passion for their course, but more often than not these courses and programs do nothing more than put an enormous amount of stress on high-school students and give them the illusion that they're not only preparing themselves for college but earning college credit early. I started the IB program my freshman year in high school and ultimately ended up only doing an IB cert in Latin IV (so I'm disappointed to see Latin literature go away, as well) and an AP Comparative History course, the latter of which actually earned me college credit (that I couldn't use). It's a decent program if you're looking for more advanced classes, but I've seen too many people go into those courses thinking they'll be ahead in college by taking the exams.

But then again, after the SAT grading fiasco a few years back (the abnormally low scores from damaged answer sheets), one has to wonder just how big of a profit margin the College Board is actually running.

Given two people with similar degrees from Oxford and from the Open University, I'll take the OU graduate every time.

The UK education system is seriously fucked up. It's goal based now. The purpose is to get you to pass exams, not to educate. We might be better off with the International Baccalaureate outwith political control. The other thing is that education should be life long. It should just be a standard part of being a citizen.

The brain changes shape, it takes several years, it has to modify the strength of all these trillions of connections but with enough effort eventually you get good at what you're learning.

When I was in middle school, my sixth grade social studies teacher was pushing to get our school district to adopt the Programme. The IB Diploma Programme (http://www.ibo.org/diploma/), which I would later complete, was then being made available at our high schools, and the Middle Years Programme was a valuable tie-in to that. Moreover, my teacher believed the same thing you do: that students can benefit from greater interrelation between subject curricula, and this was the primary basis upon which she was arguing in support of the Programme. I, and another student, joined her campaign, giving speeches to the faculty and the school board (where I later sat as a student representative).

Anyway, the district never adopted the Programme. There was too much resistance from conservative teachers and faculty members who didn't want to restructure their curriculum. Tell a PE teacher to tie his curriculum to science by incorporating anatomy, or humanities by discussing the cultural effects of sports and recreation, and he'll look at you funny and tell the kids to go kick the ball. I still believe in the value of the Programme's philosophy. A unified curriculum that ties subjects to each other and to the student's understanding of The Big World Out There can enhance learning not only in the middle school years, but also better prepares students for high school and life beyond. Students absorb information more readily when they can relate it to their own experiences and their own interests rather than viewing it as isolated knowledge-in-a-can that doesn't relate to anything beyond passing a test so they can move on to the next course.

So, where am I going with this? Talk to other teachers about this idea. Find like-minded colleagues and start a pilot program. Generate tangible results, then go forward and attempt to restructure curriculum on a level beyond your own classroom. Your desire to broaden your curriculum is the first spark, but fire can't burn in a vacuum.

When I was in middle school, my sixth grade social studies teacher was pushing to get our school district to adopt the Programme. The IB Diploma Programme (http://www.ibo.org/diploma/), which I would later complete, was then being made available at our high schools, and the Middle Years Programme was a valuable tie-in to that. Moreover, my teacher believed the same thing you do: that students can benefit from greater interrelation between subject curricula, and this was the primary basis upon which she was arguing in support of the Programme. I, and another student, joined her campaign, giving speeches to the faculty and the school board (where I later sat as a student representative).

Anyway, the district never adopted the Programme. There was too much resistance from conservative teachers and faculty members who didn't want to restructure their curriculum. Tell a PE teacher to tie his curriculum to science by incorporating anatomy, or humanities by discussing the cultural effects of sports and recreation, and he'll look at you funny and tell the kids to go kick the ball. I still believe in the value of the Programme's philosophy. A unified curriculum that ties subjects to each other and to the student's understanding of The Big World Out There can enhance learning not only in the middle school years, but also better prepares students for high school and life beyond. Students absorb information more readily when they can relate it to their own experiences and their own interests rather than viewing it as isolated knowledge-in-a-can that doesn't relate to anything beyond passing a test so they can move on to the next course.

So, where am I going with this? Talk to other teachers about this idea. Find like-minded colleagues and start a pilot program. Generate tangible results, then go forward and attempt to restructure curriculum on a level beyond your own classroom. Your desire to broaden your curriculum is the first spark, but fire can't burn in a vacuum.

I strongly suggest that any parents out there with kids in school actively remove them from the public education system and look at an internationally recognised qualification, independent of political control:

The International Baccalaureate.

http://www.ibo.org/

This is interesting, because being a Junior taking IB Biology http://www.ibo.org/, I've found that my teacher encourages us when our results in the laboratory don't match up with the expected theoretical results. Our instructor looks at it as a learning experience, and asks us to find sources of error, and do further research to identify reasons why we got those results. Often, it is simply a matter of a variable not contained.

The stress in this Science class is that in the real world, experiments often DO NOT go smoothly or successfully. The real science comes in in determining what went wrong and what one would try in the future.

I think that this approach is crucial to the scientific process, students should not be conditioned to have every trial yield the expected results.

In high school, I took a course called "Information Technology in a Global Society"; it was an IB course
The gist of the course was a combination of the ramifications of technology, an overview of ethics and law with technology, and some basic instruction in important aspects of technology (web design, databases, e-mail, programming, etc). While I was never in need of the fairly trivial instruction on the how-to of the technological aspects, those were not the focus of the course--the idea being that to learn about the ramifications of something, one must first have some grasp of the nature of the beast. I found the remainder of the course, however, to be particularly intellectually stimulating, not to mention useful.
The point of my story is to agree with you, but to posit that the scope of this is far too narrow. These things are important now, and far too many people understand even one of them, let alone many of them. Tomorrow, they'll be even more important.

Our school, well at least the program I am part of, uses the International Baccalaureate curriculum. Here is their site: http://www.ibo.org/

I graduated from Lafayette College with a Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Lafayette is mostly considered a small liberal arts college, but it has a very strong engineering program. Total size of the school is about 2000 students. It is considered part of the Little Ivy League, though formally that doesnt really exist.

In my opinion, you get what you pay for. Lafayette was small enough that I knew every professor and every student in my department. They knew me as well, and my grades in every class, even outside of the department. I don't think you can get that kind of personalized attention at a larger school. All of the classes were taught by professors. Never was there a T.A.

I mainly learned from lectures. The expensive $100 dollar a pop books were usually references guides for me. The professors knew their craft. And the course load was reasonable.

One issue that we had that first, my class was the first class of ECE majors. The college had decided to scrap their EE degree in favor of a mixed ECE degree. My class was the only class that was allowed to chose. Everyone before us was an EE, while any new freshmen were all ECE majors. The fact that we were the guinea pig class may have lightened the work load a little, but the move from EE to ECE was just shuffling around some classes and adding some Comp Sci classes.

On the flip side though, the whole college was also changing from the 5-3 system to the 4-4 system. The 5-3 system is you take 5 course for 3 credit hours a semester while the 4-4 is 4 classes for 4 credit hours. As an engineer I always had to take 5 classes regardless. But any class taken outside of the engineering department was now beefed up with usually more writing (Damn those humanities requirements).

Again, you get what you paid for.
Small school, low student professor ratio, less chance to do some meaningful research, less known name on the diploma, and also usually in the middle of nowhere(Easton, PA isnt exactly a happening place)

Larger school, large city (usually), large classes, less interaction with faculty, more known name, bigger research being done.

I enjoyed going to Lafayette. I had enough free time, each semester usually only had 1 maybe 2 really difficult classes, while the rest were easy.

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The article to me has some glaring misconceptions. The main one being that the writer believes that has a highschool science star he should have been able to master an engineering degree. AP courses help, but american highschool are woofully inadequate in preparing students for college.

I went to an international school and took the International Baccalaureate http://www.ibo.org/. It is an internation highschool degree program that tests and scores you on an internation level which is recognized by universities around the world while a regular american highschool diploma is not.

Grade inflation is not just occuring in colleges but start at elementary school. Getting an A in the US is just too simple. Too many straight A students are not really all they are cracked up to be.

Thus, I dont see a problem with the teaching being to difficult, to me it seemed like he had an over inflated ego by being the valedictorian of his class and never actually learned the way to learn in highschool. The fact that he switched completely out of the science field just shows me that he shouldnt have been an engineer.

I also think that the fact that the comp sci field has become increasingly more popular over the years, it is taking away a lot of the students that would have gone into engineering in the past.

The article reads too much like a blog entry then a news report. No input from the college stand point nor is there a student point of view of those who have managed to go through the program where he was successfully.

Flawed article.

Iceman

(warning: pointless babbling ahead)

I spent most of time after school coding and hacking UNIX and am much better for it. I barely scraped by with history and literature. Mostly because I just wasn't interested. I would sit down to read history and literally couldn't concentrate on it, it was just too boring. What interest do I have in the fact that corn was the main product of a certain area of U.S. during a period of time centuries ago? Useless boring details, that was the problem I had with high school history. I'm actually more interested in history/literature now as adult (for the purpose of curiosity), but at that time it was a drag.

I had a strong interest in computers during high school. I excelled in computer science and learned a lot from my teacher. I was in the IB program student so the CS course took us into college-level subjects. I was an assistant for my school's tech specialist. I setup a large portion of the school's new network. I even got paid for it during the summer. Actual work experience that prepared me for a career, which is what you are arguing against. You are saying computers should be kept out of schools, but for me it was a very important part for me. Maybe I have a different perspective because that was a decade ago for me (finished high school in 96), and things are really bad these days.

What I think is really important is not simply to read books, literature, history, but a well-rounded education. That is what I think I got. Sure, I didn't like history and literature, but I'm not arguing it should lose focus. It was a pain in the ass for me (maybe because IBP was a pain), but I did learn and did read a lot of books. But there should be equal emphasis on sciences, math, and computers.

Unfortunately, computers are a part of our everyday lives now, and kids need to know how to use them, or at least have access to them. I wish it weren't case (I actually believe that computers become popular too quickly and should have stayed the domain of nerds/geeks a bit longer before involving the rest of the world).

I do agree with what you are saying about making students "feel good about themselves" and demanding performance. The parents I know (I am not one yet) are always bitching about their students' teachers are the cause of their children not doing well. They bitch about how their children have to do assignments that are pointless. They talk to the teachers to get their children excused when they screw up. That is just sending the wrong message. It's basically saying they don't have to work hard because their parents will get them out of any mess they made. Kids are being turned into these helpless, lazy, morons. And their parents are helping it happen. Me, personally, I found all the bullshit I had to deal with in K-12 and college to be basically preparation for all the bullshit you have to deal with in the real world.

International Baccalaureate

http://www.ibo.org/ibo/index.cfm

I have long believed there was a problem in the educational system in the United States. I was raised up through it, and have experienced it in 4 different states. Each state takes its approach to education differently, which made it hard for me when I moved around from school to school. There was no consistency throughout my education. At one school I would be ahead and at another I would be behind, but all the while I felt I was playing catch up. Yet that being the case, I was still able to do well when I got to High School. I entered the academically challenging IB http://www.ibo.org/ program, and did a full course load for three years and my senior year I tested and got my IB Diploma as well as the regular HS diploma. I also graduated 15th in my class of 345. I'm not tooting my horn here, put using this as a point to show education is possible, but you have to choose a path that means hard work.

The program I was in was the only one in the district of 6 or so High Schools. Other HS's has Honor's programs, but those are a joke. As are the basic requirements for passing. You show up to class and they pass you, for fear if they fail you, they will destroy your self esteem. Did they ever think about how that makes those who actually work for their grades feel? My brother was able to skip 40 days out of a 90 day semester and still graduate. Now if I were to skip out of work without letting anyone know nearly 50% of the time, I would be fired in a heartbeat. What kind of message are we sending the kids in the educational system? Do what you want, and we will let you pass because we don't want to hurt your feelings. That's bullshit, the minute they get out into the 'Real World' they get stuck with the cold hard reality that it sucks, and bosses are tough. But they have been so pampered and babied, that they blame their bosses for being demanding and uncompromising, and the bosses end up being more lax in the work force. Can you begin to see the effects this could have on society.

There are good teachers out there, I know, I had some outstanding teachers. Teachers that challenged me to think, to question. This became even more apparent when I got to college. But it needs to start earlier, and not just in the 'special or gifted' programs. Our society has been moving away from a mass-production intensive society to a services environment. That means people need to think more on their own, problem solve, not just be mindless droids on an assembly line.

I think and know the educational system needs to change, and it isn't so much about money in the schools, its about complacency. We have gotten two comfortable with how things are, loosening the requirements are far easier then failing students that don't perform.

But that's just my 12.5 cents worth on that subject.

Bitter much? I am one of those poor people that supposedly can go to Harvard or Yale for free. I was part of an advanced program in my High School known as International Baccalaureate, an international standard that some schools around the world adhere to in order to provide a certain level of parity that exceeds standards in almost all member countries. Because of this, I absolutely obliterated the SATs, entered college as a Sophomore, and received a 2/3rd scholarship to the college I chose. My problem was that, despite my poor background, my scholarship destroyed any chance I had at government aid. So, with 2/3rds of my education paid for, where does the other part come from?

Three years in college put me $23k in the hole. Not bad for a double major, but hardly free. You're right on one thing, though: $60k for two adults is not rich. Unfortunately, I also know that $60k is hardly poor either - most of my life, we lived on less than $10k. Just ignore anyone who attacks you for being "rich". Nobody that really matters is attacking you, for what it's worth, you will always know the truth of the matter. Most would agree that you're part of the middle class that's being lost in all of this.

Your problem is not a unique one, but poor people aren't some nebulous entity that make you a convenient target for ridicule. If you read a little more carefully, it's the truly rich, the people in the top 5% that are the target of most of our ire. Even then, children can not be held accountable for the sins of their parents. The problem occours when the cost of labor becomes the lowest common denominator - as is rapidly occurring. When only price separates who works and who doesn't, only those who provide wages truly win. When that happens, there will only be rich and poor, and families like yours will no longer exist.

Yeah, you got screwed. But in the long run, that should be the least of your worries. People like me wanted to be people like you. That aspiration is getting harder to accomplish. I busted my ass to get where I am, but if this keeps up, no amount of hard work will help anyone. Remember only price matters when it comes to global labor competition, and everyone agrees we can't compete on that.

I'm actually past the halfway mark on my own Computer Engineering program and that's exactly what I'm doing. As someone else mentioned you get work experience AND some money to help out. And who can argue with just having one extra semester of school (though I only had summer vacation during my first year).

As for the scholarships I can say that this is not true here in Canada. I was awarded a Notel Networks Entrance Scholarship (before they went down the crapper of course) as well as a Faculty of Engineering one. Now this is probably due to the fact that I was one of the top track members in the region, I was yearbook editor my last year, and I did the International Baccalaureate Programme

Having had three kids in (and one through) magnet programs, I can comment that it isn't about 'leaving some students behind' so much as about not letting a talented kid drown in the crapfest that the typical HS has become. Most all the local schools offer at least some AP courses, but the academic magnets offer Int'l Baccalaureate curricula. Nice having an environment where being the 'smart kid' doesn't get you stuffed into lockers or bullied for the test answers, and for the one in the arts magnet, getting a double-block dance class daily along with her AP courses. (For some of her classmates, where they don't have to worry about regular gay-bashing from the jock squad.)

I'm sad to say that my school downright hates linux with a passion.

I'd even dare to say that they hate any form of technology.

We have ONE CS class (new this year so our school could be certified by the IB). We also have a few uninteresting windows apps/typing classes.

Thers's also a 'technology' class, which I take, and have found to be quite interesting. First off, in any other school, it would be called a shop class... anyhow, they've started to do a very limited amount stuff with technology and robotics... using apple ][s.

Don't get me wrong, the district is one of the most well funded in the state. They have MORE than enough money to do whatever they want. But the problem is... they don't, and they don't give a damn about it.

Each computer in the school is connected to a domain through Windows 98 and an outdated version of netware, and is locked down to a ridiculous level of security (previously not thought possible on '98 machines (although I once managed to disable the DHCP server on the LAN by accident).

The school doesn't believe in learning by doing. Students can't change a thing on the computers, let alone fix them. When they had the problem of the cheap windows machines breaking, they hired a full-time computer-repairman (on TOP of the part-time system admin. Unfortunately they never let him have the admin passwords.... ). Students are never involved in the process, and it makes me sad.

I once proposed forming a student organization to regularly update the school website (I coded a PHP site in advance to show them). They were impressed, but the administration refused the proposition, because they didn't want students actively involved in such an importatnt position.

Sigh.... I could go on like this for pages and pages, but I'll save that for a rainy day.

Speaking from the Canadian perspective, I think that skewed grades are more a problem in the high schools then in University. At the University of Toronto, where I am currently attending, I find that most classes are curved judiciously so that the most classes have about a 65% average. A straight-A student is highly respected here and should be (at least in the sciences).

My worries are rooted in the schools that feed my institution. Watching my sister apply for university this year reminds me of how unfair the whole system is and how skewed most high school's grades are. I would have less to complain about if the grades of different high schools were weighted somehow but the universities don't do it!

I remember friends of mine who would start at my high school where they were getting low 80s and transfer to another school and be pulling high 90s. The end result is that my brilliant friends who went to a good high school for the sake of a good secondary education got passed over in the admissions process for these wannabes in, too put it bluntly, shitty high schools.

I've seen several people in my university come in with high 90s and almost flunk out in first year and others come with less auspicious grades and do phenomenally. I find it hard to believe that this is the "luck of the draw;" my friends from my alma mater are generally doing better than most who had their admission averages. I know that grades can often be a lousy indicator of overall understanding, but surely they should indicate something, especially if they determine our futures!

Despite the fact that there is a consistent, government-mandated curriculum across all of Ontario, we still have gross discrepancies. Different high schools have too much leeway in deciding their students' achievement. I'm so thankful that my decent, but unremarkable Ontario grades were supplemented by the internationally standardized testing of the International Baccalaureate.

A highschool IB jr in math studies can compute that, and most of those kids will be liberal arts majors.. So I could easily compute that with a liberal arts degree.

My high school, St. Petersburg High School, has a magnet program that is a member school of the International Baccalaureate program and the mandate by the IBO is that teachers assure that all papers submitted to IB are the students own work. They use the Turnitin.com service to make this assurance. As a student at this school writing these papers I find the Turnitin.com system to be a valuable way to deter cheating. While it is not an absolute way of catching cheaters (not by a long shot) it does allow teachers to spend more time concerning themselves with grading accuracy rather than checking papers for cheating. The service allows their papers to be checked against not only every other paper from this year, but also all the papers from previous years. Given the proliferation of the internet in our society, cheating has become much easier than ever before and the Turnitin.com service makes it easier to keep honest people honest.

There are drawbacks of course. If teachers just take the report on what it says and do not investigate furthur then it does a disservice to the student. A system needs to be set in place where students who have been flagged by the system can sit down with the teacher and discuss the paper to determine if it was cheating or just a chance flagging. At our school how accusations are handled is the teacher will sit down with the student and ask them questions about different ideas in their paper. This gives them a chance to show their knowledge of the topic and explain their paper, explain their sources etc. This gives the student a chance to show their knowledge and ideas as their own because often a cheater has not completely researched a topic and has only skimmed through someone elses ideas.

With an effective system to handle flags by the Turnitin.com system, it can be an effective tool to deter cheating. But as it was once said "Locks only keep honest people honest." and no there is no fool proof system to prevent cheating. "Those who aim to produce a fool proof system, will be surprised at the ingenuity of fools."

Back in High School chemistry we had to do a section on environmental chemistry to fulfill the IB (International Baccalaureate) requirement. From what I recall ozone itself is created by the ionizing (bad) UV light that supposedly does damage to humans and wildlife. Once the ozone is created the energy from the UV light has be expended creating the ozone and is no longer harmful. CFCs can then come over and react with the ozone, and turn it back into oxygen. CFCs didn't interfere in the production of the ozone it merely ripped off the extra oxygen to make more O2 which was then free to react and make more ozone, repeat ad nauseum. The lack of ozone has no detrimental effects. Either way the non-ionizing UV light still gets through. It was the O2 that stopped the ionizing UV light, not the ozone, and no one's claiming there's a lack of O2.

I'm not a college student yet, by the definition of the phrase. I'm still in high school, though taking classes that are commonly referred to as college level. I'm an International Baccalaureate Diploma Candidate. To define, the IB program is an acclaimed university 'preparatory' program that exists in 101 countries for high school-level students (Grades 11-12 in the US). There are several other college prep programs for high school students; the primary difference between, for example, AP classes and IB ones is simply scope. Often the AP classes teach the same things as the IB classes do, but a person can take AP American History and everything else regular level. IB students have every hour of the school day filled with critical thinking, analysis, discussion and writing. If we're interested in... say... becoming a computer scientist, we don't simply take one hard class (CompSci) and ignore the other subjects. We're given what's essentially a classical or renaissance education. All conceivable academic subjects are taught (or at least touched upon), and tied in to alternative cultural ideas.

The obvious effect is that by the time we enter college, an IB student is founded thoroughly in at least two languages, at least two branches of the sciences, the arts, the theory of wisdom and knowledge, classical philosophy, and has a mastery of Calculus-level mathematics.

The important effect, though, is that we are prepared to become members of the international community. This is a significant concept, especially today. People who are capable of doing their job and only their job are legion. What is needed are people who bind world cultures together, people who can influence the course of humanity. People who can think.

This is what a broad education is meant to provide. I must agree with what was said earlier: Universities are not technical schools or job-training academies. They exist to embrace students' minds', pull them out of the box, and, to use a cliché, expand their horizons.

I suppose one simply must ask him/herself: "Do I want to learn an occupation, or do I want an education?" If it's the former, investigate technical programs and technical schools. If it's the latter, look towards the university system.

Maybe the U.S. should learn from Germany (which, as a note, is the foreign country that I'm in my fourth year of studying) and their education system. Those who want to learn to weld metals aren't forced through philosophy and Latin classics. Instead they are identified and moved to schools to learn the jobs they want to perform. Those who want to be photographers learn the arts, physics and mathematics used therein and finish their education apprenticing with a photographer. Those who want to learn the theory of knoweldge are the ones who eventually take the Arbitur and go on to a prestegious Universität. Everybody wins.

I attend an International Baccalaureate high school in central Florida. The school is set up on the campus of a regular high school except the IB students have separate classes except for electives, and the IB school has separate administration. All extra-curricular activities are done through the regular high school.

The great thing about being at an IB school (I'm not sure if all IB schools are like this) is that the administration and teachers truly care about the students. Most of the time, the students are committed to getting an education and the teachers are committed to giving the students that education. The administration is also very helpful to any student who has a need. The guidance counselor (who, incidentally is named Katz) is quite knowledgable and certainly knows what she's doing, considering she's got a doctorate in curriculum resources.

The IB school is also quite populated with geeks, as would be expected, which is proving to be a great experience for me. My parents sent me to a private school for elementary and junior high, which was a good thing, considering the crappiness of the public schools in my area, but the school was a "rich-kids" school and I didn't fit in to that group really well. At IB, I'm finally getting to attend school with other people who see the world in much the same way that I do. I also do not feel like the teachers are trying to turn me into a mindless sheep, but that they are truly trying to make me and every other student in IB think independently.

I've read almost all of the commentary to this article, and I'm feeling very lucky that I have the ability to have this experience in high school. I'm not trying to gloat over anyone by saying all of this, even though it may sound that way. It is my sincere hope that "normal" high schools can look at the model IB has set up, not just academically but in their attitude towards the students, and see the kind of quality people that are coming out of it.

I seriously dont see whats wrong with elitism in schools. I was in the IB diploma program at a school for a year before moving out to california, and into "everyones equal" non elitist school systems. They say they cant track kids and excelerate the smart ones etc. While at the same time they let the mentally retarted kids have there own class etc. But those are "special cases" so its OK. I dont like having to take very low level classes in high school because its "required", and such are mixed with some kids whow ant to learn, some who are indifferent, and the ones who are taking the class for the 3rd time, and are proud of this fact. Why not let the administrators weed out the stupid and put them in there own class, weed out the average and put them in there own ring of classes, and the above average and excellerate them, or hell, m*tivate them. Also, the pre-requisite system for tech classes has got to go, they tried to hold me outta a College c++ class (junior in high school) because i didnt have my "core computer classes", better known has "How to turn on a computer 101", "What the little letters on the plastic rectangle infront of you do", and "Microsoft Office 97".

Lets overhaul the schools, start elitist stuff, and re-think the pre-requisite system.
Bleh. Sorry for the rant :)