ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the largely unexpected growth of the International Baccalaureate (IB) programmes in public schools in areas as diverse as Chicago, Ecuador, and Japan. It offers a ‘skeptical reality’ perspective, one of three approaches widely used by globalisation theorists, to show that in reality the extent of IB contact with public schools is relatively small-scale, and prioritised. The IB does not have the scope of exposure, amount of government backing or level of funding, or depth of contact that many observers might believe or sense. This chapter uses three sets of data to show this. First, there is the ‘geographical data’ which shows that the IB exists largely in Western, urbanised contexts. There is no ‘rural IB’. There is not a single IB public school across Africa. Second, there is the ‘funding data’ showing that relatively very little public money is used to implement the IB. Third, there is the ‘exposure data’ showing that each public school has few IBDP students and enters few candidates for examinations. A much bigger picture thus emerges. There exists in reality a process of filtering and focusing scarce resources so that only a few ‘globalised workers’ emerges. This in turn becomes an elite and exclusive process focused on the urban elite who have the propensity to compete and work (trade) at a global level. The ‘internationalisation of public schooling’ in this case is not a large-scale process aimed at the ‘masses’. It becomes, in reality, merely the ‘small-scale de-nationalisation of urban public schooling’.
