Still Where, Not If, You're Poor: How Geographic Locale Can Limit International Baccalaureate Opportunities

• In Event: 51.078 - MTCC Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: 51.078-5 - Geographic and Geospatial Considerations and Contexts of Inequality

Abstract

Testing suburban advantage theory (Rury & Saatcioglu, 2011), we replicated a previous study of relations between poverty, minority concentration, and geographic locale with likelihoods that U.S. public schools would offer International Baccalaureate (IB) programmes. Largely consistent with pilot study findings, hierarchical logistic regression results showed geographic locale to be the most powerful predictor of IB access. Higher concentrations of students from minority groups made schools more likely to offer IB, and poverty did not preclude schools from offering IB. Private-school data analyzed descriptively showed a mostly similar pattern, indicating that options for international education exist most robustly in cities, but decreasingly so as one traverses through suburbs, fringes, and then distant and remote areas surrounding cities.

Authors

• Michael Thier, International Baccalaureate

• Jeongim Jin, University of Oregon