The Impact of International Baccalaureate Schools on District Student Enrollment, Racial Composition, and Public School Finance

• In Event: Public School Student Disenrollment: Causes, Effects, and Potential Solutions

Abstract

U.S. school districts continue to grapple with the negative academic consequences of COVID-19 (NAEP, 2025) while navigating co-occurring enrollment loss: Families who sought alternatives to public schools during the early 2020s have opted to remain in these alternatives (e.g., homeschooling; Francis & Goodman, 2025). Because enrollment is linked to funding, decisions to exit thus exacerbate districts’ challenges in improving achievement. 

Yet the pandemic was not the only time when districts faced shrinking student populations. Historical efforts to integrate schools by race resulted in disenrollment by White families (Reber, 2005). Theoretically actionable ways to address segregation in the present day (e.g., redrawing attendance zones; Gillani et al., 2023) fail to materialize as district leaders fear that parental pushback foreshadows families’ decisions to leave the district. Conversely, providing specialized academic “tracks” across schools may preserve student populations, though potentially at the expense of maintaining segregation (Oakes, 2005). A particularly high profile related case is New York City, where sociodemographically privileged families strongly opposed efforts to rethink the district’s gifted and talented program and exam schools for the purposes of integration (c.f., Thompson, 2024). 

Building on this research, we provide the first causal evidence on the impacts of school adoption of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IB). To become IB, high schools must realign curriculum, provide teachers additional professional development, and incorporate assessment protocols into operations–a process intended to increase the academic rigor of students’ experiences. 

We create a novel dataset on all public IB high schools in California and identify when these schools became IB. We link this information to longitudinal data (1988-2025) on the student racial composition of schools and districts, as well as district-wide segregation. To explore whether any compositional shifts subsequently affected families’ investment in public education (Pierson, 1993), we evaluate impacts on efforts to raise money for district capital spending through bond elections (Biasi et al., 2025; Rauscher, 2020). 

Applying the Callaway and Sant’Anna difference-in-differences estimator (2021) to account for the staggered “treatment” timing of IB adoption across schools in California (future treated schools serve as comparison units), we document that high schools experience increased enrollment, particularly of White and Asian students, after becoming IB. Though these schools’ districts do not experience overall student enrollment growth after IB adoption, White and Asian student enrollment increases significantly and other student subgroup enrollment decreases (not significant). School segregation levels do not change. Finally, we find that IB districts are about 14 percentage points more likely to hold a bond election after a high school becomes IB (p<.1). With approximately 80% of such elections passing both prior to and after IB adoption, this suggests that the expansion of White and Asian families in IB districts may be leading to additional desire to increase capital spending on schools.

For the conference, we will expand on these results by incorporating additional data in the 28 other states with publicly available bond elections results (Biasi et al., 2025).

Author

• Mark Junxuan Chin, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author