International education and the rise of paleoconservative thought: Mapping the growth of the IB in the USA along county-level voting patterns

• In Event: Global Education Between Governance, Donor and Evaluation

Proposal

The International Baccalaureate (IB) is an educational foundation established in 1968 in Geneva, Switzerland. It emerged in response to the academic and pragmatic needs of a transnational community, namely the need for a rigorous and internationally focused curriculum whose graduating diploma could be recognized by multiple university systems across Europe and North America. During its early years, the IB was a niche program that relied on external funding from UNESCO, Century Fund and the Ford Foundation for its continuity (Hill, 2002). Indeed, the IB was largely the restricted purview of international schools, many of which levied highly prohibitive tuition fees. Growing demand for a rigorous and internationally focused curriculum, however, enabled the IB to expand its reach beyond a small group of international schools and, eventually, achieve financial independence. Growth included gradual adhesion into state-funded schools, who turned to the IB as both a means of enhancing the quality of public education and of providing an educational alternative in teaching gifted students. These new patterns of growth have allowed IB member schools today to be very different from the foundation’s original base. Currently, 2692 IB schools are state funded (IBO, 2022), which corresponds to 48% of the total number of member schools.

Although now comprising a large proportion of member schools, state-funded IB schools are not geographically dispersed. The vast majority are in the Americas region where the United States currently accounts for 1720 state funded IB schools (IBO, 2022). The conditions that enabled the IB’s growth in the United States are well-documented (see Nugent & Karnes, 2002) and will be discussed in detail later. What has received less scholarly attention, however, are the existing forms of critique and pushback which question whether national forms of schooling should include a costly and internationally focused curriculum developed and provisioned by an international foundation. Of interest to the present study is what Bunnell (2009, 2012) presciently identified as a vocal critique emanating from a growing paleoconservative movement that has, in many instances, pushed for the revocation of the IB from state-funded schools.

The term paleoconservative was first coined to designate an eclectic group of conservatives who felt alienated by the growing influence of neoconservatives within the Republican Party. Inspired by the work of individuals such as Pat Buchanan and James Burnham, paleoconservatives viewed the conservative establishment within the Republican party as having capitulated “to doctrines of progressive humanism and cosmopolitan liberalism” (Drolet, 2020b, p. 3) and, thus, having abandoned what were viewed as “authentic conservative” values such as the protection of traditional beliefs (derived from Christian ethics), American nationalism, regional socio-economic independence and the need of stricter borders to curtail immigration (Kiely, 2021). While present in popular discourse since the 1980s, paleoconservatives were largely marginalized within the Republican Party and viewed as a niche movement with limited appeal and reach. As Greensberg (2016) explains, the prosperity of the 1990s greatly curtailed paleoconservatism’s ability to gain adherents and spotlight. However, a sequence of events which included failures of neoconservative foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial crisis of 2008 and the election of the United States’ first African American president, galvanized the paleoconservative movement, increasing its influence in mainstream politics. Growing adherence to paleoconservative thought culminated in the Republican nomination and eventual election of presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The rise of the paleoconservative movement presents a direct challenge to the IB, whose historical association with UNESCO and perceived emphasis on “universal values” diametrically oppose foundational principles of paleoconservative thought. Indeed, with the rise of paleoconservatism, criticism of the IB has gradually seeped into the policy platform of many state affiliates of the Republic Party. For instance, the 2018 Standing Platform for the Minnesota Republican Party makes direct reference to the IB and notes that “[they] oppose state and federal support of the International Baccalaureate (IB) program”. The New Hampshire House of Representative Republican Caucus is even more explicit in its critiques, stating that “[We] oppose laws and programs contrary to our founding principles such as the International Baccalaureate Program, UN Agenda 21 or other sustainable development programs”. Despite the growing presence and visibility of paleoconservative critique, little scholarly attention has been invested in discerning how the rise of paleoconservative thought has shaped or even redirected the IB’s growth in the United States. Even more broadly, no study to date has empirically examined how the growth of the IB in the United States is conditioned by local forms of political affiliation. This study addresses these broad questions by examining the association between county-level voting patterns with the growth of the IB, the availability of different programs of the IB continuum, and school demographic data.

The data for this study were compiled and manually merged from three distinct and publicly available sources: the IB’s online list of member schools for the 2020-2021 academic year; the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core Data for the 2020-2021 academic year; and the CQ voting and Election Collection data on county-level voting results for all presidential elections between 1968 and 2020. Incidence Rate Ratios (IRR) and 95% Wald Confidence Intervals (CI) were estimated using mixed-effects Poisson models with county as the clustering variable. Notable findings include a shift in growth patterns beginning in 2008, where IB schools have increasingly clustered along partisan lines. The study concludes by considering the potential challenges these changing growth patterns may present to the IB’s future in the United States. Moreover, with mounting evidence that political polarization has become a normalized and pronounced feature of contemporary world politics, this study discusses the potential implications these findings may have on understandings of the IB’s role and purpose.

Author

• Tiago Bittencourt, Universidad San Francisco de Quito