An elite curriculum meets an amalgam of students

When she first enrolled at the Baccalaureate School for Global Education, Courtney Johnson mistook the word baccalaureate for bachelorette. She thought she was signing up for an all-girls school. Turns out, she wasn't the only one unsure about what she was getting into.

At this school on a sun- dappled boulevard in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, Courtney and a handful of 10th-grade classmates confess to having found their way here more by happenstance than through careful deliberation. It's an unlikely path to a public school whose mission is to offer the rigorous International Baccalaureate curriculum to each of its students.

IB, founded in 1968 to provide educational continuity to the roving children of European diplomats, arrived in American public schools in 1977. Often it's compared to the better-known Advanced Placement program. As with AP, students can take just one or two college-level IB classes.But many opt to pursue the challenging IB diploma, which can count for a semester or more of college credit.

The students here tend not to harbor the same grand ambitions one might find at a place like the United Nations International School, just a subway ride away (UNIS, as it's called, is a private school and the first IB participant in the US). Their parents aren't the hovering, hard-driving types who vie to get their kids into the elite college preparatory schools spread throughout the city. In fact, many students here say their parents knew as little about IB as they did when they registered.

And this is all exactly as Principal Bill Stroud intended it. In 2002, when he set out to open a new school, he envisioned a place that would draw a mix of kids from the neighborhood, not least of all the average and below- average students. At his school, the expectations would be the same for everyone - extremely high.

"When you're applying, they don't look at how good your grades are," says Tiffany Johnson, one of the 10th-graders. "They look at how you are as a person." Grades actually are considered, but a student's commitment, gauged during an interview, is as important. The school also takes into account diagnostic reading and math tests.

A primary consideration here is diversity - cultural and academic. The students reflect their neighborhood: They are an even mix of black, Latino, Asian, and white; one-third qualify for free lunches, one-third for reduced-price lunches; between 10 and 25 percent enter below their grade level.

Mr. Stroud's school is an experiment of sorts. At root, he's trying to answer one question: Can IB work for all students?

Today, 474 schools in the US offer IB. At a time when the American high school has been deemed "inadequate," "broken," and "obsolete" by any number of critics, IB is one piece in a broader effortto reform the institution.

For schools trying to offer the curriculum to a wider range of students, the hope is that even those who don't excel will benefit from exposure to college-level work. In turn, that may improve college graduation rates. (Fewer than half of students who enter college earn degrees.)

Only two of the schools offering IB courses are public schools committed to preparing all students for the IB diploma. Besides the Baccalaureate School there is only the International Academy in the affluent Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, which admits students from 12 area districts. At that school, opened in 1996, 93.5 percent of students earned the IB diploma this year.

There are some other urban schools trying to make IB more inclusive. Participation in IB by minority and low-income students at Mount Vernon High School in Fairfax County, Va., for instance, has swelled in recent years.

The Baccalaureate School has 410 students enrolled in grades 7 through 12 for the fall. It will graduate its first class next year, but the class of 2007 will be the first eligible to earn the full IB diploma.

This year, 100 percent of the students passed their Regents Exams, New York State's high school assessment. But Stroud says the real measure of success is student engagement.

On this Thursday, two African guests visit a ninth-grade Global Studies class to discuss genocide in Rwanda and Darfur. The students come away with their perceptions of Africa changed.

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