All against all competition: the incorporation of the International Baccalaureate in public high schools in Canada

ABSTRACT

Since the 1980s, education in Canada has been through a process that led to school choice, targeting the improvement of students’ performance through school competition. These policies fostering an education quasi-market became an ideal framework for the expansion of IB schools. Since the Diploma Programme of the International Baccalaureate (IBDP) offers a differentiated international curriculum and is perceived as a program that contributes to students’ achievements, it has been increasingly adopted in school districts and schools. This paper explores the marketing strategies developed in schools and districts in response to school competition by tracing the incorporation of the IBDP in high schools in different districts in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. Based on interviews with school staff, district officials and IB local association representatives, this study analyzes schools’ marketing decisions from a consumer and producer orientation taking into account the macro environment (federal government) and micro-environment (provincial government and districts). Rather than fostering efficiency and improving students’ achievement as intended, marketization policies resulted in an increased focus on the recruitment of high achieving students, which led to a competition between schools, between districts and between other programs in the districts or in other words –an ‘all against all’ competition.

KEYWORDS:

• School choice
• school competition
• marketing strategies
• International Baccalaureate

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://www.ibo.org/contentassets/bc850970f4e54b87828f83c7976a4db6/dp-statistical-bulletin-may-2017-en.pdf.

2. CEGEP is a publicly funded pre-university college in the province of Quebec’s education system. Originally, a French acronym for Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel.

3. Sources: Phone conversation with the general director of SEBIQ – Société des écoles du monde au Québec et de la francophonie (15/5/2018) and mail exchange with the president of SEBIQ (10/5/2018).

4. http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/education-training/k-12/support/graduation/getting-credit-to-graduate/externalcredentials.

5. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/compared-to-ontario-bc-offers-more-choice-and-fairness-in-education-with-better-student-results.

6. Except for the case of the province of Quebec that as a pre-university program the DPIB does not depends on the districts but on the Higher Education authorities. Since the pre-university professional colleges (CEGEP) are autonomous, each CEGEP decides about the implantation of the programme based mainly on cost/effective calculations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Halbert Centre for Canadian Studies Research Exchange Program [HC-REP - 2011].

Notes on contributors

Julia Resnik

Julia Resnik (PhD, Tel Aviv University) is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her main research areas are globalization of education policies, comparative education, multiculturalism, migrant children (migrant workers and asylum seekers), international education and the involvement of civil society in education systems. She has edited various special issues including one on Sociology of international education focusing on internationalization of elementary and post-elementary education (International Studies in Sociology of Education 2012, 22:4, 291-310) and published many articles in peer-reviewed Anglophone and francophone journals. She has recently published an edited book:  Resnik, J.  (Ed.) (2018)The Power of Numbers and Networks: Understanding the Mechanisms of Diffusion of Educational Models © 2018 – Routledge.