Catherine Doherty is a sociologist of education with interests in internationalisation of curriculum and pedagogy across sectors.Allan Luke is a research professor working in educational policy, curriculum studies, Indigenous education and literacy.Paul Shield is a research fellow in quantitative methodologies for educational research .Candice Hincksman is a senior research assistant and doctoral candidate in statistics. The International Baccalaureate's branding and reputation targets academic high achievers aiming for university entrance. This is an empirical examination of the growing popularity of this transnational secondary credential amongst local populations in Australia, focusing on its uptake across the community, and the discourses underpinning its spread and popularity. This paper reports on online surveys of 179 parents and 231 students in schools offering the IB as an alternative to Australian state curricula. It sets out to understand the social ecology of who chooses the IB and who it chooses. Statistically significant differences between IB and non-IB choosers were found in terms of family income, parent education, student aspirations, transnational lifestyles, and neoconservative, neoliberal and cosmopolitan beliefs. The analysis demonstrates how the reproduction of advantage is accomplished through choice behaviours in stratified educational markets.Keywords: International Baccalaureate, selectivity, neoliberalism, neoconservatism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism. This paper explores a relatively new educational phenomenon: the presence of a transnational secondary credential within local curricular markets that historically have been monopolised by a state-level certification. Over its 40 year history, the International Baccalaureate Diploma has been typically associated with international schools for expatriate communities in the US, Canada, UK, Asia and Europe (Bunnell, 2008). However, this ambit has recently expanded to offering a branded alternative in private and government schools with local catchments, enabled by regulatory regimes encouraging competition with state schooling and its official curriculum. In 2011, the IB was offered in a total of 11 state-funded schools, and 51 independent schools in Australia. This ratio is higher in the UK, (139 of the 219 IB
The IB by designThe IB is the prototypical transnational school curriculum with its origins in the needs of mobile transnational elites (Fox, 1985). The norm in OECD countries has been for secondary curricula to remain under the jurisdiction of the state, province or nation both to facilitate pathways to matriculation and post-secondary participation, and to serve the distinctive knowledge, civics and values of nations. In the last decade, the (1) retrospective canonical knowledge and habits of mind, and (2) emergent forms of 'intercultural capital' (Goldstein, 2007) that will facilitate prospective participation in transnational economies (Resnick, 2008).
The IB's broader impactThough enrolling only a small proportion of Aust...