Minnetonka, Minnesota, a western suburb of Minneapolis, has a good size group of parents who want the district to ecease its offering of the International Baccalurate program. The district is a relatively rich one; per capita income is 75% more than the average for Minnesota.
The parents have some strange beliefs that they are basing their conclusions on. For one, they believe that American education is the best in the world:
Paul Borowski, a parent of three children in the district [says] “Our education system is the envy of the world,” says Borowski, citing the IB’s origins. “Why would we want to subordinate that to some organization connected with the United Nations?”
[The IB program is not connected with the UN, although the UN did provide some startup funds decades ago.]
Secondly, the right leaning people of the state love to talk about choice in high schools, but apparently not when it comes to their own district. The parents in Minnetonka complain that they already have the Advance Placement program, so why would they need anything else. And article in the local Minnetonka paper states a complaint by a parent that because IB is an international program, they have no control over it. Apparently they must know someone on the inside at the College Board, who administers the AP curriculums.
Now I don’t think that the IB program is the greatest thing in education (I don’t think it provides enough for kids who are of “average” intelligence). But the reasons not to like IB that the Minnetonka parents cite are ridiculous:
The debate grew more contentious when parents began claiming the program is propaganda for the United Nations, giving kids an anti-American, anti-Christian education.
The accusations are not lost on Susan Campbell, Aaron’s mother. “I’m a Christian,” says Campbell, “so I was very concerned about the controversy.” So concerned, in fact, she asked her pastor about the program. “He’s really sharp, and he said it is anti-Christian,” she says, with resignation. “I guess I have to accept that as his opinion.”
Over the course of a couple of days, a handful of parents wrote a petition to kill the IB program and sent it to the school board.
The petition gives seven reasons why the program’s elimination is needed, one of them being that “the International Baccalaureate rejects the Judeo-Christian values held by the majority of families in our district and instead promotes the atheistic Secular Humanist principles of multiculturalism, pacifism, one-world government, and moral relativism.”
All this after only one year with the IB program in Minnetonka. Perhaps the parents should visit a class or two.
As Aaron Campbell [a Minnetonka IB student] nears completion of his first year in the program, he says he doesn’t see how any class could be a threat to his Christianity and adamantly refutes any sort of anti-American tone in the classes. “The parents aren’t the ones taking the class,” he says. “They’re just nervous of new.”
The whole story is from City Pages