Sometimes when you think you know a story so well that you stop paying attention to it, it abruptly changes and bites you in the ass. Mine, that is. A public school district that I thought I knew well has raised an international kerfuffle over its uncharacteristic -- to me -- elimination of the highly touted International Baccalaureate program.
I've covered education issues pretty much from the beginning of what I laughingly call "my career," and one of the districts I've written about in some detail over the past few decades is Upper St. Clair, a mostly upper-middle-class, mostly new-money suburb of Pittsburgh, though still with some vestiges of its history as a farming community (i.e. lower-income students). It was the sort of place that upwardly mobile parents moved to so that their kids would get a stellar education. Its schools regularly won Blue Ribbon Awards of Excellence. When I covered the district, it prided itself as on the forefront of educational innovation, e.g. one of the first in the middle-school movement, in the 1950s. It honored its teachers and bragged about their accomplishments. When there was an opening for a new teacher, the school office literally received hundreds of applications. It wasn't just that USC teachers were among the highest-paid in the county, but they were actively encouraged to constantly improve and challenge themselves, not just with the de rigueur post-graduate education but also by taking advantage of unusual programs (e.g. Teachers in Space). Students regularly won places in the Governor's Schools of Excellence and honors in musical theater competition. Though not perfect, USC stood as a good model of what public education could offer.
When I wrote about dedicated, caring citizen-volunteers who were doing a great job on public school boards, I was thinking to some extent of the folks I used to cover in Upper St. Clair. Hah. The situation seems to have 180'd since my days there, and a group of parents and students are suing in federal court, questioning both the method and the motivation behind the abrupt cancellation of IB. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has been on top of this controversy, since a newly installed majority has attacked the IB program as being "against 'Judeo-Christian values'." You have to go pretty far into right field, e.g. Front Page Magazine, to find out how the internationally lauded, rigorous academic program is really a Marxist, Islamist, anti-Christian front promoting "responsible global citizenship."
The propagandistic evils of IB come as a surprise to the handful of other local schools offering IB programs -- such as Vincentian Academy, a fairly conservative Catholic school. (Hmmm, that brings to mind those so-called "Christians" who don't think of us "Cathlickers" as "real" Christians.) When the city Board of Education decided to launch an IB program, it was an ambitious attempt to install a world-class jewel into an inner-city school, Schenley High (coincidentally the alma mater of both Andy Warhol and my late father). Nobody was thinking it was Marxist.
Disclosures: I have some conflicts about this story, partly because I know at least one of the parents involved. (The administrators and school directors I covered as a newspaper reporter are not part of the district's structure anymore.) And I realize that a great many HuffPo readers -- and maybe a lot of news-junkie liberal types as well -- don't seem to be interested in educational issues. At least not the realities of them. Maybe Bob Somerby was right after all.