A well-meaning effort to increase educational equity in Utah might not be helping those most in need. But there are ways to make these programs more accessible.
High school students in a classroom.(Getty)
In the 1980s, Salt Lake City School District offered its three largest high schools the opportunity to open a new program. Two declined, but one—my own, West High in downtown Salt Lake City—said yes.
So, in 1984, West unveiled Utah’s first International Baccalaureate Diploma program.
To earn an IB Diploma, 11th- and 12th-grade students take college-level courses in six “core” subjects, complete a service project, and write a mini-thesis. IB is a rigorous program with member schools in 156 countries. West’s leadership embraced IB hoping it would boost educational opportunities for under-resourced students.
In homogeneous Utah, West is perhaps the only truly inner-city high school and one of the most diverse. Utah is 89.8 percent white, but West is 75 percent non-white, and nearly half of students are Hispanic. West is also a Title I school, a federal designation that funds schools where 40 percent or more of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Over half of West’s students come from low-income families.
Since 1984, the program has thrived. Jenny Nicholas, West’s IB Coordinator, tells me essentially every West IB Diploma recipient graduates, while West’s overall graduation rate is just 82 percent, and a vast majority of IB students enroll in college. Most attend the University of Utah Honors College—often on scholarship—or a top university or liberal arts college out of state. When I graduated in 2022, nearly half the students in Utah who got into Harvard came from the program. For Utahns who want their children to attend an elite university, West IB is the place to send them.
But it’s harder to say West IB helps those most in need.
Though West is predominantly Hispanic, in my experience, its IB program had relatively few Hispanic students. Instead, it was largely white, East Asian, and South Asian. (When I spoke to West administration, they had no demographic data on the makeup of their IB program).
Similarly, though more than half of West students are low-income, most of my IB peers were the children of well-off, highly educated professionals—lawyers, doctors, or professors. Many IB students, including myself, lived outside of West’s boundaries but chose to attend the school anyway to participate in IB, usually commuting from wealthier parts of Salt Lake City.
Within IB, students were isolated from the rest of the school and received disproportionately more resources. IB or pre-IB students took honors, AP, or IB classes taught by another group of teachers. Most of these classes included zero non-IB track students. It was difficult to meet students outside IB, so most participants only had friends inside the program. Funding West’s IB certification, training IB teachers, and sustaining IB-dominated groups—including most extracurriculars—was also pricey.
I doubt I could have found the education I received at West anywhere else in Utah. I graduated high school rigorously well-prepared for college and with a deep love of learning, two things for which I’ll always be grateful.
However, the way people presented West’s IB program left me uneasy. It was often cited as a shining example of educational equity for under-resourced students. But it seemed to me West IB was failing to help—or even include—those most in need of support.
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I always thought my high school experience was anomalous, but at Harvard, I learned it was actually quite common. Peers described going to other “schools within schools”—magnet programs within larger public schools whose demographics usually diverged from their high school’s.
Paul Reville, a former Massachusetts secretary of education who now teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, tells me this phenomenon is “not unusual.”
“If you have open choice in schools, it often leads to different kinds of segregation and clustering,” he says. “Oftentimes, that will line up along racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic lines.”
IB’s data reflects this. Only 33 percent of IB Diploma Program exam-takers in Title I schools are low-income, compared to 40 percent or more of students at those schools who are low-income. At Title 1 IB schools, 24 percent of students are Black, but only 13 percent of IB Diploma exam-takers are Black.
Some IB programs are literally clustered, like Berkeley High’s Berkeley International School, a sub-school within a larger high school. Others, like the IB Diploma program at Castle Park High School near San Diego, are like mine: not technically separate from the school at large but essentially walled off from the broader community.
Frances Campos graduated from Castle Park’s IB program and now attends Harvard. Though her IB program was demographically similar to her broader school—predominantly low-income and Hispanic—she said IB students received more resources and felt cut off from non-IB students. “Even within an underrepresented community, it did definitely have subtle ways of selecting for people,” she says.
While in IB, Campos says she felt “so isolated from the rest of the school”—taking almost all her classes exclusively with 22 other IB Diploma students, which eventually dropped to just nine others her senior year. “I found it hard to make friends outside of the program.”
These disparities occur even after IB’s leadership’s decades-long push for equity.
While many magnet programs admit students via a placement test or lottery—checkpoints that can disadvantage under-resourced students or curb enrollment—IB does neither. IB designed its Diploma Program so any 11th-grade student with the desire and necessary prior knowledge can participate.
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“Some programs are, by their nature, exclusive, and that’s not the IB,” says Robert Kelty, IB’s head of outreach and development in the Americas. “It is a framework that allows for equity.”
IB has also made a concerted effort to make its programs accessible to low-income students. Sixty percent of the IB programs in US public schools are available in Title I schools.
To IB’s credit, the benefits of earning an IB Diploma as a low-income student are enormous. About 89 percent of students from well-off families attend college, and only 64 percent from middle-class and 51 percent from low-income families. IB closes this gap, with 79 percent of low-income students who earn IB Diplomas enrolling in college, on par with the college enrollment of higher-income IB students. IB Diploma graduates also enter many universities with over a year of credits, and in states like Florida, they automatically earn a scholarship to state college.
But the difficulty for under-resourced students is not what happens after IB—it is entering the program in the first place. Kelty, Reville, and Frank Barnes (another professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education) told me that disparities within the IB Diploma program result from inequalities much earlier in school.
Though anyone can enroll in the IB Diploma program, IB classes require students to be above grade level. Students must have several years of advanced prerequisites to take “tracked” IB courses like math and foreign languages, both of which are requirements for the IB Diploma. The prerequisite for the IB math class I took in my senior year, “Approaches and Analysis HL,” was AP Calculus BC, meaning participants had to be at least two years above grade level in math.
This makes it difficult for many students, especially those from low-income families, to enroll in IB. Researchers at Brigham Young University found that low-income students lag an average of three academic years behind their higher-income peers and enter high school with average literacy skills five years behind high-income students.
Even if IB high schools that serve low-income populations start preparing their students for the diploma program in the ninth grade, raising many students’ performance from below to above grade level in just two years is extremely difficult.
“Some kids are way ahead in math, and other kids are way behind, and asking an individual teacher to close that gap with a very wide range of students is a lot to ask,” says Reville. “It’s too late if you wait until high school.”
This data leaves me conflicted about my own IB program. Have I spent too long holding West accountable for disparities within IB they could do little about?
But I also think about the strikingly disproportionate amount of resources I received because I was an IB student. Just hosting an IB Diploma program is expensive. According to Shannon Wilson, one of West’s assistant principals and former IB coordinator, participating schools must pay $12,660 to IB each year. Certifying a single IB teacher costs an additional $200–300 in registration fees, plus the price of training.
At West, many other resources flowed unequally to IB students. West IB has a dedicated counselor, and while I was there, most non-sports extracurriculars were almost exclusively composed of IB students. When West paid for its mock trial team to travel out of state for competitions or its debaters to receive specialized coaching, that funding went to those of us in IB.
Compounding these issues, IB programs can be funded by resources explicitly intended to help low-income or underperforming students. The federal government allocates Title I funding to schools with the mandate they use it to benefit the school at large, especially students struggling the most. However, it’s possible to put Title I funds toward IB under the logic that an IB program benefits the entire school (though Kelty tells me this is relatively unusual, and West does not use its Title I funding this way).
More commonly, schools put Title IV funding toward their IB programs—something West does. Title IV funds exist to improve student access to quality education, and their allocation is linked to Title I funding.
But when IB programs’ structures make it difficult for their students to even meet their underperforming peers, how can the presence of IB programs benefit underperforming students?
Campos also fails to see how funding IB programs helps non-IB students.
“I don’t see how any of the funding that went toward IB, how it could have been extended to anyone that was non-IB,” she says. “Once people decided, ‘Oh, I’m going to do IB or not going to do IB,’ you’re pretty much cut off from each other.”
Nevertheless, the disparities within IB are not ironclad. Reville believes educators can address them by focusing on early education.
He says if districts create a program like IB, “that’s very rigorous and tends to draw existing high achievers,” they also need to ensure “those who haven’t been such high achievers get prepared and encouraged to enroll in it.”
“In other words, you’ve got to build a pipeline,” he says.
IB is already doing this itself. In the 1990s, it created a middle school “Middle Years Program” and an elementary school “Primary Years Program” to prepare students for advanced high school education. These programs are less common than the Diploma Program but are growing in popularity. Unlike most IB Diploma programs, they generally include all students at a given school.
Reville strongly advocates for these programs, which include entire school populations. He says his “ideal” educational system sets high standards for every student and empowers them to measure up. He also says it is essential for pipeline programs to begin when students are young—before achievement gaps set in.
IB’s research proves the benefits of these pipelines. In districts where the IB Primary Years and Middle Years programs exist, the IB Diploma program experiences far fewer economic and racial disparities.
Whether through IB or not, creating noncompetitive programs that strengthen all students’ early education is a promising way to boost educational equity. The challenge is that these programs require a lot of “intentionality, planning, and strategy,” says Reville, as well as resources, and their effects take years to manifest in high schools.
IB and school administrators are also working to make IB programs more accessible. One initiative is IB’s other high school program, the IB Career Program, established in 2004, which prepares students for specific career pathways like engineering or firefighting. The Career Program requires fewer advanced classes than the Diploma Program. It is more accommodating for students who want to attend a trade school or pursue immediate employment instead of college.
West was an early adopter of the Career program in 2013. Although it remained relatively small for nearly a decade—only six IB Career certificates were awarded to my graduating class in 2022, compared to 41 IB Diplomas—Nicholas says West’s Career program has begun to grow quickly.
“Especially if kids haven’t been thinking about doing more rigorous courses at school, it’s an approachable thing,” she tells me.
Nicholas also says West’s IB Career program is more representative of the larger school than its Diploma program. Because of the Career program, “West IB in 2025 looks a lot different than West IB from 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, or five years ago,” she says.
IB’s national leadership and schools like West have also begun encouraging non-IB Diploma students to take IB classes selectively. Enrolling in a single IB class boosts students’ graduation and college attendance rates. This pick-and-choose system also increases interactions between IB and non-IB students and actually allows students who do not earn the full IB Diploma to benefit from the presence of IB programs.
IB has developed a new literature class that does not require participants to be above grade level and is encouraging high schools to use it as their general 11th- or 12th-grade English class. Nicholas says West is beginning to implement this program.
“That IB Language and Literature class is a very great petri dish of kids,” she says. “It’s really exciting to walk into an IB class now, just look around, and be like, ‘This is not what the IB class I taught 10 years ago looked like.’”
IB still experiences disparities, and for schools like West, the fight to reduce them is not over. West’s existing “pipeline” into IB is small and test-in, which muddies its ability to help under-resourced students. Nationally, the use of Title I and Title IV funding for IB remains a difficult question.
Still, there are reasons to be optimistic. Talking to Nicholas, it seems West IB’s makeup has changed more in the three years since I graduated than in the 40 years before. I also came away from my conversations sincerely believing the people who run IB—Nicholas and Wilson at West and Kelty at the national level—are genuinely doing their best to make it a program open to everyone.
I have four younger siblings who all plan to enroll in West IB. Two attend West now, and two are in elementary school. I hope they get the same benefits from the program I did—that it prepares them well for life after high school and helps them love learning.
But beyond that, I hope the IB program they experience looks very different from mine.
Adelaide ParkerAdelaide Parker is a writer and student at Harvard College from Salt Lake City, Utah majoring in Social Studies and Philosophy. She works as a co-op for The Boston Globe.