International education and the rise of paleoconservative thought: mapping the growth of the International Baccalaureate in the United States along county-level voting patterns

ABSTRACT

Despite the growing presence and visibility of paleoconservative critique of international curricula such as the IB, little scholarly attention has been invested in discerning how the rise of paleoconservative thought in mainstream politics has shaped or even redirected the IB’s growth in the United States. This study strives to address this gap by examining the association between county-level voting patterns with the growth of the IB, the availability of different programs of the IB continuum, and school demographic data. Incidence Rate Ratios (IRR) and 95% Wald Confidence Intervals (CI) were estimated using mixed-effects Poisson models with county as the clustering variable. Notable findings include a shift in growth patterns beginning in 2008, where IB schools have increasingly clustered along partisan lines. The study concludes by considering the potential challenges these changing growth patterns may present to the IB’s future in the United States and elsewhere.

KEYWORDS:

• International Baccalaureate
• paleoconservative
• political polarization
• international education
• voting patterns

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In other words, nearly 2% of the United States 93,295 state-funded schools now offer the IB (NCES, 2022).