Credential Market: Mass Schooling, Academic Power and the International Baccalaureate Diploma 3030801683, 9783030801687

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
About the Author
Chapter 1: Introduction: Revisiting Credential Sociology
The Sociology of Educational Credentials
Education Credentials and the Modern Social Order
Credentials and Social Power
Where Does Credential Power Come From?
Credentials and Sociodicy
High School Credentials and Social Closure
Credentials and Economic Metaphors
Credentialism as Generalised Credential Inflation
Credential Value
Value in Social Science
Credential Value and Belief
From Value to Valuation
Credential Legitimacy and the State
The Value of Educational Credentials
Credential Distribution and Structural Value
Credential Markets
Markets, Market Position and Market Power
Credential Markets
Credential Market Position as Academic Power
Credential Theory and the IB Diploma
Method and Data
The Argument Summarised
References
Chapter 2: The IB Diploma from Globalisation to Credential Theory
A Global Imaginary
Shortfalls of Assumed Global Class Formation
Re-embedding the IB Diploma in Credential Structures
Framing the IB Diploma Internationally
Uneven Country Distribution and Private Schooling
A Domestic and Gendered Student Recruitment
Universal University Aspirations and Domestic Destinations
The Structure of the Global IB Diploma Market
The Differentiated Insertion of the IB Diploma Across High School Credential Markets
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: The IB Diploma and the Nation-State: Positional Competition and Academic Distinction
Introduction
The United States
Canada
India
East and Southeast Asia
England
South America
Europe
The Middle East
Australia
Generalisations and Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: The Definition of Recognised Academic Competence in Credential Markets
Introduction
Curriculum and Educational Inequality
Credentials, Curriculum and the IB Diploma in Australia
Curriculum Hierarchy and Credential Hierarchy
Curriculum Architecture
Curriculum Volume
Curriculum Assemblage
Curriculum Variety
Languages
Academic Profitability
Examinations and Inequality
Academic Risk, Self-Exclusion and Credential Value Predictability
Credential Hierarchy: Student and Teacher Views
The Comparative Social Stratification of Credentials
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Urban Schooling, Private Schooling and the IB Diploma in Australia
Introduction
Schools as Credential Retailers
A Credential Market Within Schools
The Spatial and Institutional Structures of IB Diploma Schools
The Geography of IB Diploma Availability
School Size and IB Diploma Retailing
An Internationally Oriented Market?
The IB Diploma and Private Schooling
Private Schools and Socio-Academic Segregation
A Niche Credential Market Segment
The IB Diploma and the ‘Great Australian Divide’
Urban Private Schooling and the IB Diploma
Socio-Academic Restrictions to IB Diploma Access
The Price of the IB Diploma
Explaining Schools’ Investment in the IB Diploma
References
Chapter 6: Resource Concentration, Social Segregation and Academic Power in IB Diploma Schools in Australia
Introduction
Resource Concentration and the IB Diploma
IB Diploma Schools’ Economic Resources
IB Diploma Schools’ Human Resources
Social Segregation and the IB Diploma
IB Diploma Schools’ Economic Selectivity
IB Diploma Schools’ Socio-Educational Advantage
IB Diploma Schools’ Social Class Recruitment
Schools’ Academic Power and the IB Diploma
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Families, Credential Choice and the IB Diploma in Australia
Introduction
Families as Credential Acquirers
The IB Diploma as an Urban Credential
Families, Private Schooling and Private Credentialing
A Gendered Credential
Choosing the IB Diploma
Reproduction Strategies and Family Conatus
The Price of the IB Diploma
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: The Socio-Academic Structure of the Australian Credential Market
Introduction
The Concentration of Academic Capital in the IB Diploma
Family Social Position as a Source of Credential Market Power
The Social Space of Credentials
Family Economic Capital
Family Cultural Capital
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: Academic Power and the IB Diploma in Australia
The Bottleneck of High-School University Transition in Australia
The IB Diploma and Elite University and Degree Aspirations
The Prevalence of Elite Domestic University Aspirations
Elite Course Aspirations: The Health Professions and Double Degrees
Academic Power and Tertiary Admission Scores
Fulfilling University Aspirations
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: The Institutionalisation of High School Credential Value
Introduction
The Institutional Architecture and Symbolic Foundations of High School Credential Value
University Recognition
Institutionalising Recognition: The IB Diploma Example
The Distinctive Status of the IB Diploma
Quantifying the Value of High School Certificates
Comparing the Incomparable
Technology of IB Diploma Value Quantification
Credential Valuation: Assumptions and Values
Social Logics of Quantification
Credential Value and the State
Credential Value Predictability
Value Codification as a Social Stake
Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: Mass Schooling, Academic Competition and the International History of the IB Diploma
Introduction
The Mythology of Origins
The Dominance of Examination Over Curriculum
The Social and Symbolic Capital of Early IB Promoters
Labour of Recognition
A Socially and Academically Exclusive Project
From Primitive Capital Accumulation to Sustained Academic Power
Early Academic Elitism and University Success
Expansion
Preventing Devaluation
Funding a Private Credential
Legitimising Elitism
Explaining the Constitution of an IB Diploma Market: Mass Schooling and High School Credential Inflation
Countries’ Acceptance of the IB Diploma
Massification and Credential Inflation
Conclusion
References
Chapter 12: Credential Stratification in a Unified Market: The History of the IB Diploma in Australia
Introduction
Universities: From Social to Academic Selection
Massification in Secondary Education Until the 1970s
Massification and Credential Competition Since the 1980s
Neo-Liberalising Australian Education Systems
The Twenty-First Century and the Consolidation of the IB Diploma Market Segment
Conclusion
References
Chapter 13: Credential Markets and Credential Theory
Introduction
The Dynamics of Credentialing
Market Competition and Change
Massification, Credential Inflation and Devaluation
Mass Markets and Market Segmentation
The End of the Credentialed Social Order?
Credentials and Positionality
Credentials as Positional Property
Academic Competition as a Cultural Auction
Academic Competition as a Tamed Competition
Credential Value
Credential Scarcity and Legitimate Cultural Competence
Positional Cultural Property and Value
Credential Property
The Specificities of Credential Property
Non-transferability and Cultural Competence
Credentials and the Social Order
Cultural Credit and Cultural Debt
An Economy of Belief
Credential Value and Social Magic
Credentials and the State
The State as Arbiter of Cultural Credit and Debt
References
Chapter 14: Conclusion
The Transformation of the Australian Credential Market and the IB Diploma
Private Credentialing and Mass High School Certification Markets
Credential Market and Credential Value
References
Appendices
Appendix 1: Methodological Annex
Data Sources
Data on IB Diploma Acquirers
Data Caveats and Limitations
Variable and Indicator Limitations
Appendix 2: Data Samples (Tables A.1 and A.2)
Appendix 3: List of Recoded Categories for Course Preferences of 2006 School Leavers with ENTER Applying for Three Most in-Demand Institutions (Melbourne University, Monash University and RMIT University)
Glossary

Citation preview

International Study of City Youth Education 4 Series Editor: Stephen Lamb

Quentin Maire

Credential Market

Mass Schooling, Academic Power and the International Baccalaureate Diploma

International Study of City Youth Education Volume 4

Series Editor Stephen Lamb, CIRES, Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

This series is based on the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), a new and innovative international study that considers how well education systems are working, for whom, and why. ISCY is a longitudinal study of 10th Grade students in 15 cities: Barcelona, Bergen, Bordeaux, Ghent, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Montreal, Reykjavik, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Sacramento, Tijuana, Santiago, Turku and Wroclaw. The ISCY project compares how well different education systems prepare young people for life beyond school. It aims to measure the impacts of the distinctive institutional arrangements of each system, including programs and courses, curriculum and assessment practices, types and locations of schools, and the structure of education and training opportunities beyond school. ISCY provides unprecedented insight on how educational paths and achievement impact young people’s education and career trajectories, civic engagement, and overall well-­ being. It offers a unique opportunity to measure the relationship between student academic performance, attitudes and aspirations, and future outcomes. The series features volumes on various topics written by researchers based across the ISCY network. Current volumes to be released in the series involve work on educational opportunity and inequality, social and cultural contexts, skills for the 21st Century, school effects and student engagement. The series: • Compares diverse international systems using common measures • Focuses on systemic and contextual factors and their contribution to student outcomes • Provides strong theoretical foundations in studies of educational inequality • Develops measures of 21st Century skills and consider their relationship to schools and system context •  Analyses longitudinal information about student pathways and post-school destinations • Please contact Astrid Noordermeer at [email protected] if you wish to discuss a book proposal. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15447

Quentin Maire

Credential Market Mass Schooling, Academic Power and the International Baccalaureate Diploma

Quentin Maire Centre for International Research on Education Systems Victoria University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2524-8537     ISSN 2524-8545 (electronic) International Study of City Youth Education ISBN 978-3-030-80168-7    ISBN 978-3-030-80169-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80169-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book revisits central questions in the sociology of credentials by focussing on a new type of high school certificate, the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma, a private qualification studied in over 3500 schools from more than 150 countries. It seeks to explain the history and currency of this new certificate in a context of mass credential awarding and decline in the overall social value of high school certificates (i.e. credential inflation). By developing the concept of credential market and applying it systematically, the book examines what makes credentials valuable, how new credentials become appropriated by different social groups, and what this means for social inequality in education systems. The book argues that the social logics of educational credential acquisition can only be understood if contextualised within specific credential markets. This principle applies to the IB Diploma as much as to mainstream high school certificates. Since credential markets are state-fashioned to a significant extent, and since this affects the different certificates on offer, detailed country-level analyses are indispensable to sociological research on emerging certificates. In this book, the substantive analysis of the IB Diploma in high school credentialing systems is used as a means to progress credential theory. The empirical coordinates of much of the study are the Australian education system. Three chapters are international in scope to make sense of the ways in which a private certificate comes to occupy distinct positions in different credential markets. Most importantly, the logic of inquiry in these national and international contexts has bearing not only beyond Australia but also beyond the specific case of the IB Diploma. A key argument of the book is that the distribution of academic capital (or academic power), understood as specific forms of knowledge valued through curriculum and examination systems, presides over the making of credential value and educational inequality. Investment in the IB Diploma by students endowed with recognised academic competence (i.e. academic capital) explains how this private credential has become a distinctive high school certificate. I contend that long-­ standing social inequalities in the distribution of academic capital institutionalised in the stratification of school systems, the nature of cultural competence valued in the curriculum, and the unequal distribution of family resources contributing to its v

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Preface

cultivation, have led to the quasi-monopolisation of the IB Diploma by middle and upper classes in Australia and internationally for its promises of academic distinction. The argument that the appropriation of a new credential by dominant social groups as a means of educational distinction is based on the unequal distribution of recognised academic value, whilst decisive, must be supplemented with an analysis of the symbolic making of credential value. The social power of credentials always depends on recognition of their legitimacy, a fact of great importance in understanding the means through which new certificates come to acquire value. A specific labour of legitimation was needed for the IB Diploma to become a profitable credential. I argue that this labour required an investment of social energy and has been conditioned on the dominant social positions of its promoters, users and supporters. The different chapters offer a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which the value of a private certificate becomes defined by the education system in which it is located. Most of the analysis is new and has not been published elsewhere. The text has been constructed to flow logically from chapter to chapter, but readers interested in specific aspects of the analysis can refer to the summaries at the beginning of each chapter (included in the online version of the book on the publisher's website) to contextualise the argument made in different parts of the book. Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Quentin Maire

Contents

1 Introduction: Revisiting Credential Sociology��������������������������������������    1 The Sociology of Educational Credentials����������������������������������������������     2 Education Credentials and the Modern Social Order������������������������������     3 Credentials and Economic Metaphors ����������������������������������������������������     8 Credentialism as Generalised Credential Inflation����������������������������������     9 Credential Value ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    11 Value in Social Science����������������������������������������������������������������������������    11 Credential Value and Belief ��������������������������������������������������������������������    12 From Value to Valuation��������������������������������������������������������������������������    13 Credential Legitimacy and the State��������������������������������������������������������    14 The Value of Educational Credentials������������������������������������������������������    15 Credential Distribution and Structural Value ������������������������������������������    16 Credential Markets����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    17 Markets, Market Position and Market Power������������������������������������������    17 Credential Markets����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    19 Credential Market Position as Academic Power��������������������������������������    20 Credential Theory and the IB Diploma����������������������������������������������������    20 Method and Data��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    21 The Argument Summarised ��������������������������������������������������������������������    22 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    25 2 The IB Diploma from Globalisation to Credential Theory������������������   29 A Global Imaginary ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    29 Shortfalls of Assumed Global Class Formation��������������������������������������    31 Re-embedding the IB Diploma in Credential Structures ������������������������    34 Framing the IB Diploma Internationally��������������������������������������������������    37 Uneven Country Distribution and Private Schooling������������������������������    38 A Domestic and Gendered Student Recruitment ������������������������������������    40 Universal University Aspirations and Domestic Destinations ����������������    41 The Structure of the Global IB Diploma Market ������������������������������������    43

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The Differentiated Insertion of the IB Diploma Across High School Credential Markets����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    44 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    48 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    49 3 The IB Diploma and the Nation-State: Positional Competition and Academic Distinction������������������������������������������������������������������������   53 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    53 The United States������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    54 Canada������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    59 India ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    61 East and Southeast Asia ��������������������������������������������������������������������������    62 England����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    64 South America������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    66 Europe������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    68 The Middle East��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    70 Australia��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    70 Generalisations and Conclusion��������������������������������������������������������������    73 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    75 4 The Definition of Recognised Academic Competence in Credential Markets������������������������������������������������������������������������������   81 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    81 Curriculum and Educational Inequality ��������������������������������������������������    82 Credentials, Curriculum and the IB Diploma in Australia����������������������    84 Curriculum Hierarchy and Credential Hierarchy������������������������������������    85 Curriculum Architecture��������������������������������������������������������������������������    86 Curriculum Volume����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    88 Curriculum Assemblage��������������������������������������������������������������������������    88 Curriculum Variety����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    91 Languages������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    92 Academic Profitability ����������������������������������������������������������������������������    93 Examinations and Inequality��������������������������������������������������������������������    97 Academic Risk, Self-Exclusion and Credential Value Predictability������    98 Credential Hierarchy: Student and Teacher Views����������������������������������   100 The Comparative Social Stratification of Credentials������������������������������   102 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   103 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   104 5 Urban Schooling, Private Schooling and the IB Diploma in Australia������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  109 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   109 Schools as Credential Retailers����������������������������������������������������������������   110 A Credential Market Within Schools ������������������������������������������������������   110 The Spatial and Institutional Structures of IB Diploma Schools������������   112 The IB Diploma and Private Schooling ��������������������������������������������������   119

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The Price of the IB Diploma��������������������������������������������������������������������   125 Explaining Schools’ Investment in the IB Diploma��������������������������������   127 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   129 6 Resource Concentration, Social Segregation and Academic Power in IB Diploma Schools in Australia��������������������������������������������  133 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   133 Resource Concentration and the IB Diploma������������������������������������������   134 Social Segregation and the IB Diploma��������������������������������������������������   136 Schools’ Academic Power and the IB Diploma��������������������������������������   147 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   150 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   151 7 Families, Credential Choice and the IB Diploma in Australia������������  153 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   153 Families as Credential Acquirers ������������������������������������������������������������   154 The IB Diploma as an Urban Credential��������������������������������������������������   154 Families, Private Schooling and Private Credentialing����������������������������   155 A Gendered Credential����������������������������������������������������������������������������   157 Choosing the IB Diploma������������������������������������������������������������������������   161 Reproduction Strategies and Family Conatus������������������������������������������   165 The Price of the IB Diploma��������������������������������������������������������������������   168 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   170 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   170 8 The Socio-Academic Structure of the Australian Credential Market������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  173 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   173 The Concentration of Academic Capital in the IB Diploma��������������������   174 Family Social Position as a Source of Credential Market Power������������   178 The Social Space of Credentials��������������������������������������������������������������   181 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   192 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   193 9 Academic Power and the IB Diploma in Australia ������������������������������  195 The Bottleneck of High-School University Transition in Australia��������   195 The IB Diploma and Elite University and Degree Aspirations����������������   199 Academic Power and Tertiary Admission Scores������������������������������������   209 Fulfilling University Aspirations��������������������������������������������������������������   213 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   218 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   219 10 The Institutionalisation of High School Credential Value��������������������  221 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   221 The Institutional Architecture and Symbolic Foundations of High School Credential Value�������������������������������������������������������������   222 Quantifying the Value of High School Certificates����������������������������������   227

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Contents

Credential Value and the State ����������������������������������������������������������������   234 Credential Value Predictability����������������������������������������������������������������   237 Value Codification as a Social Stake��������������������������������������������������������   239 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   241 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   242 11 Mass Schooling, Academic Competition and the International History of the IB Diploma ����������������������������������������������  245 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   245 The Mythology of Origins ����������������������������������������������������������������������   246 The Dominance of Examination Over Curriculum����������������������������������   249 The Social and Symbolic Capital of Early IB Promoters������������������������   254 Labour of Recognition ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   255 A Socially and Academically Exclusive Project��������������������������������������   257 From Primitive Capital Accumulation to Sustained Academic Power����   258 Explaining the Constitution of an IB Diploma Market: Mass Schooling and High School Credential Inflation����������������������������   271 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   277 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   278 12 Credential Stratification in a Unified Market: The History of the IB Diploma in Australia������������������������������������������  283 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   283 Universities: From Social to Academic Selection������������������������������������   284 Massification in Secondary Education Until the 1970s ��������������������������   285 Massification and Credential Competition Since the 1980s��������������������   288 Neo-Liberalising Australian Education Systems ������������������������������������   293 The Twenty-First Century and the Consolidation of the IB Diploma Market Segment ������������������������������������������������������������������   296 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   300 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   302 13 Credential Markets and Credential Theory������������������������������������������  305 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   305 The Dynamics of Credentialing ��������������������������������������������������������������   306 Credentials and Positionality ������������������������������������������������������������������   314 Credential Value ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   320 Credential Property����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   324 Credentials and the Social Order ������������������������������������������������������������   327 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   334

Contents

xi

14 Conclusion������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  339 The Transformation of the Australian Credential Market and the IB Diploma����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   340 Private Credentialing and Mass High School Certification Markets ������   342 Credential Market and Credential Value��������������������������������������������������   343 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   345 Appendices��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  347 Appendix 1: Methodological Annex ��������������������������������������������������������  347 Appendix 2: Data Samples (Tables A.1 and A.2)��������������������������������������  356 Appendix 3: List of Recoded Categories for Course Preferences of 2006 School Leavers with ENTER Applying for Three Most in-Demand Institutions (Melbourne University, Monash University and RMIT University)��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  357 Glossary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  359

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4

Number of IB Diploma schools in countries with at least 50 IB Diploma schools (2020) Source: International Baccalaureate Organization website�����������������������������������������������������������������������  39 Percentage of IB Diploma/Certificate graduates who completed their IB Diploma/Certificates in their country of (first) nationality, by country (2011–12) Source: IGI Services, The IB Diploma Programme: Graduate Destinations Surveys 2011–2012����������������  41 Percentage of private schools among IB Diploma schools and secondary schools, by country (2018 and 2020) Sources: PISA 2018 and International Baccalaureate Organization website�����������������������������������������������������������������������  45 Socioeconomic status difference between public and private school students (PISA 2018) and relative over-representation of private schools among IB Diploma schools, by country (2018 and 2020) Sources: PISA 2018 and International Baccalaureate Organization website. Note: the chart includes all countries with at least 50 IB Diploma schools in early 2020, except Ecuador and India for lack of PISA 2018 data�����������  47

Fig. 3.1

Ethnic representation in IB Diploma/Certificate relative to representation in overall senior high school student population (%, 2015–16) Source: Digest of Education Statistics 2018 (Snyder et al., 2019) for the ethnic profile of US students in grades 9–12 in 2016 and Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) data for the ethnic profile of IB enrolment for the 2015–16 school year������������������������������������������������������������������  58

Fig. 4.1

Percentage of Australian twelfth grade students studying different curriculum areas (2013) Source: ACARA (2016)�������������  89

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xiv

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5

Fig. 5.6

List of Figures

Academic profitability of IB Diploma subjects (2019) Source: International Baccalaureate (2020) Note: the graph includes all subjects with at least 1000 candidates. Subjects labelled ‘A’ are Group 1 subjects; subjects labelled ‘B’ are Group 2 subjects; subjects labelled ‘Ab.’ are Ab Initio language subjects (i.e. foreign language initiation); ‘Lit’ refers to Literature and ‘Lal’ refers to Language and Literature. The curriculum area to which a subject belongs is indicated in brackets. ‘SL’ are standard level subjects and ‘HL’ are higher level subjects�������������������������������������������������������������������������  94 Percentage of candidates scoring 4 or above, by IB Diploma subject area (2019) Source: International Baccalaureate (2020)�����  95 Academic profitability of commonly studied twelfth grade VCE subjects (2019) Source: VCE 2019 Unit Completion Outcomes data and VTAC (2019) Note: the graph includes all subjects with at least 2000 candidates. The number of candidates refers to the number of students completing the highest unit (typically Unit 4) in a given subject. The scaling of VCE studies is analysed below��������������������������������  96 Percentage of IB Diploma students who agree or strongly agree with comparative statements on the IB Diploma (2015) Source: IB Diploma student survey, 2015�������������������������������������  101 Percentage of IB Diploma schools offering study programmes for one or two high school academic certificates, by school sector (2018) Source: IB Diploma school websites�����������������������  111 Distribution of high schools and IB Diploma schools across urban and non-urban areas (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis������������������������������������������������������������  113 Schools offering the IB Diploma in Melbourne (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: the grey shaded area represents Melbourne, using the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ ‘Urban Centre and Locality’ definition�������������������������  114 Schools offering the IB Diploma in Sydney (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: the grey shaded area represents Sydney, using the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ ‘Urban Centre and Locality’ definition������������������������������������������  115 Mean twelfth grade enrolments in high schools, by IB Diploma status and school sector (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis�����������������������������������������  117 Mean school percentage of LBOTE students, by IB Diploma status (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis���������������������������������������������������������������������������������  119

List of Figures

xv

Fig. 5.7

Distribution of high schools and IB Diploma schools across Australia’s three schooling sectors (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis�����������������������������������������  123

Fig. 6.1

Average annual senior secondary tuition fees charged by IB Diploma schools, by state (AU$, 2019) Source: IB Diploma school website data������������������������������������������������������������������������  138 Percentage of high schools and IB Diploma schools with ICSEA (socio-educational advantage) scores above selected thresholds (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  141 Mean ICSEA (socio-educational advantage) score of high schools, by IB Diploma status and sector (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis�����������������������������������������  142 Mean percentage of students from each socioeconomic quarter, by IB Diploma status of high school (weighted, 2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis���������������  144 Mean percentage of students from each socioeconomic quarter in high schools, by sector (weighted, 2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis. The graph excludes Catholic schools as only one Catholic school offers the IB Diploma�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  145 Mean percentage of students from each socioeconomic quarter in IB Diploma schools, by sector (weighted, 2018) Source: ACARA school data.���������������������������������������������������������  146 Percentage of students in the two highest achievement bands in NAPLAN (national standardised test) grade 9 grammar, by IB Diploma status of high school (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis�����������������������������������������  149 Percentage of students in the two highest achievement bands in NAPLAN (national standardised test) grade 9 numeracy, by IB Diploma status of high school (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis�����������������������������������������  149

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3

Fig. 6.4

Fig. 6.5

Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7

Fig. 6.8

Fig. 7.1

Victorian high school certificate acquirers, by credential and geolocation of school attended (%, 2017) Source: On Track 2017 survey data Note: VET refers to vocational education and training. VCAL refers to the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning, a vocationally oriented alternative to the Victorian Certificate of Education���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  155

xvi

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3

Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5

Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4

Fig. 8.5 Fig. 8.6

Fig. 8.7

List of Figures

Distribution of high school students and IB Diploma students across school sectors (%, 1998–2017) Source: Longitudinal Study of Australian Youth (LSAY) data�����������������������������������������  156 Victorian high school certificate acquirers, by credential and school sector (%, 2017) Source: On Track 2017 survey data Note: VET refers to vocational education and training. VCAL refers to the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning, a vocationally oriented alternative to the Victorian Certificate of Education�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  157 Senior high school students and IB Diploma students, by gender (%, 1998–2017) Source: LSAY data����������������������������������  158 Percentage of Australian PISA 2015 students who (strongly) agree with the following statements, by gender (weighted, 2015) Source: OECD PISA 2015 data�����������������������������������������������������  160 Percentage of students receiving high scores (bands 9 and 10) in NAPLAN (national standardised test) competencies in ninth grade, by IB Diploma and parental education status (2012) Source: IB Diploma 2015 survey data and NAPLAN National Report for 2012 (ACARA, 2012). Note: IB Diploma students’ NAPLAN results are self-reported.�����������������������������������������������������������������  175 LSAY twelfth grade and PISA 2012 students’ mean PISA mathematics, reading and science test scores, by IB Diploma status (2003–2017) Source: LSAY data and PISA 2012 data��������  177 Twelfth grade students’ mean scores in PISA mathematics, reading and science tests, by IB Diploma status (2003–2017) Source: LSAY data�������������������������������������������������������������������������  178 Socioeconomic status of Victorian twelfth grade students, by credential (%, 2017) Source: On Track 2017 survey data Note: VCE refers to the Victorian Certificate of Education, VCAL to the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning, and VET refers to vocational education and training (see Chap. 4)�����  182 Socioeconomic status of Victorian metropolitan non-Catholic private school twelfth grade students, by credential (%, 2017) Source: On Track 2017 survey data�����������������������������������������������  183 Percentage of Australian adults and IB Diploma students’ parents who completed a bachelor’s degree or above, by gender (2015) Source: IB Diploma student survey data and Australian Bureau of Statistics Education and Work data (ABS, 2019).���������������������  188 Percentage of university-qualified parents among twelfth grade students, by parent and IB Diploma status (2003–2017) Source: LSAY data�������������������������������������������������������������������������  189

List of Figures

Fig. 9.1

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 9.3

Fig. 9.4

Fig. 9.5

Fig. 9.6

Fig. 9.7

xvii

Hierarchical structure of the Victorian university selection market based on mean tertiary admission score of students’ first preferences and offers (2006–07) Source: VTAC 2006–07 tertiary admission data (unpublished), CIRES, Victoria University Note: the analysis excludes non-university tertiary institutions as well as the Australian Catholic University and Charles Sturt University as these are not primarily Victoria-based. The University of Ballarat is now known as Federation University Australia�����������������������������������������������������������������������  198 Percentage of Australian students expecting to complete a university degree (PISA 10th grade or above students) or enrol at university in the following year (12th grade IB Diploma students) (weighted, 2015) Source: PISA 2015 data and IB Diploma 2015 survey data Note: for PISA, the data refers to the level of education students expect to complete. University refers to bachelor’s degrees or above. The results are weighted using the w_fstuwt variable. For the IB Diploma student survey, the data refers to twelfth grade students’ enrolment plans for the following year. Differences in university intentions among the IB Diploma cohort in LSAY (previous table) and in the IB Diploma-specific survey (this figure) are due to the time coverage of the data, which is more recent and focussed for the IB Diploma-specific survey���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  202 University preference of twelfth grade IB students’ aspirations (2015) Source: IB Diploma 2015 survey data Note: when several institutions were mentioned by the student, the first one was retained for the analysis�����������������������������������������������������������������  203 Percentage of student applying for the most in-demand Victorian higher education institutions, by IB Diploma status (first preference, 2006) Source: VTAC 2006–07 tertiary admission data (unpublished), CIRES, Victoria University�����������  204 Percentage of school leavers with an ENTER scores above three thresholds, by high school credential (%, 2006–07) Source: VTAC 2006–07 tertiary admission data (unpublished), CIRES, Victoria University�������������������������������������������������������������������������  211 Percentage of 2006 school leavers applying for university through VTAC having their first preference met, by high school credential (%, 2006–07) Source: VTAC 2006–07 tertiary admission data (unpublished), CIRES, Victoria University�����������  214 Rate of offers made to first preferences submitted for VCE/VCAL and IB Diploma graduates applying to the three most in-demand Victorian universities (2006–07) Source: VTAC 2006–07 tertiary admission data (unpublished), CIRES, Victoria University������������������������������������������������������������  215

xviii

List of Figures

Fig. 11.1 IB schools presenting candidates for the IB Diploma/Certificates, 1975–2019 (N, May and November examination sessions) Source: IB Diploma statistical bulletin series Note: the data point values displayed on the chart correspond to the calendar years displayed on the horizontal axis, except for the final value which represents the number of IB Diploma schools in 2019�������  263 Fig. 11.2 IB Diploma and Certificate candidates, 1975–2019 (N, May and November examination sessions) Source: IB Diploma statistical bulletin series Note: the final data point values displayed on the chart show the number of IB Diploma and IB Diploma/Certificate candidates in 2019��������������������������������������������������������������������������  264 Fig. 12.1 Schools offering secondary education compared to base year of 1984, by sector, 1984–2018 (indexed) Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Schools, Australia time series Note: in the base year (1984) when the number of schools is set to 100 in each sector, there were 1559 public schools, 464 private Catholic schools and 365 non-Catholic private schools��������������������������������������������  294 Fig. 12.2 FTE students in public and private school compared to base year of 1975, by sector, 1975–2018 (indexed) Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Schools, Australia time series Note: in the base year (1975) when the number of full-time equivalent students is set to 100 in each sector, there were 2.3 million public school students and 620 thousand private school students�������������������������������������������������������������������  295 Fig. 12.3 Number of IB Diploma schools in Australia, 1978–2020 Source: IB Organization website���������������������������������������������������  298 Fig. 12.4 Conversion of IB Diploma scores into tertiary admission scores, 1999–2019 Source: Coleman (2009) for 1999 and 2009 data, Universities Admissions Centre (UAC) for 2019 data Note: the 1999 and 2009 data refer to South Australia’s Tertiary Entrance Ranks (TER) and the 2019 data refers to the country-wide notional Australian Tertiary Admission Ranks (ATARs)������������������������������������������������������������������������������  299

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4 Table 6.5 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 8.1

Top 12 countries in number of candidates presented at the IB Diploma examinations (%, May and November 2018)�����������������  40 Top five universities attended by IB Diploma/Certificate graduates, by country of school attended (2011–12)���������������������  42 Average enrolments in high schools, by IB Diploma status (2018)�����������������������������������������������������������������  116 Percentage of high schools offering the IB Diploma, by state and sector (2018)������������������������������������������������������������  121 Percentage of high schools in major cities offering the IB Diploma, by state and sector (2018)��������������������������������������������  123 Average income of high schools, by IB Diploma status (AU$, 2017)���������������������������������������������������������������������������������  134 Average staffing levels in high schools, by IB Diploma status (2018)��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  135 Lowest, highest and average annual senior secondary tuition fees in Victorian private schools and Victorian IB Diploma private schools, by region (AU$, 2019)������������������������  139 Average ICSEA (socio-educational advantage) score of high schools, by IB Diploma status (2018)�����������������������������  140 Mean NAPLAN (national standardised test) grade 9 scores of high schools, by IB Diploma status (weighted, 2018)������������  147 Victorian twelfth grade certificate acquirers, by credential and gender (%, 2015 and 2017)���������������������������������������������������  158 Students’ reasons for enrolling in the IB Diploma (%, 2015)�����  162 Percentage of twelfth grade students self-assessing as doing ‘very well’ or ‘better than average’ compared to most students in their year level at school, by IB Diploma status (1998–2012)����������������������������������������������������������������������  174

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Table 8.2 Table 8.3 Table 8.4 Table 8.5 Table 8.6 Table 9.1 Table 9.2 Table 9.3 Table 9.4 Table 9.5 Table 9.6

Table 9.7 Table 9.8 Table 9.9

List of Tables

Twelfth grade students’ mean Index of economic, social and cultural status (ESCS), by IB Diploma status and LSAY cohort (2003–2017)���������������������������������������������������������������������  184 Parental occupation of Queensland public school students (%, 2013) and IB Diploma students (%, 2015)���������������������������  186 Twelfth grade students’ mean WEALTH score, by IB Diploma status and LSAY cohort (2006–2017)��������������������������  187 Twelfth grade students’ mean CULTPOSS score, by IB Diploma status and LSAY cohort (2006–2017)��������������������������  190 Twelfth grade students’ mean HEDRES score, by IB Diploma status and LSAY cohort (2006–2017)��������������������������  191 Hierarchical structure of the Victorian university selection market based on undergraduate first preferences and offers (%, 2019)�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  197 Post-secondary intentions of twelfth grade students, by IB Diploma status (%, 1998–2017)����������������������������������������  200 Selected first course preferences of 2006 school leavers applying for a course in one of the three most in-demand Victorian universities, by high school credential (%, 2006)��������  206 Selected first course preferences of 2006 school leavers from IB Diploma schools applying for university through VTAC, by high school credential (%, 2006)�������������������������������  209 ENTER score of 2006 high school completers applying to enrol in Victorian higher education through VTAC, by high school credential (2006–07)�������������������������������������������  210 ENTER score of 2006 high school completers from IB Diploma schools applying to enrol in Victorian higher education through VTAC, by high school credential (2006–07)������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  213 Percentage of offers made by the three Victorian universities making the most offers to 2006 school leavers, by university and high school credential (%, 2006–07)������������������������������������  216 Selected offers made to 2006 school leavers through VTAC by the three most offer-­making Victorian universities (combined), by high school credential (%, 2006–07)�����������������  216 Selected offers made to 2006 school leavers from IB Diploma schools through VTAC by the three most offer-making Victorian universities (combined), by high school credential (%, 2006–07)���������������������������������������������������  218

List of Tables

xxi

Table 10.1 Conversion of selected IB Diploma scores into notional ATARs, 2010–2019��������������������������������������������������������  238 Table 12.1 Apparent retention to twelfth grade, by school sector, 1968–1999�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  295 Table A.1 Australian IB Diploma student survey sample (2015)����������������  356 Table A.2 Distribution of twelfth grade students across LSAY cohorts (n, 1998–2017)����������������������������������������������������������������������������  356

About the Author

Quentin  Maire  is a French-Australian research fellow in the Centre for International Research on Education Systems at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a recognised scholar in educational sociology, international education and comparative education. He completed his PhD on the International Baccalaureate (IB) in 2016 and has published in various academic outlets, including in International Studies in Sociology of Education, Educational Review and Discourse. His work uses both quantitative and qualitative research methods and combines empirical analysis and theory building. He is developing an original sociological agenda to propose new ways of understanding social inequality in education systems. He is currently co-authoring a comprehensive volume on educational inequality with Stephen Lamb and Esther Doecke. The book builds on the large-­ scale International Study of City Youth (ISCY) project and will be published with Springer in 2022.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Revisiting Credential Sociology

As official titles of educational competence, credentials have a central status in education systems. They are ostensibly used to certify the knowledge and skills that students are thought to have acquired. They are often considered to be one of the main factors that drive students to engage in formal learning and are commonly used in research as indicators of educational inequality. On the other hand, credentials are criticised for the negative consequences they would engender, such as introducing or exacerbating academic competition between schools and students, narrowing the curriculum, and impoverishing assessment practices. They are considered central to the making of social inequality between classes and to the process of education-mediated social reproduction. In this book, credentials are approached sociologically as titles of cultural credit. This means that, as a rule, investment in the acquisition of credentials can be socially profitable. But different educational certificates produce unequal yields in the social world and can thus contribute to social inequality. Even at a given certification level, different credentials can be ordered hierarchically and prove unequally useful to their acquirers. The means through which a hierarchy is constituted when several credentials compete in the same space is a key aspect that this book investigates. I deploy the concept of credential market to characterise this ordered and hierarchical credential structure. Credential markets are dynamic systems. Existing credentials are transformed, new credentials emerge, and other credentials are withdrawn from circulation. Changing credential markets thus offer an opportunity to grasp the logic of credential value-making more directly than by simply examining the structure of a credential market at a given point in time. In this book, the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma, a new high school certificate that started spreading across the globe in the early 1970s and has since acquired an international reputation for academic rigour, is used as such a case of market transformation. Its arrival in the Australian high school certification space and the stabilisation of its position within it allow us to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Q. Maire, Credential Market, International Study of City Youth Education 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80169-4_1

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analyse how new credentials interact with the established high school certificates with which they come in contact. The IB Diploma has been studied from a range of perspectives to explore a variety of theoretical interests, including globalisation theory, social inequality, curriculum analysis, teachers and teaching, streaming or tracking, and college preparation. However, the nature of the IB Diploma as a certificate inserted in specific credential markets has rarely been given detailed attention. This has meant that various theoretical insights that could be gained from such an analysis, both about the IB Diploma and about credential markets more broadly, have not materialised. If ‘we know little about the precise nature of supply and demand [of the IB Diploma]’, and if ‘the actual “value” of the [IB Diploma], as a form of academic capital, needs much further investigation’ (Bunnell, 2011), it is in part because the certificate status of the IB Diploma has not been considered methodically. This gap highlights the need to approach high school certificates such as the IB Diploma as credentials rather than simply as curricula or study programmes. This can help us refine our understanding of the role of credentials in producing social inequality in education systems. In this detailed introduction, I situate the book in the lineage of the sociology of educational credentials. I first present selected landmarks in credential research to frame the theoretical apparatus that underpins the study. I then outline the questions driving the inquiry and discuss the concepts used in the analysis. The issue of credential value and the concept of credential market hold centre stage. I then describe the methods used to analyse credential markets, before briefly mentioning the sources I have used. At the end of the introduction, I provide a general outline of the chapters that follow and summarise the book’s main arguments.

The Sociology of Educational Credentials This book is inscribed in a long tradition of sociological research on credentials, which can be traced back at least to Max Weber’s work. The Weberian tradition, in which one can include Bourdieu for the present purpose, has established the foundations of our understanding of the relationship between credentials and society. In this section, I provide an overview of significant developments in credential sociology. I first show how credentials have come to be seen as a central element of the modern social order. I then turn to the fact that, despite credentials being scarce goods, a significant quantitative expansion of high school certification has taken place in affluent countries, a phenomenon that has been qualified as ‘credential inflation’. This forms the credentialing context in which the book’s analysis of high school credential markets takes place.

Education Credentials and the Modern Social Order

3

Education Credentials and the Modern Social Order The relationship between credentials and social domination has been a major interest of sociologists. Credentials’ contribution to the distribution of opportunities and the legitimation of this distribution are central to credential theory. This is particularly true for educational certificates, which have been the most commonly studied variety of credentials.

Credentials and Social Power Bourdieu (2015) considered credentials as objects of prime sociological importance. He contended that they allow the sociologist to ask fundamental questions about the nature of social domination, starting with the mechanisms of value and power making in society. Bourdieu subsumed credentials under the broader category of official titles, which he considered core to power struggle in modern society (Bourdieu, 1996b). Through his project aiming to bridge economic (i.e. material) and cultural (i.e. symbolic) social determinations into a unified theory of practice (Swartz, 1997, 2013; Pinto, 2002), he highlighted the importance of systems of belief that socially empower individuals or groups to be recognised as legitimate bearers of an identity or competence. This is the main lens that Bourdieu adopted in studying credentials. As he defined them—albeit using a terminology that may not travel well outside of France due to the specific place of state administration positions in the French field of power—, credentials in contemporary societies are the titles of legitimacy of a ‘state nobility’ (Bourdieu, 1996b) that owes its social position to academic titles (although not exclusively). This credentialled nobility is composed of social agents ‘whose authority and legitimacy are guaranteed by the academic title’ (Bourdieu, 1998). Given the importance of educational certificates in determining social positions, credential competition has been characterised as one of the main modern forms of social (including class, ethnic, gender etc.) struggle (Hurn, 1993). Since the need for higher education degrees has become increasingly imperative to access positions of power (including in the labour market) (Bourdieu, 1996b), academic qualifications are central to the social constitution and reproduction of contemporary middle and upper classes. More generally, credential and examination systems have been foundational elements of bourgeois culture (Green, 2013), which has come to form a close relationship with contemporary capitalism. Classical credential sociologists compared the role of credentials and private property in the constitution of the social order in modern societies. To these theorists, such was the significance of credentials that they could stand on par with private property in the making and shaping of social space. For Parkin, ‘it is necessary to regard credentialism as a form of exclusionary social closure comparable in its importance for class formation to the institution of property’ (Parkin, 1979).

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Ultimately, credentials and property—or, in Bourdieu’s language, cultural capital and economic capital—are here seen as the two central pillars of class formation in modern societies (Parkin, 1979). Not all credential theorists agree with granting such theoretical importance to credentials. Murphy, contra Collins and Parkin, qualified credentials as a ‘derivative form’ of exclusion from sources of social power, lesser in importance compared to private property (Murphy, 1988). Moreover, some sociologists have questioned this dichotomous form of reasoning about credentials and property. Refusing to oppose property and credentials, Bourdieu reworked the concept of ‘capital’ to craft the term ‘cultural capital’. Bourdieu coined this concept to refer to cultural properties (i.e. knowledge, skills, goods, certificates etc.) from which one can derive a profit in specific contexts. He argued that credentials indicate ‘an agent’s position in the structure of the distribution of cultural capital, socially perceived as guaranteeing possession of a particular quantity of cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 1990). In Bourdieu’s sociological theory, credentials are a form of private property and the main cultural attribute that produces and reproduces social inequality. Establishing a parallel between money in the economic realm and credentials in the cultural realm, Bourdieu contended that credentials are to cultural capital what titles of property are to economic capital (Bourdieu, 2016), i.e. a state-backed form of credit. Another important Bourdieusian contribution to credential theory has been to outline the specificity of credentials as a form of cultural capital. For Bourdieu, educational credentials are the paradigmatic case of ‘institutionalised’ cultural capital (Bourdieu, 2015, 2016), i.e. one of the three forms (alongside the embodied and objectivised states (Bourdieu, 1979, 2016)) that cultural capital can take. This means that credential value depends on institutions, and that the institutionalisation of credential value becomes an important research problem. I tackle it in Chap. 10, by looking at the institutional arrangement that determines the value of the IB Diploma in the Australian high school credential market. All major credentials sociologists have been more or less directly inspired by Max Weber’s initial contribution to theorising this object. For Weber, credentials are key instruments in the monopolisation of dominant social positions in modern social orders (Weber, 2013, 2015). The social power of credentials has typically arisen in tandem with the creation of state bureaucracies in newly formed bourgeois societies; in these contexts, credentialing systems grew in parallel with the expansion of the middle classes (Green, 2013). In the Weberian tradition, the issues of social power and domination are fundamental to credential theory. Credentials are the basis of ‘claims to the monopolization of socially and economically advantageous positions’, and the ‘prestige of the “patents of education” […] can be turned to economic advantage’ (Weber, 2013). This invites sociologists to take the relationship between credentials and power seriously, as is done here specifically in regard to credentials and academic power. One aspect of Weber’s take on credentials that has not been given as much attention is his explicit linking of examination systems and credentials. For Weber, the ‘bureaucratization of domination’ (Weber, 2013) in modern societies has given a

Education Credentials and the Modern Social Order

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central and joint role to examinations and credentials in social power struggles. It is important to note the link Weber makes between examinations and credentials or, more specifically, that the credentials Weber had in mind were typically produced through examination systems. As we shall see in this book, examinations have a peculiar status among assessment practices, one that makes them particularly amenable to commanding belief in the competence they guarantee. This gives examinations clear affinities with the need for credentials to be trusted if they are to be socially profitable. The place of examinations in the constitution of the IB Diploma value is examined in detail in Chap. 4. Although the place of credentials in making social inequality has been found to vary from country to country (Ishida et al., 1997; Dubet et al., 2010), credentials remain an important piece of the social fabric of all modern ‘schooled’ societies (Brown et al., 2010; Baker, 2014; Bourdieu, 1998). This is even true for states such as England, where the profitability of credentials is more dependent on other social resources than it is in most of Western Europe and some parts of Asia, for instance. The joint histories of class and state formation are central to comparing and contrasting credentialing systems in different countries: while in continental Europe, credentialing arose in relation to the constitution of state bureaucracies (Green, 2013), in the United States, state bureaucracies played a relatively minor role in the credentialisation of society (Rubinson & Ralph, 1984). To understand why credentials nevertheless became an important social currency in the United States— and a mass currency there before anywhere else—, one must acknowledge that higher education degrees acquired value in a context marked by the emergence of private bureaucracies (i.e. giving access to managerial positions in private firms) (Brown, 1995) and a struggle for social closure in the old professions (Collins, 2019). State bureaucracies, private bureaucracies in large firms and the old professions have remained important components of middle-class labour markets in most affluent societies, making credentials highly relevant to our contemporary condition.

Where Does Credential Power Come From? Credential theory has been shaped by a debate about whether the power of credentials resides in the skills they certify or in other attributes not directly related to what they purport to attest (Murphy, 1988; Tholen, 2020; Araki, 2020). This is a question largely inherited from economists, some of whom (especially human capital theorists) consider that the premium in occupational rewards (e.g. wages) associated with credentials is explained by the greater productivity of their holders. From this point of view, credentials certify skills, skills increase productivity, and greater productivity commands greater income. There are several problems with this ‘economistic’ way of framing the question of credential power. Sociological research has found that the primary use of credentials in the labour force is as an instrument of exclusion, a tool for limiting

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market competition in the use of certain skills. Kim Weeden (2002) has noted that credentialing is one of the three common instruments of the restriction of supply of labourers, with licencing and unionisation. In the case of the United States, she found closure strategies restricting the supply of labourers most effective at increasing the earnings of workers (Weeden, 2002). Credentials can operate as a source of social power because they are exclusive, i.e. they prevent others from accessing opportunities that become reserved to only part of the group: ‘exclusion on the basis of allegedly necessary and valuable skills is the common denominator of all credential exclusion. Credentials constitute conspicuous skills, conspicuous cultural capital, and conspicuous merit’ (Murphy, 1988). This is largely ignored by the human capital theory of credential power. The binary nature of credential ownership also sits uneasily with the continuous nature of the social distribution of skill levels in a given domain of competence. While credentials institute a categorical dividing line between those who are certified and those who are not, competence or skills are generally continuous distributions, as Bourdieu (1991) insisted. This means that the power of credentials can never be reduced to technical competence. Rather, certification generates its own form of power, and the symbolic dimension of credential competence, i.e. the fact that competence is officially recognised, must always be included in the analysis of credentials. As Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) argued, we must empirically examine ‘the special symbolic potency of the title (credential)’ to understand its value. A sociologically informed way of thinking about credential value starts from the premise that the social power of credentials is produced in various struggles, including in the labour force (between and within occupations, as well as between employers and employees) and in the education system (between holders of different credentials as well as between credential providers). It also depends on class struggles more broadly and the role of the state in these struggles. Social struggle is thus the starting point of this book’s analysis of the Australian high school credential market and the place of the IB Diploma within it. One must interrogate the socio-­ academic appropriation of different credentials, as is done in Chaps. 7 and 8, as well as the circuits of production of credential legitimacy, as is done in Chap. 10.

Credentials and Sociodicy So far, I have presented credentials as instruments of monopolisation of opportunities. But the role of credentials in making social inequality goes beyond this: they are a fundamental piece for legitimising an unequal social order. As Wacquant (1996) argues, ‘the bestowal of a diploma is the climactic moment in a long cycle of production of collective faith in the legitimacy of a new form of class rule’. Since the education system is the main social purveyor of credentials, it makes the relationship between the education system and social order one of legitimation. This was the central argument in Bourdieu and Passeron’s theory of reproduction

Education Credentials and the Modern Social Order

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(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Passeron, 2013). It, too, was an intuition of Weberian origin. To be sure, the legitimising power of credentials is socially variable. Murphy contends that ‘one should not […] overestimate how much the excluded accept their exclusion as legitimate (e.g. those excluded on the basis of credentials), however legitimate such credential exclusion may appear to the credentialled’ (Murphy, 1988). This power of legitimation has been linked to the shifting fortunes of the meritocratic ideology, in which the distribution of credentials is presented as fair and socially impartial (Duru-Bellat & Tenret, 2009; Brown et  al., 2016; Tenret, 2011; Duru-Bellat & Tenret, 2012). In societies in which credentials are commonly found in all social groups, as is the case in most Western countries, the legitimising power of credentials also depends on social recognition of the unequal value of different certificates. Accordingly, we need to investigate how the unequal value of different credentials is made legitimate. By looking at the relative worth of the IB Diploma and other high school certificates in Australia, I address this theoretical question empirically in Chap. 10.

High School Credentials and Social Closure Credential theory has primarily emerged and advanced based on research conducted at the interface of higher education and the labour market (e.g. Baker, 2014). Credential sociology’s dominant focus on labour markets has meant that the kind of credentialed opportunities that have most interested researchers have typically been jobs. But the exclusionary nature of credentials is as evident in the education system as it is in the labour market. Credentials operate as a selection device to access certain locations in the education system (e.g. selective university courses). Without the right credential (and the right grade, mark or distinction), one is barred from accessing some schools, programmes, degrees or courses. Analysing credentials as an instrument of social exclusion is thus relevant within the education system itself. There are theoretical gains to be made by paying greater attention to credential power in social arenas other than the labour market. Take the issue of credential scarcity. Hannan (1985) contends that ‘in being tied (even at one remove) to work, credentials are of necessity stratified and subject to the influence of scarcity’. But high school certificates’ absolute scarcity has arguable significantly decreased in recent decades, as larger proportions of youth cohorts have completed high school. Accordingly, focussing on high school certificates rather than university degrees allows us to tackle the question of credential scarcity afresh. What scarcity means in the context of high school certificates, where supply is not as obviously limited as for university degrees, will be explored in the following chapters. In this book, I argue that examining high school credentials provides a useful avenue for grasping more general properties of credentials as institutionalised cultural capital. The main field in relation to which high school credentials acquire

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their value is not the labour market, but higher education. Especially in countries where access to higher education institutions and courses is academically selective and where high school certificate scores are central to this selection process, as is the case in Australia, important insight into credential value making can be gained by looking at the interface of high school certification and higher education selection. This is the main issue I consider in Chap. 9.

Credentials and Economic Metaphors Economic metaphors are commonplace in credential research and theory, although they are rarely applied in a consistent manner, except by a few credential theorists such as Collins (2019) and Labaree (1988). The currency metaphor is the most common use of economic vocabulary to talk about credentials. For Collins, credentials are ‘a type of currency of social respectability, which are traded in for access to jobs’ (Collins, 2019). The same lens was applied by David Labaree, who noted that ‘credentialing theory […] conceives of higher education diplomas as a kind of cultural currency’ (Labaree, 1995). For Hurn, credentials are ‘a cultural currency [that] functions rather like money in that it can be exchanged for desirable goods, in particular, desirable occupations’ (Hurn, 1993). Murphy made an important parallel between credentials and money: ‘when summary statements (credentials, certificates) of the quantity of formally produced cultural goods acquired by individuals come into existence, they can operate as a currency of cultural “money”’ (Murphy, 1988). Lahire noted that credentials function as ‘a currency which is unequally distributed and which, for this reason, gives access to diverse and varied privileges’ (Lahire, 2019). Bourdieu, too, likened credentials to a currency (Bourdieu, 1996b, 2015), albeit adding that it is a paradigmatic case of a ‘universal’ currency accepted (i.e. valued) across the whole social world. Some theorists have described educational credentials not simply as a cultural currency but, far more broadly, as the main currency of social domination. Brown argues that credentials are ‘the currency of opportunity’ (Brown, 2003). To Baker, ‘educationally generated credentials [have] become nothing less than the central currency of social power (including material resources)’ (Baker, 2014). These are exaggerations, as various other sources of social power are arguably more critical to social domination (Mann, 2013; Weber, 2015), including economic power (Bourdieu, 2010, 2013, 2016). Describing credentials as the main currency of social power tends to extend a form of middle-class ethnocentrism to the entire social space, where the relevance of credentials is weaker relative to other sources of social power. Still, these arguments allude to the contemporary importance of credentials for most social groups, a fact that indeed distinguishes the contemporary status of credentials from their more restricted social relevance in earlier periods. Social theorists’ characterisation of credentials as a cultural currency has been an important step in moving toward the possibility of an economic sociology of credentials, even though there has generally not been an explicit invitation to do so

Credentialism as Generalised Credential Inflation

9

in their work. Yet, while the currency metaphor is helpful and I will have recourse to it in the present book, credential theory cannot stop there. One of the main limitations of this metaphor is that currencies in fact acquire value when they circulate, i.e. are used as a medium of exchange. One of the distinctive properties of credentials is precisely that they do not circulate and cannot be exchanged. They can grant their holders social power, authority and various forms of profits, but never by exchanging them. This is so because the power of credentials comes from them being nominal instruments attached to specific persons. Arguably, if they could be routinely traded, ceded, bought or sold, credentials would not be as profitable since, as will be shown below, the value of credentials depends on a collective belief that they certify a form of cultural competence that can only be acquired in person. This is made clear when practices of selling or acquiring credentials for money, or the issuing of illegitimate credentials, are uncovered (e.g. Johnson, 2018). The impossibility to fully understand credentials as merchandise, i.e. through the logic of economic exchange, indicates that credentials are precisely not a currency in the traditional sense of the term, and that credentials involve specific modes of distribution and acquisition that cannot be reduced to commercial transactions. In Chap. 13, after concluding the empirical analysis, I will argue that credentials are best conceptualised as non-transferable titles of property. Unlike the currency metaphor, the notion of credential market has been relatively rarely used in credential research (see below). Against the dominant form of economisation of credential analysis, the present book places the concept of credential market at the centre of the analysis of high school certification, to outline the theoretical gains that can be made by expanding the range of economic metaphors used to understand the social value of credentials.

Credentialism as Generalised Credential Inflation When Collins’ account of the United States (US) as a ‘credential society’ was published in 1979, it made no doubt that this country was ‘the most credentialized society in the world’ (Collins, 2019). This very fact called for an explanation, one that Collins sought in the specificities of the US class and state structures. To him, the credential exceptionalism of the US owed much to its class, cultural and ethnic struggles, lack of regulation in establishing higher education institutions and overall federalism and administrative decentralisation. One of the most significant phenomena since the seminal diagnosis made by Collins in the late 1970s is that the credential society has become a global phenomenon (Baker, 2014), observable across continents and regions, and even more exacerbated today in some parts of the world (e.g. Japan) than in the US. This means that the form that the credential society has taken in the US may indeed have to do with the peculiarities of its state and class structures, but that the pervasiveness of educational credentialing more broadly cannot be explained solely by reference to US idiosyncrasies. There are more general or common logics behind this

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phenomenon, even if these are made indigenous to different countries through specific class and state configurations. The massification of secondary schooling and generalisation of tertiary education in the second half of the twentieth century have led to a significant growth in the supply of credentials in affluent countries. In most cases, this development has engendered a devaluation of academic titles, materialised by the inflation in the ‘cultural price’ (i.e. degree requirements) of some jobs. This phenomenon has been termed ‘credentialism’, understood as an increase in the level of credential required to access a given segment of the labour market (Collins, 2019; Marginson, 1997a). If the extent to which countries have experienced credential inflation varies (Van de Werfhorst, 2009), and if it can manifest itself differently across societies (Kariya, 2011), credential inflation has been a general phenomenon in mass education systems (Collins, 2019; Duru-Bellat, 2006). This trend was already evident in the 1960s. For instance, Bourdieu and Passeron (1979) noted that the increased completion of secondary education in France was diminishing the social value of senior secondary certificates. The emergence of the ‘vocational baccalaureate’ in 1985 increased the percentage of a cohort reaching the end of secondary school while simultaneously leading to a higher proportion of manual workers employed with senior secondary credentials instead of junior secondary apprenticeships (Eckert, 1999). In Australia, school graduates at the turn of the century were frequently more qualified than previous generations had been for comparable jobs obtained after completing secondary school (Teese & Polesel, 2003). Taking the phenomenon of credential inflation into account is essential to any attempt to grasp the social making of credential value, including in the case of high school certificates such as the IB Diploma. As the metaphor of inflation suggests, credential theorists have argued that the nominal value of a given credential has undergone depreciation as the volume of supply of credentials has grown (Marginson, 1997b; Passeron, 1982; Hirsch, 2005; Brown & Hesketh, 2004; Brown & Duru-­ Bellat, 2010). But if this is true, how can a new high school diploma come to acquire value in a mass high school certification market? The concept of credentialism (or credential inflation) has received critical treatment. Passeron (1982) contends that the ‘credential inflation’ metaphor has its limits, including because credentials are not identical to money in all respects, but that using the concept is valuable so long as one reflects on its inadequacies as much as its relevance. This is an issue I address more fully in the final chapter of the book. Here, I would like to argue that the idea of credentialism is important because it points researchers toward the question of change in credential value, which is central to any assessment of the power of credentials in the twenty-first century. The IB Diploma, a private high school certificate that has gained academic value in an era of credential inflation, is a relevant case to demonstrate that the general assessment of credentialism needs qualification. At a general level, however, credential inflation in high school certification is the central credentialing context of the present study. Because credential inflation tends to be interpreted as devaluation, investigating how the value of a new credential is made in a mass credentialing market is likely to yield important theoretical gains. If

Value in Social Science

11

the major transformation of credential systems in recent decades has been marked by credentialism, how could the IB Diploma become highly valued as it entered already established certification markets? Lowe has put forward the hypothesis that international examinations and certificates may be analysed as part of a transformation of credential systems, bringing ‘a qualitatively new dimension to the issue of credentialism and credential inflation’ (Lowe, 2000). This intuition is at the core of the analysis developed in present book.

Credential Value Although the phenomenon of credential inflation has led to an overall devaluation of educational certificates relative to earlier periods, this does not mean that all credentials have lost their ability to be used as instruments of social power in contemporary societies. Some credentials still have a high value. Given the changing structure of credential markets under conditions of credential inflation, how do credentials retain, lose or acquire value? How valuable is the IB Diploma among high school credentials, and how did this private certificate come to acquire its value amid credential inflation? These questions are at the centre of the research presented in this book. They call for a brief overview of theoretical developments on the concept of credential value.

Value in Social Science In the Durkheimian tradition, the common denominator to value is that it is socially constituted, i.e. made and remade through collective life. Beyond this general contention, however, it is fair to expect a more precise answer to the question of what makes value. Where does value come from, and what are the specific social processes that sustain it? Various answers have been given to these questions. The most prominent one from neoclassic economics has called on the price mechanism and the utility of goods, while the Marxist labour theory of value, emphasising the socially necessary labour required to produce goods, has received just as much attention. Both have been criticised by Durkheim for failing to grasp the role of belief in the making of value. Durkheim was led to emphasise the centrality of collective valuation (‘appraisal’), hence of collective judgment, as the source of value: ‘value depends on opinion and is a matter of opinion’ (Durkheim, 2019). Refuting Marx’s labour theory of value for its essentialism, he argued that ‘it is not the amount of labour put into a thing which makes its value; it is the way in which the value of this thing is assessed by the society’ (Durkheim, 2019). Addressing both the utility and labour theories of value at once, Durkheim concluded that

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1  Introduction: Revisiting Credential Sociology things have no value in themselves. This is a truth which also applies in the economic sphere. The old theory of economics, according to which there were objective values inherent in things and independent of our minds, has no longer many defenders today. Values are the product of opinion; things have no value except in relation to states of mind. (Durkheim, 2010)

To Durkheim, the error of the two most prominent theories of value in economics, i.e. labour value and use value (Orléan, 2014), was that both tended to substantialise value and failed to effectively contextualise it within the social relationships that produce it, both objectively and symbolically. Against these prominent theories of value, contributions from sociology and anthropology have concluded that value is a social surplus created by society (Graeber, 2001). Mauss placed belief at the centre of value: just like Durkheim before him and Bourdieu after him, he saw no categorical theoretical distinction between economic value and other social forms of value such as religious value, moral value or magical value (Mauss, 2001). Both anthropology and sociology teach us that value does not reside in the substantial properties of objects or goods; it emerges from social arrangements and configurations. Value is bestowed onto an object from the outside. At the same time, Lordon notes that if values are social, it means that they are sustained or supported by institutions (Lordon, 2018). This invites us to probe at the collective configurations and the role of institutions in the making of credential value, including the value of a private credential such as the IB Diploma. If collective life is shaped by the institutions that organise social relationships, institutions are central to social value making. Studying credential value thus calls for examining these institutional arrangements.

Credential Value and Belief Bourdieu applied the Durkheimian theory of value to credentials, concluding that they ‘increase in a durable way the value of their bearer by increasing the extent and the intensity of the belief in their value’ (Bourdieu, 1991). For credentials and ‘symbolic goods’ more generally, ‘belief in value’ is foundational to actual value (Bourdieu, 1996a, 2015). This intuition has been integrated into credential research. An important insight from credential theory has been to highlight how belief in the value of credentials depends on the investment of social energy into convincing people to accept this claim: ‘the success of any particular credentialled group in carving out a monopoly depends on its success in propagating the claim that its credentials certify the presence of some skill’ (Murphy, 1988). This issue is particularly critical if one intends to explain how a new credential comes to be accepted and sought after, as is done with the IB Diploma in this book. If one takes the act of certification seriously in making the value of credentials, value can be defined as ‘a collective belief in the importance of “goods” (moral, cultural or material) or of “practices”’ (Lahire, 2019). Paying attention to the

From Value to Valuation

13

symbolic efficacy of the act of certification itself leads one to redefine an educational credential as ‘a public and official warranty, awarded by a collectively recognized authority, of a competence whose technical and social boundaries and proportions can never be disentangled or measured’ (Bourdieu, 1996b). This way of defining value allows us to focus not only on what credentials purport to certify, but on the act of certification itself and the means through which value judgments are carried. Indeed, credentialing and certification are far from self-evident objects from a theoretical point of view; Bourdieu qualifies these acts as ‘extremely mysterious’ and likens them to ‘magical acts’ of comparable status to amulets (Bourdieu, 1982, 2016). This contention invites us to look at how credentials acquire legitimacy, how an emergent credential comes to be considered as a legitimate qualification. Chapter 11 examines this process of primitive and ongoing accumulation of ‘symbolic capital’ (i.e. credit of recognition) in the IB Diploma. If value is social in origin, it remains that various regimes of value can coexist. Beckert analytically distinguishes physical (i.e. material utility), positional (i.e. social utility) and imaginative (i.e. symbolic utility) value as three regimes through which goods can acquire value (sometimes coexisting with respect to the same good) (Beckert, 2011). Physical value is based on the practical usefulness of a good; positional value refers to the status, prestige or power it gives its owner in social relationships; and imaginative value implies positive sentiments in one’s internal conversations. What distinguishes positional from imaginative value is that the former is public, i.e. collective, while the latter is self-referential. Given the importance of collective belief in the making of credential value, one can hypothesise that credential value is largely positional in origin. The question of positional value and its theorisation in the case of credentials is a key issue that I address in Chap. 13, bringing insights gained from the empirical analysis into conversation with existing credential theory.

From Value to Valuation Economic sociology offers useful tools for analysing valuation as a core process in the sociological theory of credential value. ‘Evaluation, valuation, and pricing’ are key issues in economic sociology (Beckert & Musselin, 2013). Valuation always relies on standards of value (Gregory, 2015) according to which worth is appraised. Both qualification and quantification are central to the establishment of standards of value and, as a result, to the valuation process. For instance, the qualification of goods has been found to be not only a mechanism for establishing social relations (often described as ‘coordination’) in a market situation, but also a fundamental means of constituting market value (Aspers & Beckert, 2011). At the same time, if the value of a given product is a competitive stake (for instance, if the value of a credential depends on the value of other credentials), valuation practices are a constitutive aspect of market competition. For ‘if value depends on

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1  Introduction: Revisiting Credential Sociology

the contingent assessment of product qualities, the classification of goods is part of a market struggle’ (Aspers & Beckert, 2011), and so is the quantification of their value. In the case of credentials, both qualification and quantification are important to value making. However, the relative role of these two valuation processes varies depending on the type of credential being considered. As will be shown throughout the analysis, in the case of high school certificates (and unlike higher education degrees), quantification is decisive to the making of credential value, including for the IB Diploma. This invites us to examine the processes through which credential value is quantified, a task I turn to in Chap. 10.

Credential Legitimacy and the State Institutions are the prime social mechanism of stabilisation of collective belief. Accordingly, being granted official recognition by a socially legitimate institution is a crucial resource to stabilise value. Bourdieu reached this conclusion when he explained that credential issuances are ‘acts of institutions’ performed by legitimate organisations with the authority to deliver such titles of credence (Bourdieu, 2015). In fact, Bourdieu argued that in the case of cultural goods whose value depends on legitimacy, the institutions of legitimation are an integral part of the productive apparatus. Bourdieu’s claim that fashion producers must produce products and the belief in the value of their products (Bourdieu & Delsaut, 1975), for example, is applicable to credentials. However, in the latter’s case, as we shall see, the institutions that technically produce credentials (e.g. the IB organisation in the case of the IB Diploma) may not be the same as those that underpin their value (e.g. tertiary admission boards and universities). Among the institutions capable of granting recognition to credentials, Bourdieu paid particular attention to the state and its associated institutions. Bourdieu’s work on the ‘artistic field’ allowed him to identify the institutions of consecration in stabilised cultural fields (Bourdieu, 2016, 2017b). He concluded that, in these environments, the ultimate guarantor and backer of value is the state. This is a crucial theoretical starting point and its pertinence about educational credentials outside of France will be tested. The need to pay attention to the state is a particularly useful antidote against the temptation to consider the value of private credentials such as the IB Diploma as a purely private matter, produced solely in the interplay between the resources, desires and interests of different (private) social agents.

The Value of Educational Credentials

15

The Value of Educational Credentials Drawing on the lessons from past research and theory on credentials and their value, how is the value of high school credentials made? Or, more specifically, in a space where various high school certificates coexist, what is the value of the IB Diploma relative to other certificates, and how is this value produced? Several authors have developed theories of value specifically for credentials. A noteworthy attempt to theorise the value of credentials has been put forward by Marginson (1997b). Marginson applied the conceptual pair of use value and exchange value borrowed from Marx to credentials. Eckert’s more recent attempt to tackle the question of credential value uses the same binary architecture (Eckert, 2011), as does Labaree’s earlier examination of credentialing theory (Labaree, 1995). However, this reliance on a Marxist theory of value is not the most relevant to think sociologically about credential value (nor about social value more broadly, for that matter (Orléan, 2014)). The concepts of exchange and use value do not apply very well to the social processes through which credentials can become profitable for their holders. Flipping the Marxist theory of value to focus on acquisition instead of production, Bourdieu contended that the value of a credential can be measured by the time needed to acquire it (Bourdieu, 2016). This may represent progress from the models discussed above, but it remains theoretically insufficient to grasp credential value, especially in a context of credential inflation. Indeed, while it may be generally true at a ‘macro’ level when comparing different levels of credentials (e.g. high school certificates versus university degrees), this theory is not empirically supported with regard to credentials in general. Neither has the actual duration of acquisition (i.e. the time invested by social agents to acquire credentials) been measured to support this hypothesis, nor do degrees that take longer to acquire necessarily have more value than shorter ones (Duru-Bellat, 2006). There is some truth in Bourdieu’s contention: paying attention to the ‘cost’ of acquiring a credential is important. But rather than focussing specifically on time expenditure, one should consider that the value of a credential depends on its price, i.e. what needs to be expended to acquire it. In the case of educational titles, this expenditure is a labour of acquisition of cultural competence, of which time is but one aspect. To ascertain the value of a credential, one thus needs to look at its conditions of access and the nature of its cultural and cognitive demands, as these determine the labour that needs to be expended in the acquisition process. I conduct a detailed and comparative analysis of the cultural and cognitive demands of the IB Diploma and an Australian high school certificate in Chap. 4.

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1  Introduction: Revisiting Credential Sociology

Credential Distribution and Structural Value Rather than focussing on the use/exchange value pair or on the time needed to acquire credentials to explain their value, in this book, I argue that it is the structure of credential distribution itself which is the source of their value. This is directly inspired from another aspect of Bourdieu’s work in which he claimed that, to grasp the value of a given credential, ‘what counts at each moment is the structure of the distribution of the different academic titles’ (Bourdieu, 1996b). As will be argued below, this is precisely why the concept of credential market is so useful. In the case of ‘symbolic goods’, i.e. goods whose value depends on collective recognition, what produces value is not a specific agent, a specific context or even a configuration of specific agents in specific contexts. For these objects, value is structural, i.e. generated through the rules that regulate their acquisition (Bourdieu & Delsaut, 1975). Saint-Martin (1971) argued that the value of credentials is always determined structurally, i.e. relative to the value of all other credentials appropriated by different social categories of acquirers. Applying this framework to the IB Diploma, its value cannot be analysed by reference to its students, schools, the IB organisation, or even the combination of these three categories of actors alone. It is the overall credential market, with its competitive mechanisms of credential distribution, that creates value. This calls for a meticulous description of the high school credential structures in which the IB Diploma is embedded, systematically using the comparative method. The IB Diploma cannot be effectively understood as a credential if it is studied on its own, i.e. outside of its broader credential context. A few credential researchers have applied this structural mode of analysis to understand the value of cultural certificates. In the United States, David Labaree’s research is one of the most systematic attempts to do so. Labaree conducted a detailed analysis of the value of the high school credential issued by Philadelphia’s Central High School in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He found that the value of Central’s credential was intimately tied to the school’s social recruitment and that its value fluctuated significantly throughout its history. As the occupational profitability of higher education credentials grew in the Pennsylvanian labour market, the value of high school credentials became increasingly indexed to their ability to secure access to higher education institutions. For our own purpose, however, one of the important theoretical insights of Labaree’s study was that the main driver of the fluctuation in credential value was the structure of the broader credential market in the city in general, and the degree of competition between credentials in particular (Labaree, 1988). If the emergence of the IB Diploma is considered as a transformation in high school credential markets, it is also worth noting how Labaree explained the change in credential value in light of transformations in schooling more generally. To him, credential market differentiation and stratification was the response mounted by socially dominant groups to the devaluation of the credentials that had previously functioned for them as titles of social distinction. He concluded that Central’s

Markets, Market Position and Market Power

17

success in ‘protecting its thoroughbred credentials from the mongrelizing effects of expanding enrollments’ was due to ‘a powerful and well-mobilized group of middle-­ class alumni and aspirants who sought to preserve a mechanism for obtaining an exclusive high school education when high school was becoming a universal experience’ (Labaree, 1988). As this book will make clear, a comparable search for credential distinction in a context of intensifying credential competition has been central to the history and value of the IB Diploma.

Credential Markets While credential theory has thoroughly questioned the nature of credential power, the structured nature of credential distributions is often under-theorised in the field (see Labaree’s work mentioned above for a rare counterexample). To address the question of credential distribution more systematically, I propose to call on the concept of credential market, albeit using a specific sociological definition, i.e. one developed in economic sociology. If the theoretical virtue of a concept is defined by the work of empirical description and/or measurement it enables (Passeron, 1982), then the concept of credential market has significant theoretical potential.

Markets, Market Position and Market Power Despite most educational sociologists’ distaste for ‘markets’ in education, the market terminology is a useful instrument for describing and understanding the social relationships that unite social agents and their respective and conflicting interests in specific social contexts. Of course, this does not mean that that this concept is universally applicable, nor that we must adopt a narrowly economistic definition of a market, nor that using the concept automatically implies moral endorsement of what is often described as the ‘marketisation’ of education. The analysis of markets has occupied a central place in economic sociology (Swedberg, 1987; Fligstein & Dauter, 2007), and it offers useful conceptual instruments for analysing cultural titles of property, i.e. credentials. Markets can be considered as specific social contexts in which competition is central to social action. Economic sociology conceptualises a market as a field of struggle between social agents (Garcia-Parpet, 2007; Aspers et  al., 2020), helping us focus on the conflictual dimension of inequality-making processes in education. The focus on the competitive nature of exchange of rights in the economic sociology of markets creates a connection with sociology’s broader interest in the role of social struggle and power in making social inequality. Following Fligstein (2001, 2005), the question of power is indeed central to the sociology of markets. For Bourdieu, a market is above all a structure of power in which action is shaped by power struggles (Bourdieu, 2017a). However, the specific forms of power vary from

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1  Introduction: Revisiting Credential Sociology

market to market. Accordingly, a central task of the present book is to determine the extent to which the prevailing form of power in the market for credentials, i.e. academic power, structures the distribution of credential value. The concept of market position is central to market analysis in economic sociology and one of the fundamental ways in which economic sociology departs conceptually from mainstream economics (Fourcade, 2007; Podolny, 1993; White, 1981a, b). An important aspect of Weberian social theory is that market position is defined by the ownership of ‘market-relevant assets’ (Breen, 2005). Following Weber, Bourdieu contended that to understand what people do in a market, one needs to understand their position in the power structure of this market (Bourdieu, 2017a). In line with Bourdieu’s theorisation of capital (Bourdieu, 1986, 2016), this can be operationalised as the position within the distribution of market efficient resources. In the case of credentials, the position of both schools (or credential ‘retailers’) and families (or credential ‘acquirers’) in their respective market structures should be understood in terms of assets and resources. This is what is done in Chap. 6 (for retailers) and 8 (for acquirers). There are commonalities between this sociological definition of the market as a structured space of positions and Bourdieu’s theory of field (Bourdieu, 1993). Bourdieu’s field theory is in fact considered by some economic sociologists as one of the useful analytical instruments to grasp the structure of markets (see Aspers et al. (2020), Fourcade (2007) and Swedberg (2005)). However, this literature has not often considered how analytically specific Bourdieu’s field theory is, when applied methodically (Lahire, 2015). Given the very specific conditions that need to be met for the Bourdieusian concept of field to be used meaningfully, in the case of many social arenas, market is probably a more suitable concept. Since credential arenas do not meet all criteria to qualify as fields (Bourdieu, 1993; Lahire, 2015), the concept of credential market appears more adequate. In economic sociology (including in Bourdieu’s own work), the concept of ‘market’ describes a structured space of power relations in which social agents or institutions struggle for the appropriation of scarce resources. In fact, although primarily known for his concept of field, and himself considering it his most original contribution to sociology (presenting field thinking as a ‘small revolution’), Bourdieu long hesitated between the concepts of ‘market’ and ‘field’ to describe social contexts of action as structured spaces in which interested social agents compete with one another for the appropriation of a particular category of goods (Bourdieu, 2017a). Often, Bourdieu defines markets and fields in the same way (Bourdieu, 1991). Compared to many other approaches in the sociology of markets that focus on producers alone, one of the benefits of Bourdieu’s theory is that it seeks to explain the matching of suppliers and consumers (Fourcade, 2007), a principle that will be applied systematically to the IB Diploma in Australia.

Credential Markets

19

Credential Markets The concept of credential market can easily be misunderstood, especially given the negative connotation associated with the ‘market’ in the sociology of education (Gewirtz et al., 1995; Ball, 2003; Connell, 2013b) and among researchers interested in neoliberalism in particular (Connell, 2013a, 2015). To prevent misreadings, my use of the term ‘market’ must be assessed for its analytical worth rather than based on the sentiments the term may evoke among readers. Understood sociologically, the market for credentials has a far longer history than neoliberal educational policies and it would be a mistake to equate the former with the latter. In countries such as the United States, England or Australia, a positional competition for selective university entrance existed before the so-called ‘market reforms’ of the 1980s. Neoliberal reforms may have exacerbated social inequalities in credential acquisition; they may have altered the cultural price of credentials, and they may have narrowed the definition of recognised cultural competence; but they have not created the market for credentials. This market existed before—and will likely also exist after—the neoliberal phase of capitalism. If markets can be understood as structured spaces in which social relations are organised around competitive distribution and/or appropriation, and if market position is defined by the possession of market-relevant resources, it is possible to describe in general terms the structure of credential markets. Credential markets bring together a hierarchised space of retailers and a hierarchised space of acquirers who compete according to cultural rules of credential distribution for the appropriation of resources relevant to credential acquisition. The position of different schools and students in these two hierarchised spaces varies, and it is based on these positions that the value of a given credential is made. In the schooling years, the senior high school level is the one most clearly dominated by credentials. At this stage, credential markets are often nationally unified, with one or two categories of certificates available (typically a single state-­issued high school certificate or a combination of academic and vocational certificates). However, alternative credentials have appeared in some countries, leading to a diversification of the market in school leaving certificates. This is the case of Australia, where the IB Diploma has gained recognition and become used as an alternative high school certificate in all eight states and territories. This market situation, characterised by a shift from a situation of state monopoly or duopoly to a diversification of school leaving certificates, provides sociologists of education with a unique opportunity to examine the mechanisms by which specific credentials come to acquire a given value in a market where other credentials are available. Since the arrival of a private credential such as the IB Diploma creates or extends competition between credential issuers, the market concept is highly relevant to make sense of this situation of credential competition. The concept of credential market is also valuable to nuance the macro-level observation of educational credentialism by providing analytical tools to focus on localised and micro-level changes in credential value. Thanks to the notions of

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1  Introduction: Revisiting Credential Sociology

market region (and segment) and market stratification, it is possible to theorise the fact that credential inflation does not affect all credentials equally. Some credentials may undergo depreciation while others may become increasingly socially profitable, even within the sub-category of high school certificates. In fact, the case of the IB Diploma clearly exemplifies how new credentials can emerge and become highly valued in an already mass market. One of the central arguments of this book is that in mass credential markets where different certificates coexist, one of the mechanisms of value-making—especially the highest and most distinctive value—is horizontal stratification between formally comparable credentials.

Credential Market Position as Academic Power The provisional definition of credential market outlined above suggests that we need to capture the ‘morphology of the market’ (Bourdieu & Boltanski, 1978) for credentials to understand the value of any certificate within it. This is best done by examining the market position of credential retailers and acquirers within the hierarchical space of schools and students. Since the definition of market position refers to control or possession of market efficient resources, in the case of educational credentials, it is academic power, understood as cultural mastery recognised through curriculum and assessment systems, that operates as the dominant form of market power, for both schools and students. If the relative positions of both schools and students in the credential market are organised as hierarchical distributions, these hierarchies are ladders of educational competence dominated by specific forms of academic ability. I explore the social definition of academic competence in detail in Chap. 4.

Credential Theory and the IB Diploma This overview of landmarks in credential theory, developments in the sociology of credential value and the concept of credential market brings us to a summary of the research programme that provides the narrative arc for the chapters that follow. The analysis developed in the book weaves three strands together: a theoretical interest in credentials, the analytical instruments of economic sociology, and a focus on the IB Diploma as the empirical object of analysis. This architecture allows for original insights into both the IB Diploma as a specific certificate and educational credentialing more generally or, more accurately, a better understanding of the general nature of credentials through the specifics of the IB Diploma. It is hoped that the book will be of interest to sociologists of education in general, and credential sociologists and IB researchers in particular. Its relevance to an international audience includes not only the three chapters where the position of the IB Diploma in different high school certification markets is analysed, nor is it

Method and Data

21

restricted to the theoretical developments in credential theory I propose in Chap. 13. In addition to these, its significance resides in the use of an original method of investigation that can be transposed to other systems. The systematic analysis of credentialing structures—rather than of the IB Diploma as a specific credential— would gain from being transposed, adapted and applied internationally. Bringing together credential theory and the IB Diploma, the book attempts to make both substantive and theoretical contributions. Substantively, the book provides the most detailed analysis of the relationship between the IB Diploma, academic power and social inequality in Australian education to date. It also offers a new theory to explain how the IB Diploma became successfully established as a high school certificate internationally. Theoretically, the conceptual apparatus grounding the analysis brings together the insight from economic sociology and the sociological theory of credentials. To my knowledge, no comprehensive analysis of credential markets to date fully harnesses the value of the theoretical instruments of economic sociology, especially the concept of market.

Method and Data Operationalising the theoretical questions raised so far about credential value in a context of credential inflation into a methodological protocol is a complex task. The issue is compounded by the empirical focus on the IB Diploma, on which data is not as readily available as for other credentials. I have chosen to use the example of the IB Diploma in Australia as a case study to answer these questions, albeit contextualised within the global presence of IB Diploma certification. To answer the theoretical questions raised in this introduction, I have used the best data available where it existed and collected new data where required. The analysis thus draws on a wide range of sources, from both existing databases and new ones constructed specifically for the project. A detailed list of the sources of data used in the analysis is included in Appendix 1. Given the relational definition of credential market I propose, the comparative method is the main approach used to make sense of the value of high school certificates. International comparisons of the position of the IB Diploma in different certification markets, which I develop most comprehensively in Chaps. 2 and 3, are used to grasp the specificities of the value of the IB Diploma in Australia. The thrust of most of the analysis is to compare groups of students and schools involved with different credentials (or ‘regions’ of the credential market). This means comparing schools retailing the IB Diploma to those only offering the state high school certificates; comparing the profile of senior secondary students preparing to acquire different credentials, both within and across schools; and comparing the post-­ secondary destinations and trajectories of these categories of students. Since the analysis mainly draws on descriptive statistical results, it should be accessible to most sociologists and educational researchers.

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1  Introduction: Revisiting Credential Sociology

Of course, this approach has its limitations, both in terms of what can be done with individual data sources and in combining them. In addition to the lack of information on several attributes of students and schools occupying different positions in the credential market, various technical issues had to be resolved in working with the data (e.g. the identification of IB Diploma students is not always constructed in the same way across data sources; data is sometimes available only for some schools or students; sample sizes can be too small to conduct meaningful analysis; and available data can be more or less dated or stretching over several years). A more detailed discussion of the limitations of the data used in this book is provided in Appendix 1. Despite these caveats, the combination of sources remains the most effective approach to answer the questions set out in this introduction, however tentatively.

The Argument Summarised In the next chapter, I propose a critical treatment of the dominant use of globalisation theory to analyse the IB Diploma internationally. I argue that this theory is not very successful at explaining the distribution and take up of the IB Diploma across the globe. I contend that the focus on the credential status of the IB Diploma is more pertinent to explain where the IB Diploma is commonly found and where it is not, as well as the types of schools and students that get involved in the IB Diploma. I conclude the chapter by arguing that to understand the logic of IB Diploma retailing and acquisition, one cannot study it as a stand-alone object. Instead, one needs to contextualise it within high school credential markets and, in particular, to consider the struggles for academic distinction that animate them. These markets are largely nationally (rather than globally) structured. The third chapter reviews existing research on the IB Diploma in different regions to illustrate the necessity of credential-focussed and country-specific analyses. Its geographical coverage spans the countries with the highest levels of engagement with the IB Diploma, including those found in North and South America, Europe and Asia. I find that the place and role of the IB Diploma in high school certification vary significantly from society to society. At the same time, the use of the IB Diploma as an instrument of academic distinction in competitive high school credential markets characterised by credential inflation, as well as its attendant middle- and upper-class social recruitment, are internationally consistent. This finding is used to investigate the relationship between the IB Diploma and credentialism in Australia in the subsequent chapters. In Chap. 4, I propose a systematic comparison of the IB Diploma and the main state high school certificate in an Australian jurisdiction to identify the nature of recognised academic competence in the credential market. I show that the structures of the two high school certificates are not identical, even when both coexist within the same credential market and can be used to gain access to the same post-school opportunities. Based on an analysis of their respective curriculum, assessment and

The Argument Summarised

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awarding conditions, as well as using teacher and student surveys, the chapter finds that the IB Diploma is perceived as more demanding than the state high school certificate. I argue that this hierarchical ordering of competing credentials is likely to produce an academically and socially differentiated market position for the IB Diploma and the certificates with which it coexists, engendering a form of market stratification and inequality in credential value. Chapter 5 canvasses the insertion of the IB Diploma in the Australian school system. Identifying private schooling as an important mechanism of socio-academic distinction in Australia, I discuss the importance of the distribution of private credential retailing across schools in a system where segregated schooling is the norm in urban contexts. The chapter reveals that, although the IB Diploma remains a niche segment in the country, this private certificate is concentrated in the private schools of Australia’s major cities, thus operating as a restricted and exclusive region within the broader high school certification market. Building on the finding that the IB Diploma is concentrated in a narrow range of schools, Chap. 6 examines the place of the IB Diploma in the collective production of academic advantage in Australia. I expose the high concentration of resources in schools offering the IB Diploma and their elitist socio-academic recruitment, highlighting how the former can be used to foster the accumulation of academic capital among IB students. The IB Diploma is thereby found to occupy a place at the apex of the socio-academic hierarchy of the school system. In Chap. 7, I turn to families investing in different segments of the high school credential market and seek to explain the observed pattern of family engagement in the IB Diploma in Australia. I reveal that the IB Diploma is primarily used by girls and students born in Australia, problematising some elements of analyses seeking to make sense of the IB Diploma through global class formation theory. Against this unsuccessful approach, I propose an explanation of these findings that draws on the credential status of the IB Diploma. Broadening the chapter’s focus, I offer a new analysis of the reasons provided by students for choosing this alternative certificate that confirms the central role of academic distinction to make sense of patterns of investment in different regions of the credential market. Chapter 8 seeks to delineate the socio-academic structure of the Australian credential market. Building on the identification of various forces pushing toward market segmentation, I explore the social and academic distribution of families across different regions of the credentialing system. The chapter uncovers the appropriation of private credentialing by high-achieving and middle- and upper-­class students. The most distinctive social property of families investing in the IB Diploma is their high level of cultural capital, even more than their high level of economic resources. The chapter demonstrates that, to the concentration of IB Diploma retailing in schools serving socially advantaged families revealed in Chap. 6, is added a further layer of within-school socio-academic stratification. This indicates that school- and credential-level exclusion practices can jointly contribute to the production of social inequality within a given education system, especially in mass credential markets.

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1  Introduction: Revisiting Credential Sociology

In Chap. 9, I assess the extent to which IB Diploma students consolidate their academic capital through this private certificate. The analysis shows that, notwithstanding the declared difficulty in mastering the IB Diploma curriculum, the majority of IB Diploma students are highly successful at achieving distinctive academic results. This places them in a strong position in the university selection process. The chapter then demonstrates that IB Diploma students, most of whom are from middle- and upper-class families, seek access to the most academically selective universities and courses, more than other credential graduates do, including those graduating from the same schools. Further, despite their more elite aspirations, IB Diploma graduates’ rate of success in seeing their aspirations fulfilled (i.e. gaining access to highly selective higher education spaces) exceeds that of other certificate holders. These findings indicate that the IB Diploma is a high value certificate occupying a dominant position in the Australian high school credential market, acting as a conduit of academic power. The analysis provides strong evidence of the role of the IB Diploma in credential-based socio-educational inequality. Chapter 10 explores the institutional infrastructure that enables the IB Diploma to be used as an instrument of consolidation of academic capital. It highlights the importance of valuation processes, especially the quantification of IB Diploma value through its direct conversion into tertiary admission scores. The chapter reveals the assumptions, value statements and social logics that underpin this process of quantification. I discuss the role of private and public institutions in stabilising this IB Diploma value, as well as the value predictability that this institutional architecture produces. I conclude the chapter by illustrating how the relative value of different credentials is a stake in social struggles where the interests of different social groups are in contention. In Chap. 11, I reconstruct the historical trajectory of the IB Diploma internationally since its inception in the 1960s. I show the importance of the labour of accumulation of symbolic capital that was needed for the IB Diploma to become established internationally and explain this success by the social power of its architects, promoters and early users. The chapter then offers a critical appraisal of the dominant argument that this certificate emerged and grew as a response to the needs of internationally mobile families. Instead, I argue that the IB Diploma has, since the beginning, been caught in the logic of academic competition and the search for instruments of academic distinction by socially dominant families in massifying credential markets. The critical context here is the massification of high school completion and its attendant high school credential inflation. In Chap. 12, I test, in the Australian case, the analytical pertinence of the theoretical argument constructed in Chap. 11. The chapter traces the structural transformation of the high school credential market from an elite to a mass system in the second half of the twentieth century. I reveal that the diffusion of the IB Diploma in this space followed the largest expansion of high school certification in Australian history, lending credit to the argument that the IB Diploma has operated from the start as an instrument of academic distinction in the face of intensifying credential competition. The chapter concludes by arguing that educational policy interventions in recent decades have exacerbated the stratification of the school system, resulting

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in the stabilisation of the IB Diploma as an elite segment in the broader credential market. Chapter 13 builds on the lessons learned in the different chapters to contribute to credential theory. It offers general propositions about the nature of credential markets and seeks to grasp more firmly the forces that produce change in such markets. I emphasise the role of morphological factors and the unequal distribution of resources in explaining market transformation. I then discuss the value of the ‘positional’ concept to analyse credential distributions and attempt to discuss the specificities of credentials as a type of cultural goods. In the last section, the chapter returns to the question of the relationship between credentials and the social order, the question that has animated credential sociologists ever since Weber.

References Araki, S. (2020). Educational expansion, skills diffusion, and the economic value of credentials and skills. American Sociological Review, 85(1), 128–175. https://doi. org/10.1177/0003122419897873 Aspers, P., & Beckert, J. (2011). Value in markets. In J. Beckert & P. Aspers (Eds.), The worth of goods: Valuation and pricing in the economy (pp. 3–38). Oxford University Press. Aspers, P., Bengtsson, P., & Dobeson, A. (2020). Market fashioning. Theory and Society, 49(3), 417–438. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-­020-­09379-­0 Baker, D.  P. (2014). The schooled society: The educational transformation of global culture. Stanford University Press. Ball, S. J. (2003). Class strategies and the education market: The middle classes and social advantage. RoutledgeFalmer. Beckert, J. (2011). The transcending power of goods: Imaginative value in the economy. In J.  Beckert & P.  Aspers (Eds.), The worth of goods: Valuation and pricing in the economy (pp. 106–128). Oxford University Press. Beckert, J., & Musselin, C. (2013). Introduction. In J. Beckert & C. Musselin (Eds.), Constructing quality: The classification of goods in markets (pp. 1–28). Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1979). Les Trois États du Capital Culturel. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 30(1), 3–6. Bourdieu, P. (1982). Les Rites Comme Actes d’Institution. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 43(1), 58–63. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital (R. Nice, Trans.). In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (G.  Raymond, & M.  Adamson, Trans.). Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). Sociology in question (R. Nice, Trans.). Sage Publications. Bourdieu, P. (1996a). The rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary field (S.  Emanuel, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996b). The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power (L. C. Clough, Trans.). Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason: On the theory of action. Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2010). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste (R.  Nice, Trans.). Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (2013). Séminaires sur le Concept de Champ, 1972-1975: Introduction de Patrick Champagne. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 200(5), 4–37.

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Bourdieu, P. (2015). Sociologie Générale, Volume 1: Cours au Collège de France (1981–1983). Raisons d’Agir/Seuil. Bourdieu, P. (2016). Sociologie Générale, Volume 2: Cours au Collège de France (1983–1986). Raisons d’Agir/Seuil. Bourdieu, P. (2017a). Anthropologie Économique: Cours au Collège de Fance (1992–1993). Raisons d’Agir/Seuil. Bourdieu, P. (2017b). Manet: A Symbolic Revolution. Lectures at the Collège de France (1998–2000). Polity Press. Bourdieu, P., & Boltanski, L. (1978). Changes in social structure and changes in the demand for education. In S. Giner & M. S. Archer (Eds.), Contemporary Europe: Social structures and cultural patterns (pp. 197–227). Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P., & Delsaut, Y. (1975). Le couturier et sa griffe: contribution à une théorie de la magie. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1(1), 7–36. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1979). The inheritors: French students and their relation to culture (R. Nice, Trans.). The University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture (R. Nice, Trans., 2nd ed.). Sage Publications. Breen, R. (2005). Foundations of a Neo-Weberian class analysis. In E. O. Wright (Ed.), Approaches to class analysis (pp. 31–50). Cambridge University Press. Brown, D. K. (1995). Degrees of control: A sociology of educational expansion and occupational credentialism. Teachers College Press. Brown, P. (2003). The opportunity trap: Education and employment in a global economy. European Educational Research Journal, 2(1), 141–179. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2003.2.1.4 Brown, P., & Duru-Bellat, M. (2010). La méritocratie scolaire. Un modèle de justice à l’épreuve du marché. Sociologie, 1(1), 161–175. https://doi.org/10.3917/socio.001.0161 Brown, P., & Hesketh, A. (2004). The mismanagement of talent: Employability and jobs in the knowledge economy. Oxford University Press. Brown, P., Lauder, H., & Ashton, D. (2010). The global auction: The broken promises of education, jobs and incomes. Oxford University Press. Brown, P., Power, S., Tholen, G., & Allouch, A. (2016). Credentials, talent and cultural capital: A comparative study of educational elites in England and France. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37(2), 191–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2014.920247 Bunnell, T. (2011). The international baccalaureate and ‘growth scepticism’: A ‘social limits’ framework. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 21(2), 161–176. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/09620214.2011.575103 Collins, R. (2019). The credential society: An historical sociology of education and stratification. Columbia University Press. Connell, R. (2013a). The neoliberal cascade and education: An essay on the market agenda and its consequences. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2), 99–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750848 7.2013.776990 Connell, R. (2013b). Why do market ‘reforms’ persistently increase inequality? Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(2), 279–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/0159630 6.2013.770253 Connell, R. (2015). Markets all around: Defending education in a neoliberal time. In H. Proctor, P. Brownlee, & P. Freebody (Eds.), Controversies in education: Orthodoxy and heresy in policy and practice (pp. 181–197). Springer. de Saint-Martin, M. (1971). Les Fonctions Sociales de l’Enseignement Scientifique. Cahiers du Centre de Sociologie Européenne, EPHE et Mouton. Dubet, F., Duru-Bellat, M., & Vérétout, A. (2010). Les sociétés et leur école: Emprise du diplôme et cohésion sociale. Seuil. Durkheim, É. (2010). Sociology and philosophy (D. F. Pocock, Trans.). Routledge. Durkheim, É. (2019). Professional ethics and civic morals (C. Brookfield, Trans.). Routledge. Duru-Bellat, M. (2006). L’Inflation Scolaire: Les Désillusions de la Méritocratie. Seuil.

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Duru-Bellat, M., & Tenret, É. (2009). L’emprise de la méritocratie scolaire: quelle légitimité ? Revue Française de Sociologie, 50(2), 229–258. https://doi.org/10.3917/rfs.502.0229 Duru-Bellat, M., & Tenret, E. (2012). Who’s for meritocracy? Individual and contextual variations in the faith. Comparative Education Review, 56(2), 223–247. https://doi.org/10.1086/661290 Eckert, H. (1999). L’Émergence d’un Ouvrier Bachelier: Les «Bac Pro» Entre Déclassement et Recomposition de la Catégorie des Ouvriers Qualifiés. Revue Française de Sociologie, 40(2), 227–253. https://doi.org/10.2307/3322765 Eckert, H. (2011). Les Diplômes et leur Valeur. In M. Millet & G. Moreau (Eds.), La Société des Diplômes (pp. 51–66). La Dispute. Fligstein, N. (2001). The architecture of markets: An economic sociology of twenty-first-century capitalist societies. Princeton University Press. Fligstein, N. (2005). The political and economic sociology of international economic arrangements. In N. J. Smelser & R. Swedberg (Eds.), The handbook of economic sociology (2nd ed., pp. 183–204). Princeton University Press and Russell Sage Foundation. Fligstein, N., & Dauter, L. (2007). The sociology of markets. Annual Review of Sociology, 33(1), 105–128. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.33.040406.131736 Fourcade, M. (2007). Theories of markets and theories of society. American Behavioral Scientist, 50(8), 1015–1034. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764207299351 Garcia-Parpet, M.-F. (2007). The social construction of a perfect market: The strawberry auction at Fontaines-en-Sologne (J. Law, & F. Muniesa, trans.). In D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, & L. Siu (Eds.), Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics. Princeton University Press. Gewirtz, S., Ball, S.  J., & Bowe, R. (1995). Markets, choice and equity in education. Open University Press. Graeber, D. (2001). Toward an anthropological theory of value: The false coins of our own dreams. Palgrave. Green, A. (2013). Education and state formation: Europe, East Asia and the USA (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. Gregory, C. A. (2015). Gifts and commodities (2nd ed.). Hau Books. Hannan, B. (1985). Democratic curriculum: Essays on schooling and society. Allen and Unwin. Hirsch, F. (2005). Social limits to growth (2nd ed.). Taylor & Francis e-Library. Hurn, C. J. (1993). The limits and possibilities of schooling: An introduction to the sociology of education (3rd ed.). Allyn and Bacom. Ishida, H., Spilerman, S., & Su, K.-H. (1997). Educational credentials and promotion chances in Japanese and American Organizations. American Sociological Review, 62(6), 866–882. https:// doi.org/10.2307/2657344 Johnson, D. A. (2018). Diploma mill: The rise and fall of Dr. John Buchanan and the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania. The Kent State University Press. Kariya, T. (2011). Credential inflation and employment in ‘universal’ higher education: Enrolment, expansion and (in)equity via privatisation in Japan. Journal of Education and Work, 24(1–2), 69–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2010.534444 Labaree, D. F. (1988). The making of an American high school: The credentials market and the central high School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939. Yale University Press. Labaree, D. F. (1995). Foreword. In D. K. Brown (Ed.), Degrees of control: A sociology of educational expansion and occupational credentialism (pp. ix–xvi). Teachers College Press. Lahire, B. (2015). The limit of the field: Elements for a theory of the social differentiation of activities. In M. Hilgers & E. Mangez (Eds.), Bourdieu’s theory of social fields: Concepts and applications (pp. 62–101). Routledge. Lahire, B. (2019). This is not just a painting: An inquiry into art, domination, magic and the sacred (H. Morrison, Trans.). Polity Press. Lordon, F. (2018). La Condition Anarchique. Seuil. Lowe, J. (2000). International examinations: The new credentialism and reproduction of advantage in a globalising world. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 7(3), 363–377. https://doi.org/10.1080/09695940050201352

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Chapter 2

The IB Diploma from Globalisation to Credential Theory

Abstract  After critically reviewing established theories used to explain the emergence and expansion of the IB Diploma internationally, this chapter proposes an alternative theory promising to be more successful at accounting for the observable pattern of worldwide IB Diploma diffusion. The main contention of this interpretive model is that the IB Diploma needs to be understood as a credential (rather than solely as a curriculum) and its diffusion contextualised within the specific educational and social structures of each country in which it is found. Following an analysis of the global distribution of IB Diploma schools and students, I review the most ambitious attempt to characterise the international distribution of the IB Diploma to date, highlighting its strengths and limitations. I then exemplify how contextualising the IB Diploma within national education system structures can be carried out in practice. This provides the foundation for the international overview of the relationship between the IB Diploma and academic distinction in the next chapter. Keywords  Globalisation · Credential · Academic competition · Gender · Private schools · International mobility

A Global Imaginary When researching the IB Diploma, one is confronted with thick layers of discourse about an internationally portable high school credential used by students to travel the globe. This is, after all, the official rhetoric of the IB organisation, which marketises the IB Diploma as an ‘international qualification’ (International Baccalaureate, 2014a) that has ‘gained recognition and respect from the world’s leading universities’ (International Baccalaureate, 2014c). In Australia and England, the fact that the IB Diploma enables global mobility is a prominent way in which schools use the IB Diploma in their marketing practices (Maire, 2015; Resnik, 2009). This ‘globalisation’ perspective is also the main theoretical lens researchers bring to the study of the IB Diploma, analysing its link with concepts such as the global elite (Kenway & Fahey, 2014, 2015; Bunnell, 2011), the global middle class (Ball & Nikita, 2014; Wright & Lee, 2019), global or world citizenship © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Q. Maire, Credential Market, International Study of City Youth Education 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80169-4_2

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(Brunold-­Conesa, 2010; Hill, 2002; Doherty, 2018), ‘educational globalisation’ and the denationalisation of education (Resnik, 2012), international education (Hill, 2002, 2007), international schools (Bunnell, 2014; Bunnell et al., 2017), the acquisition of ‘global cultural capital’ (Bagnall, 2010) or ‘cosmopolitan capital’ (Weenink, 2008, 2009, 2012) and notions of globalisation more broadly (as developed by Sassen, 2001, 2007; Sklair, 2001). Emerging and established middle- or upper-classes around the world, the story goes, have enlarged their perspectives on the social world, considering higher education and labour markets worldwide as a field of opportunities for their life trajectories (Lowe, 1999, 2000). One example of this form of theorising can be taken from a recent international research project conducted in seven countries. Kenway et  al. (2017) engaged in ethnographic research in seven ‘elite’ schools across seven countries formerly ruled by Britain (Australia, Barbados, England, Hong Kong, India, Singapore and South Africa) to investigate how these schools were ‘caught up in the changing social conditions of globalization’. The availability of the IB Diploma or comparable programmes (e.g. the Cambridge International General Certificate of Education) was a common feature across several of these schools. At first glance, this may seem to vindicate the globalisation-driven explanation of the IB Diploma. But a more careful examination of the place and role of the IB Diploma in different contexts raises difficult questions about this theory’s relevance. It is unclear whether systematic criteria (i.e. presence of foreign-born students, availability of the IB Diploma or related programmes etc.) were used to select these schools—or countries, for that matter—or whether the presence of the IB Diploma was a by-product of other sampling criteria. This makes it difficult to ascertain the relationship between the IB Diploma and various socio-educational contexts, including local and national ones. In an earlier article based on the same project, Kenway and Koh (2015) broadly identified elite schools as those being ‘highly selective, financially and/or academically’. In a separate article, Kenway and Fahey (2014) had categorised elite schools as those of ‘British public school’ model inspiration that ‘are over 100 years old, have produced many influential people and have powerful connections, their records illustrate considerable success in end-of-school exams and entrance to high-status universities and, overall, they have excellent reputations’. However, what the availability (or not) of the IB Diploma may owe to these schools’ status as former British colonial schools or to their ‘elite’ position within their local and national contexts rather than to ‘globalisation’ is seldom considered. Moreover, the extent to which the availability of the IB Diploma is a common feature of such ‘elite’ schools worldwide is not addressed directly in the analysis. At times, it appears as if the authors consider the availability of the IB Diploma in itself as an indicator of the effect of ‘globalisation’ on these schools. The IB Diploma is described as ‘the archetypal global curriculum’ (Kenway & Fahey, 2014). But this fails to disentangle the actual social uses of the IB Diploma from the ‘global’ rhetoric surrounding this certificate. The authors argue that because the IB Diploma and assimilated ‘international’ credentials are believed—by schools and families—to enable more global social futures, ‘the curriculum at these schools

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contributes to the formation of a transnational class of elites who have extensive global connections and aspirations’ (Kenway et al., 2017). But global imaginaries are not the same as a ‘transnational elite class’ formation, and little evidence of the prevalence of this ‘global’ class formation process through the IB Diploma is provided. In fact, the authors’ very analysis renders this assumption problematic. They show a highly differentiated picture of the place and status of the IB Diploma in the sampled schools and an ambiguous connection between the IB Diploma and ‘forces of globalisation’. In the South African school, the IB Diploma and assimilated programmes were neither offered nor considered. In the Australian school, within-­school competition between the local high school certificate and the IB Diploma was more prominent than IB Diploma-enabled international mobility. In the Indian school, the main driver of IB Diploma offering in the studied school was competition with other Indian elite private schools offering the IB Diploma—i.e., a domestic market concern. The English school was perhaps the clearest case of a school in which the IB Diploma seemed to be an element embedded in a circuit of international mobility, the circuit assumed to exist by ‘global middle class’ and ‘transnational capitalist class’ theories. However, it is unclear whether this school’s significant recruitment of international students was typical of other English elite private schools or not. Taken together, the various strands of this critical overview suggest that ‘globalisation’ may not be the most useful way of understanding the use of the IB Diploma in the sampled ‘elite’ schools, let alone in high schools more generally. As I hope to show here and in the next chapter, the asserted relationship between transnational elite class formation and the IB Diploma is empirically fragile. In part, and as commonly encountered in research on the ‘elite’, this has to do with the disembedding of ‘elite’ social groups from the social relations in which their social position and power is constituted. The non-elite are largely absent from these analyses, and class practices are seldom re-situated within broader class structure and class relations. For instance, in the research reviewed above, the contextualisation of ‘elite’ family educational strategies in a struggle for educational advantage against other classes is underdeveloped. As the present book aims to show, conducting such an analysis is crucial to make sense of the IB Diploma in any context.

Shortfalls of Assumed Global Class Formation The theoretical lens of ‘global’ class formation applied to the IB Diploma has three major limitations. First, it is theoretically ill-equipped to explain the emergence and diffusion of the IB Diploma, especially regarding its uneven take up in different countries. The appeal to the global ruling or middle classes’ supposed appetite for globally portable credentials cannot explain why there are 79 IB Diploma schools in Germany but

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only 19 in France. It cannot explain why Ecuador has more IB Diploma schools than the Netherlands, the Philippines, France, Jordan, Finland, Pakistan, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Greece, Qatar, Austria, Lebanon, New Zealand, Vietnam, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Portugal and Venezuela combined. If these class formations were truly global, they should be observable in all countries and should thus lead to the success of the IB Diploma everywhere. But this is not what one observes. As this chapter shows, the global distribution of the IB Diploma displays clear patterns that can only be understood by studying each national school certification system in depth. Nor can it explain the temporality of the emergence, growth and, in some cases, decline of the IB Diploma in different countries. Is globalisation the most relevant theory to explain the fact that the IB Diploma emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Were Canada, the United States and Spain the three countries most exposed to globalisation by the mid-1980s, when they had the highest number of IB schools in the world? Did England become less subject to the ‘forces of globalisation’ in the early 2010s when its IB Diploma school population shrunk by 40% in the space of a few years? The global class formation lens is largely unhelpful to explain why the IB market developed where it did, when it did, and the way it did. From the point of view of sociological research, the nominal ‘internationalism’ of the IB must not be taken for granted; it must be questioned. It is not the case that because the term ‘IB Diploma’ refers to the same programme in different education systems, the IB Diploma responds to the same socio-educational logics across societies. Bourdieu noted that social scientists often commit the mistake of believing that ‘the constancy of names guarantees the constancy of things’ (Bourdieu, 2016). The common labelling of the IB Diploma across national borders does not do away with the theoretical difficulties associated with comparing—let alone generalising across—education systems (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1967; Bereday, 1964). Yet, this appears to be a common conceptual problem in research on the IB Diploma. One thus needs to dig much deeper into the structure of each education system and how this credential fits within different high school credential markets. For the above reasons, the global status of the IB Diploma must be understood much more in terms of the IB organisation and IB schools’ self-promotion, branding and status-seeking practices in market contexts rather than in terms of a generalised flow of students from countries where the IB Diploma is offered to other countries that recognise its validity for higher education admission. And as such, the IB Diploma must be brought back within the specific local, state and national credential markets it is part of, before being contextualised within the global—or more accurately international—credential market. Accordingly, one needs to pay much greater attention to nation-states’ certification systems to understand the IB Diploma in its varied contexts of existence. Relatedly, one also needs to pay more attention to specifically national and regional histories, of both education systems and class structures. The epistemological ‘errors’ described above are likely to have theoretical origins that bring us to the next major issue with existing theorisation of the IB Diploma.

Shortfalls of Assumed Global Class Formation

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From the point of view of the sociology of education, the second major issue in existing research on the IB Diploma, except for a few notable exceptions, is that it has been examined as a discrete entity. In particular, the ‘globalisation’ lens is insufficient to grasp the dynamics of the credential markets in which the IB Diploma is inserted. It does not allow researchers to make sense of what the situation of the IB Diploma in Germany owes to its coexistence with the Abitur, what properties of the IB Diploma in France are best understood when put into perspective with the local Baccalauréat and what the Victorian Certificate of Education can tell us about the IB Diploma in the state of Victoria, Australia. Just like the monographs of individual French grandes écoles Bourdieu (1996) criticised for failing to grasp the space of relationships in which these grandes écoles exist and, therefore, the fact that it is the relations in which they are inserted that makes them what they are, considering the IB Diploma without re-situating it within its broader school, curricular, credential and student spaces is an all-too-­ common mistake in research on the IB Diploma. Research to date shows a significant paucity of contextualisation of the IB Diploma within the broader educational structures that determine its position in the system of distribution of educational chances. As this book hopes to demonstrate, the IB Diploma has no intrinsic value built into it if considered outside of a specific high school credential market (and related higher education system). Only its embedding in specific credentialing structures gives it its contours and, ultimately, its value. The third major issue is that there is a need to test the internationalism of the IB Diploma rather than accept it at face value. In the research literature on the IB Diploma, the use of this credential as part of strategies of international mobility is more often assumed than empirically attested. The IB Diploma cannot be considered as evidence of the ‘globalisation’ of educational trajectories without demonstrating its connections with patterns of international class formation. In countries such as Australia, the link between a hypothetical ‘global middle class’ and the IB Diploma has been shown to be far more problematic than is generally assumed (Windle & Maire, 2019). As I hope to show throughout the book, analysing the IB Diploma from the point of view of ‘elite’ or ‘global middle class’ internationalisation has unequal relevance in different countries and, in fact, proves genuinely important only in a minority of countries with a significant number of IB schools. The use of the IB Diploma for international higher education study after high school completion is a minority experience, not a majority one. Focussing primarily on students in this minority and their use of the IB Diploma is thus partial and captures only a marginal segment of the IB Diploma reality internationally. This is true in Australia but also in the United States, where one finds more IB Diploma schools than anywhere else in the world. While the study of exceptions, atypical cases and other uncharacteristic facts is of theoretical interest, it cannot circumvent the need for a careful study of how the IB Diploma fits in different national educational and class structures. The extent to which internationally mobile class fractions monopolise the IB Diploma varies from country to country, highlighting the need for national analyses that empirically test this claim.

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2  The IB Diploma from Globalisation to Credential Theory

Re-embedding the IB Diploma in Credential Structures A fundamental principle of sociological research teaches us that any research object must be constructed theoretically to enable meaningful empirical work (Bourdieu et al., 1991). However, rarely is the analysis of the IB Diploma driven by strong, coherent questioning or, more specifically, this questioning is rarely tailored to make sense of the specific phenomenon of the advent and growth of IB Diploma. In this book, I argue that approaching the IB Diploma phenomenon from the point of view of credential markets provides such a systematic theoretical framing. I propose to take the credential status of the IB Diploma seriously, considering the IB Diploma as a theoretical object, a credential, rather than simply an empirically existing programme of study. This approach has both theoretical and methodological implications. On the theoretical front, examining the IB Diploma as a credential forces one to examine the different credential markets in which the IB Diploma is positioned. This soon leads the researcher to consider the fact that, in the case of high school certificates, credential markets are predominantly state markets rather than global ones (Brown, 2000; Marginson, 1997). Yet, unlike what Brown assumes, the present book also shows that, in most countries, the central role of the state in high school credential markets is true even in the case of the IB Diploma. Relatedly, this theoretical framing forces us to move away from the realist mode of analysis where the IB Diploma is taken as a concrete entity. This relational principle is a useful reminder to approach the IB Diploma as only one element within a broader socio-educational structure, and it is the structure itself that deserves attention rather than a specific object within it. The truth of the IB Diploma does not reside in the IB Diploma itself but in the whole credential structure. Because the social appropriation of credentials only makes sense relationally, it is the entire high school curricula and credential structures that must be analysed at once rather than focussing only on one element within them. This restores the empirical complexity of the educational opportunity structure students navigate and in which they take different paths. It also gives us a better chance to grasp the social logics at play in socially differentiated patterns of investment in credential markets. Methodologically, the credential-based theorisation of the IB Diploma and the sociological demands of ‘methodological relationalism’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) mean that the main operation of contextualisation required to effectively analyse the IB Diploma is to locate it within its broader credential market context. This imperative arises from the fact that causation in the social world is the product of a system of objective relations, rather than arising from essentialised properties of specific ‘objects’ considered in a de-contextualised manner. What creates the value of the IB Diploma thus cannot be found in the IB Diploma itself but must necessarily be sought in the structures in which the IB Diploma is inserted. As a result, it is the overall structure of the credential market that needs to be described and analysed rather than the IB Diploma itself.

Re-embedding the IB Diploma in Credential Structures

35

The scientific construction of a research programme involves a range of operations, including: delineating the precise object being investigated and the level of social reality being analysed; contextualising it within relevant social structures, i.e. placing this object in a network of social relations; and identifying one or several scales of observation to serve the project’s interpretive needs (Lahire, 2012). After outlining the theoretical construction of the research object, it is now possible to turn to the parameters of analysis and related operations of contextualisation. What level of social reality would form an adequate contextualisation of the IB Diploma? As argued above, IB Diploma researchers, through concepts such as the global middle classes and global elite, often opt for a global contextualisation to make sense of its supply in schools and acquisition by students in individual countries. The approach adopted in this book takes a different and perhaps less ambitious path for two main reasons. First, given the uneven state of knowledge on the IB Diploma in different countries, any analysis of the IB Diploma at the global scale would risk providing little insight into credential sociology. Second, since the competition for high school credentials remains a local and national matter more than an international one (Brown, 2000), these local and national lenses form the core of the analytical framework employed throughout the book. This country-level approach goes against the scales of observation most commonly used in research on the IB Diploma, which typically focus on individual schools, groups of schools or local markets (except in the United States). One of the issues in many of these studies is a discrepancy between the scale of analysis and level of social reality being described or, more precisely, a lack of reflexivity in determining the extent to which the scale of analysis being used supports claims relating to a higher (typically national or global) level of social reality. To overcome such limitations, the research design adopted here aims to use international and country-level data to justify international and national arguments about the IB Diploma, effectively matching the scale of analysis and level of social reality being described. This approach does not deny the value of different levels of analysis or focal points. In-depth analyses conducted within IB Diploma schools have provided us with precious information on the micro-reality of the IB Diploma in local contexts (see next chapter). A small number of studies have also shed light on the structure of the international IB Diploma market (see below). Still, when the objective is to reconstruct the general structures of the credential markets in which the IB Diploma is inserted, country-wide analyses are not only warranted but necessary. The present book aims to show that, in the case of Australia, efforts to consolidate academic power are much more central to understanding the IB Diploma than are international mobility desires. Adopting this form of contextualisation necessarily implies conducting an indepth and methodical analysis of where the IB Diploma is made available (i.e. which schools?) and who takes it up within these schools (i.e. which students, with what educational pasts and futures?). But this does not imply that the focus on a specific country such as Australia must be considered for its own sake. Rather, it must be taken as an exemplification of what a structural analysis of credential

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markets can tell us regarding the social operations of credential value making. This can (and hopefully will) deliver theoretical insights of relevance to any credential market analysis, both on and beyond the IB Diploma. More fundamentally, the conceptual tools used throughout this book have general applicability for credential sociology. As such, the IB Diploma is only a point of entry to study broader logics of valuation and structuring in credential markets. The conceptual apparatus and its deployment are thus as important as the substantive findings on the IB Diploma. If it is borne in mind that Australia provides an example of a state-dominated credential system accessed through a highly stratified, privatised education system (Windle, 2015), more controlled theoretical transfers can be made to analyse the place of the IB Diploma in other high school credential markets. Moreover, the deliberate focus on national credential markets does not mean that robust international analyses cannot be conducted. It simply asserts that only a sophisticated framework can produce meaningful comparisons of the position of the IB Diploma in different credential structures, and that this framework can only be built on knowledge produced in detailed case studies of individual countries. Given the current status of scholarship on the IB Diploma, constructing a detailed structural analysis of the global high school certification space in which the IB Diploma is inserted is too premature an endeavour (although see below for some elements of reflection on this international structure). However, it must be kept on the horizon for when detailed analyses of the IB Diploma in specific countries—such as the one developed in this book—are conducted and can be brought together under a more rigorously contextualised theorisation of high school credential markets internationally. On the methodological front, taking the ‘credential’ status of the IB Diploma seriously means attempting to capture the salient features of the credentialing spaces in which the IB Diploma exists—namely, the academic pedigree of school offering the IB Diploma, the socio-academic trajectory of IB Diploma students, their respective market positions (i.e. resources), as well as the IB Diploma value for higher education entry. Although data limitations often prevent a full analysis of these credential market structures, it remains essential to attempt to capture simultaneously the retailers, acquirers and profits that define the IB Diploma. At the same time, taking the credential nature of the IB Diploma seriously also means adopting a greater comparative focus on its curriculum, assessment (including examinations) and the criteria regulating the awarding of the IB Diploma credential and the other credentials it competes with. In summary, the main contention of this section is that theorising the IB Diploma as a credential and using the tools of economic sociology to study it call for specific ways of contextualising the IB Diploma within broader credential markets. In doing so, nation-state analyses that focus on the social struggles for social advantage through credentialing systems must be taken seriously. Ultimately, analysing credential markets means recognising that the dissemination of the IB Diploma internationally depends on the variation in educational opportunity structures across societies and the processes determining the construction (or absence) of social aspirations for national and/or international higher education study, work mobility and

Framing the IB Diploma Internationally

37

living. In this framework, the link between high school credentials and higher education is central. If the value of credentials is social in origin, as sociological research suggests, it is necessary to return to the unfolding of social struggles within the education system to gain a better understanding of the constitution of a market of IB Diploma retailers and acquirers. These social struggles remain, by and large, institutionalised in nation-state institutions (including credentialing systems) and national social spaces.

Framing the IB Diploma Internationally The International Baccalaureate organisation was created as a legal entity on 25 October 1968 as a not-for-profit foundation in Geneva, Switzerland (International Baccalaureate, 2014b). In its half-century of existence, it has developed four curricula available from preschool to the end of secondary school for students aged 3–19. The organisation sells implementation licences for its curricula to individual schools or groups of schools, sometimes through agreements with governments and other educational authorities. At the secondary level, the organisation has also developed standardised examinations that are available to students enrolled in the corresponding programmes. The first programme developed by the IB organisation was its senior high school certificate, the IB Diploma. The IB Diploma is an academic credential whose programme of study includes six subjects from at least five different curriculum areas for students in their last 2 years of high school. Students are examined by the IB Organization, which awards the IB Diploma to those who score at least 24 points out of a maximum score of 45 across their six subjects. Students who do not reach 24 points or do not wish to study for the whole Diploma can receive certificates of achievement in individual subjects. A bilingual IB Diploma is awarded to students who receive a grade of 3 or higher on a scale from 1 to 7 in two subjects selected from the ‘studies in language and literature’ curriculum area. After 25 years of existence, the IB organisation also developed three additional programmes to complement its originally singular curricular offering. The Middle Years Program (MYP) was born in 1994, for students aged 11 to 16; the Primary Years Program (PYP) emerged in 1997, for students aged 3 to 12; and the latest curriculum, the Career-related Program (CP), was launched in 2011 as a vocationally oriented programme for students aged 16 to 19. Yet the seminal and most influential IB curriculum remains the Diploma Programme (IB Diploma), for students aged 16 to 19. As of December 2019, there were 5219 schools in the world implementing at least one of the IB curricula (International Baccalaureate, 2019a). More importantly, at the same date, there were 3462 schools implementing the IB Diploma, more than the sum of all schools implementing one (or more) of the three other IB programmes combined (2842 schools). Altogether, two-thirds of IB schools offer the IB Diploma. The programme has often been presented as a ‘pre-university’ high

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school certificate by the IB organisation and schools. Accordingly, assessment for certification purposes has been more central to the IB Diploma than for the other IB programmes. As Chap. 11 will show, the IB Diploma was designed as a passport for accessing universities, including the most sought-after courses in elite universities, from the moment it emerged as an international high school certificate.

Uneven Country Distribution and Private Schooling As of early 2020, the IB Diploma was available is just under 3500 schools in the world. To put this number in perspective, it is 1.4 times the total number of schools offering senior high school in Australia, or equivalent to the entire high school system of a medium-size country. The worldwide IB Diploma market is thus significant in size but still far smaller than many large domestic high school markets, such as those found in China, India, Japan, France or the United States. One of the striking features of the IB Diploma is its skewed distribution across countries. Worldwide, the IB Diploma is heavily concentrated in the United States. The US has more schools offering the IB Diploma than the six following countries with the highest number of IB Diploma schools taken together (949 versus 933) (see Fig. 2.1). Any analysis of the IB Diploma that aims to make general claims about this certificate must thus consider the specific properties of the IB Diploma in the US. Beyond the particular case of the US, another important property of the worldwide distribution of the IB Diploma is its concentration in a handful of other countries. Three-quarters of all IB Diploma schools are found in just 20 countries. This pattern is not easy to reconcile with global class formation arguments. Moreover, after the United States, no obvious similarities exist between the other countries with a significant IB Diploma presence, including Ecuador, Canada, India, Spain and China. This further emphasises the need for country-specific analyses. The sociological importance of the IB Diploma in specific contexts depends on its weight within countries’ overall high school credential markets. Thus, although the US IB Diploma market is the largest in absolute numbers, relative to its high school population, the IB Diploma is a more significant component of the high school certification market in Ecuador than in the US, where fewer than 3% of public high schools offer the IB Diploma (Lee et al., 2011). The properties of the specific schools in which the IB Diploma is offered internationally vary significantly from country to country. For instance, an international survey conducted by IGI Services in 2011–12 showed that the proportion of IB Diploma/Certificate students graduating from private schools was 100% in India, four in five in Mexico and Australia, at least one in three in Canada, Spain and the United Kingdom, but just one in 20 in the United States (IGI Services, 2012). While the overall trend appears to be that of an affinity between IB Diploma acquisition and private schooling, the high degree of international variability does not permit simple generalisations.

Uneven Country Distribution and Private Schooling

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Fig. 2.1  Number of IB Diploma schools in countries with at least 50 IB Diploma schools (2020) Source: International Baccalaureate Organization website

The relationship between private schooling and private credentialing also needs to be contextualised by considering the place of private schooling in different countries (see below). Common to most countries, however, is the fact that only a minority of schools offering the IB Diploma are ‘international’ schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2008) and the same is true for ‘international’ students (Walker, 2003). This further problematises the recourse to ‘globalisation’ theory to explain the worldwide distribution of the IB Diploma.

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Table 2.1  Top 12 countries in number of candidates presented at the IB Diploma examinations (%, May and November 2018) Country United States Canada Ecuador Netherlands United Kingdom India China Singapore Peru Mexico Spain Australia Total (N)

% candidates 48.5 6.2 3.2 2.7 2.7 2.3 2.2 2.0 2.0 1.8 1.7 1.7 181,515

Sources: International Baccalaureate (2018, 2019b)

A Domestic and Gendered Student Recruitment The distribution of IB Diploma schools across countries gives access to the framing lines of the IB Diploma retailer market. At least as important from the point of view of the social construction of credential value is international distribution of IB Diploma students. Table 2.1 shows the percentage of worldwide IB Diploma candidates located in the 12 countries with the most candidates in 2018. The fact that every fourth IB Diploma school in the world is found in the US is significant, but even more striking is the fact that every second candidate for IB examinations in 2018 came from US schools. As the next chapter shows, this is partly attributable to the role of IB Certificate studies in individual subjects in the US high school credential market. Nevertheless, it still means that the IB Diploma is extremely concentrated in the United States and far from being evenly distributed globally. A number of indicators can be used to assess empirically the validity of the globalisation theory of the IB Diploma. A relevant indicator to ascertain the place of the IB Diploma in circuits of international study mobility can be found in the proportion of students completing their IB Diploma outside of their country of (first) nationality. Of course, this does not capture international study mobility post-IB Diploma completion, nor does it perfectly align with study-related international mobility at the high-school level. Still, it offers some indication of the ‘internationalisation’ of the IB Diploma in different contexts. Figure 2.2, based on IGI Services survey data, reveals that country-to-country variation exists in the share of international students graduating with an IB Diploma. Close to a third of IB Diploma students in the UK have another first nationality, but

Universal University Aspirations and Domestic Destinations

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Fig. 2.2  Percentage of IB Diploma/Certificate graduates who completed their IB Diploma/ Certificates in their country of (first) nationality, by country (2011–12) Source: IGI Services, The IB Diploma Programme: Graduate Destinations Surveys 2011–2012

fewer than one in 10 US IB students do not consider American to be their first nationality. Although revealing significant international variation, these results highlight that, in countries for which data is available, the IB Diploma is primarily invested in by domestic families. From a sociological point of view, the gendered recruitment of the IB Diploma is more significant than its recruitment of foreign-born students. In five out of the six countries included in the 2011–12 IGI Services surveys (IGI Services, 2012), the majority of IB Diploma students were girls. The phenomenon is less significant in Mexico and, in India, boys outnumber girls in the IB Diploma. The over-­ representation of boys in India is specific to the space of the IB Diploma within educational trajectories in this country and to the gendered nature of its upper-class educational emigration pattern (see the next chapter for an explanation of the Indian exception). Except for this country, the IB Diploma is quantitatively dominated by girls. Although more girls than boys are found in senior high school studies in general in most wealthy countries, girls still tend to be over-represented in the IB Diploma relative to their representation in the broader high school credential market. This calls for further analysis in specific countries, and I propose an explanation for the over-representation of girls in the IB Diploma in Chap. 7.

Universal University Aspirations and Domestic Destinations Among the 6401 students responding to the global survey of IB Diploma/Certificate graduates administered by IGI Services in 2011–12, over 98% intended to go to college or university (IGI Services, 2012). The rate was comparable for IB Diploma and IB Certificate completers. From a sociological point of view, this is by far the most distinctive feature of IB Diploma graduates as a cohort. Investment in the IB

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Table 2.2  Top five universities attended by IB Diploma/Certificate graduates, by country of school attended (2011–12) US 1 Uni. of Florida

Australia Canada Uni. of Uni. of Queensland Alberta

UK Uni. College London

Spain Mexico Uni. of Institute of Cantabria Technology of Monterrey

India Uni. of Illinois— Urbana Champaign Uni. of Uni. of Uni. of Autonomous 2 Florida Uni. of Uni. of Cambridge Valladolid Uni. of Nuevo California— State Uni. Melbourne British Berkeley Leon Columbia Uni. of Uni. of Uni. of Uni. of Uni. of Uni. of 3 Uni. of Sydney Toronto Kent Seville Monterrey Michigan— Texas— Ann Arbor Austin Uni. of 4 Uni. of Monash Queen’s Uni. of Uni. of Uni. Washington Uni. Uni. Warwick Murcia Iberoamericana Mumbai of Mexico Durham Uni. of La Universided de Uni. of McGill Uni. of 5 Uni. of Warwick Uni. Lagune la Americas Maryland-­ New South Uni. Puebla Wales, College Sydney Park Source: IGI Services (2012)

Diploma is associated with specific socio-academic properties, attracting families for whom aspiring to higher education is the norm and academically plausible. This suggests that the value of the IB Diploma to students may be deeply defined by its value for higher education studies and points to the need for analysing the value of the IB Diploma through its power in securing access to prestigious, exclusive or elite universities for its graduates. In addition to the proportion of students completing their IB Diploma in their country of first nationality, a decisive indicator to test the relevance of theorising the IB Diploma from the point of view of global class formation is the destinations of IB Diploma graduates receiving their credential in different countries. Table  2.2 shows the five higher education institutions most commonly attended by IB Diploma/Certificate graduates from seven different countries. The five most common university destinations in all countries included in Table 2.2 except India are domestic universities. In India, by contrast, four out of five university destinations of IB Diploma graduates are international—US and British—universities. This supports two main conclusions. First, in most countries, the IB Diploma appears to be inserted in domestic circuits of education—and, presumably, social trajectories—more than within globally oriented class practices. Second, the specific structure of IB Diploma social recruitment in India needs to be explained with reference to specific properties of the Indian credential market and class structure (see next chapter).

The Structure of the Global IB Diploma Market

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The Structure of the Global IB Diploma Market The previous sections have provided a general overview of some of the geographical, school system and gender coordinates of the IB Diploma. The analysis has indicated that the IB Diploma is highly concentrated in two dozen countries, with the United States occupying a unique place in this international structure. However, is it possible to take this global characterisation of the IB Diploma further? At a first level, the IB Diploma is concentrated in high-income countries and countries whose medium of instruction is English, the two categories overlapping to a sizeable extent (Tarc, 2009). This is significant enough. However, deeper properties of the international IB Diploma landscape can be identified, beyond high-level linguistic and economic considerations. The most serious attempt to map the international IB Diploma landscape in a rigorous and sociologically informed way has been made by Dugonjic-Rodwin (2014). She examined the IB Diploma from the point of view of a global market in high school credentials understood as ‘institutionalised cultural capital’. Using 2008–2009 worldwide data on IB Diploma schools (n  =  1579) and students (n = 30,531) provided by the IB organisation, Dugonjic-Rodwin’s analysis revealed key structural features of the international presence of the IB Diploma. Conducting correspondence analyses based on school information (i.e. number of years offering the IB Diploma, size of the student cohort, enrolment of international students, proportion of students choosing English language study, public or private status and international school status), the author reached the following conclusions. First, English is the primary language of instruction and assessment in IB schools worldwide (91.1% of schools), even though the full IB Diploma curriculum and examinations are available in three languages: English, French and Spanish. This clearly indicates the Anglo-American linguistic affinities of this private credential and its specific relationship with school systems where English language learning has historically come to occupy an important place. Second, the ‘weak field’ of IB Diploma schools was found to be structured around two main axes: on the ‘symbolic’ axis, international private schools were opposed to local state schools; on the ‘economic’ axis, large schools having offered the IB Diploma for many years were opposed to smaller schools who had started offering the IB Diploma more recently. This structure emerged from an analysis of the distribution of the number of students preparing for the IB Diploma, on one hand, and their geographical location and linguistic choices on the other. The analysis revealed important inter-national differences in the nature and status of the IB Diploma in different countries. International schools were primarily found in Western Europe and Asia (e.g. Sri Lanka); local (public) schools were concentrated in the United States, while small schools (i.e. those presenting few candidates to the IB Diploma) were mostly found in South and Latin America (Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Guatemala). Overall, North American schools differed from those found in the rest of the world.

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From the point of view of schools’ enrolment of foreign students and main language of study, countries where the IB Diploma was dominated by ‘international’ schools were opposed to those with a majority of ‘local’ schools. The latter category was found to be numerically dominant, with countries such as the United States, Canada, Spain, Chile and Mexico. Overall, given the peculiarities of IB Diploma schools and students (i.e. size of schools, number of candidates and prevalence of local students and public schools) in the United States, the analysis showed that this country is like no other in the global IB Diploma landscape. Dugonjic-Rodwin’s analysis has been important to reveal how internationally differentiated the IB Diploma is. To shed light on its specific contexts of implementation, Dugonjic-Rodwin (2014) has called for country-by-country analyses of the IB Diploma. On the other hand, her research had some limitations, primarily linked to the lack of access to more detailed student data, including their social origins, academic capital and post-IB study trajectories. The fact that Dugonjic-Rodwin gave greater attention to schools than to students limited her chances of grasping the inter-connections between school systems, family resources and the definition of academic competence embodied in high school credentials. This means that her otherwise robust analysis cannot form the basis of a sociological inquiry seeking to explain what makes a private credential such as the IB Diploma valuable. Her approach, where the structure of the global ‘weak field’ (Vauchez, 2011) of the IB Organization was considered from the point of view of a global ‘economy of pedagogical goods’, provided the author with only limited access to the socio-academic logics of IB Diploma acquisition and their relationship with practices of class formation and reproduction. In particular, the unavailability of data on IB Diploma students’ examination results made it difficult to grasp the global structure of the IB Diploma from the point of view of the consolidation of academic capital. Given the imperative of credential market contextualisation, this can be done more effectively at the national level, as the rest of this book shows.

 he Differentiated Insertion of the IB Diploma Across High T School Credential Markets The imperative of IB Diploma contextualisation within credential market structures becomes evident if one notices how dissimilar its insertion in different school systems is. This can be made visible by comparing the over-representation of private schools among schools offering the IB Diploma across countries. Figure 2.3 shows the proportion of private schools in the PISA 2018 sample and in the IB Diploma school population in all countries with at least 50 IB Diploma schools, except India and Ecuador for lack of data. In all countries, the IB Diploma is over-concentrated in the private sector. This is a phenomenon worthy of investigation, especially as regards the resources schools need to afford a private credential (see Chap. 5) and the processes by which the IB

The Differentiated Insertion of the IB Diploma Across High School Credential Markets

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Fig. 2.3  Percentage of private schools among IB Diploma schools and secondary schools, by country (2018 and 2020) Sources: PISA 2018 and International Baccalaureate Organization website

Diploma becomes—or fails to become—recognised and accredited by state school authorities. This recognition process varies significantly from country to country, including in the extent to which it is centralised versus decentralised. Equally important, however, is the fact that the degree of concentration of IB Diploma supply in the private sector varies largely across countries. In the US and Canada, the degree of privatisation of IB Diploma supply and the share of private schooling are comparable and of low magnitude. On the other hand, the specificity of IB

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Diploma schools relative to the broader school population stands out in most other countries. Several countries with a significant number of IB Diploma schools, such as Argentina, the UK, Japan and Australia, have a large proportion of private secondary schools in general, but the concentration of the IB Diploma in the private sector is at least twice as large as the overall share of private schools. In yet another type of school system, found in Mexico and Turkey, the IB Diploma supply is extremely privatised (over 90%) whereas private schools are a small minority of the overall school system (less than 15%). One can thus draw two important conclusions from this analysis. First, the degree of over-concentration of the IB Diploma in private schools is very different from country to country. One should therefore not assume that studying the IB Diploma has the same meaning or answers to the same educational and social logics in different systems. Second, in most societies with a large IB Diploma school market, the IB Diploma is atypical of the broader school population. This further highlights the need to tease out the specific logics according to which this differentiation emerges. The focus on private schooling is arguably only one indicator among many important ones to understand the high school credential market. The analysis of a more comprehensive set of indicators is carried out for Australia in the rest of the book. As regards private schooling, its sociological relevance in fact depends on the extent to which private schooling is socially selective. To determine whether the over-privatisation of IB Diploma schools is likely to be associated with socioeconomic segregation, one can examine it side by side with the socioeconomic status of private school students relative to public school students in different countries (Fig. 2.4). The relative socioeconomic advantage of private school students compared to their public school peers is comparatively low in (urban) China, the United Kingdom and Japan. In these countries, private school students are more likely to come from middle- and upper-class families, but not to the same extent as in the other countries included in the graph. On the other hand, in Turkey, Argentina, Mexico and Peru, private school students are far more likely to come from socioeconomically advantaged families than are public school students. One of the implications of these patterns is that the significant over-representation of private schools among IB Diploma retailers in China may not necessarily have the same implication for the social elitism of this certificate than in other countries. A different pattern emerges in countries where the distribution of the IB Diploma across public and private schools is not too dissimilar from the overall representation of public and private schools. In countries such as the United States and Canada, even though private school students are significantly more socially privileged than are their public school peers, the fact that the IB Diploma is not significantly over-­ privatised compared to the broader high school population means that the IB Diploma may not necessarily be socially elitist in its recruitment. By contrast, in Turkey, Argentina, Mexico and Peru, the fact that socioeconomic advantage is highly concentrated in private schools and that the IB Diploma is highly privatised (relative to the overall school population) means that access to the IB Diploma is very likely to be highly socially elitist. These international

The Differentiated Insertion of the IB Diploma Across High School Credential Markets

47

Fig. 2.4  Socioeconomic status difference between public and private school students (PISA 2018) and relative over-representation of private schools among IB Diploma schools, by country (2018 and 2020) Sources: PISA 2018 and International Baccalaureate Organization website. Note: the chart includes all countries with at least 50 IB Diploma schools in early 2020, except Ecuador and India for lack of PISA 2018 data

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differences imply that the role of the IB Diploma in social struggles for academic advantage in credential acquisition may be highly varied across countries. This, once again, emphasises the need for detailed case studies of the IB Diploma in different systems before being able to conduct robust international comparisons. To refine this operation of national contextualisation, the next chapter reviews existing IB Diploma research on the socio-academic selectivity of the IB Diploma in different countries.

Conclusion The preliminary elements of international analysis developed in this chapter have offered some important insights into the international structure of the IB Diploma credentialing system. First, the IB Diploma is concentrated in a few countries that account for the majority of its students and schools. For this reason, ‘the IB is an international player but it is not a truly global one’ (Bunnell, 2011). Second, theorisations of the emergence and growth of the IB Diploma based on variants of ‘globalisation’ concepts and arguments are ill-equipped to explain the international distribution of this credentialing phenomenon. Third, the profile of IB Diploma schools, students and their higher education destinations shows significant country-­ to-­country variation. This highlights how essential country-specific analyses are to fully make sense of what the IB Diploma represents in different contexts. It is not only that ‘certain national contexts and educational traditions encourage the adoption of IB programmes, while other traditions hinder their propagation’ (Resnik, 2012), but more fundamentally that the position of the IB Diploma in national credential markets is directly determined by the social and educational structures in which it becomes embedded. The reality of the IB Diploma is too variable across education systems to permit superficial comparisons, that is, comparisons that cherry-pick a handful of schools across countries but do not take the full structure of their respective education systems and social structures into consideration. Moreover, in the necessary process of national contextualisation of the IB Diploma, it is crucial to re-insert this private certificate within the broader high school credential structures in which it finds its place. In an early attempt to explain the IB Diploma as a novel credential phenomenon, Lowe (2000) proposed two hypotheses. His first hypothesis contended that ‘growing access to and intensified competition for local educational qualifications provides further pressure on elites to turn to international alternatives as a means of maintaining positional advantage’ (Lowe, 2000). His second hypothesis conjectured

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that ‘international qualifications are used for local university access where they give preferential access over local qualifications to the most prestigious faculties and courses’ (Lowe, 2000). The country-level review of existing IB Diploma research I propose in the next chapter provides an ideal opportunity for testing the validity of these hypotheses.

References Bagnall, N. F. (2010). Education without borders: Forty years of the International Baccalaureate: 1970–2010. VDM Verlag Dr. Müller. Ball, S. J., & Nikita, D. P. (2014). The global middle class and school choice: A cosmopolitan sociology. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 17(3), 81–93. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11618-­014-­0523-­4 Bereday, G. Z. F. (1964). Comparative method in education. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power (L. C. Clough, Trans.). Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2016). Sociologie Générale, Volume 2: Cours au Collège de France (1983–1986). Raisons d’Agir/Seuil. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1967). La Comparabilité des Systèmes d’Enseignement. In R. Castel & J.-C. Passeron (Eds.), Éducation, Développement et Démocratie: Algérie, Espagne, France, Grèce, Hongrie, Italie, Pays Arabes, Yougoslavie (pp. 21–58). Mouton. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. J. D. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Polity Press. Bourdieu, P., Chamboredon, J. -C., & Passeron, J. -C. (1991). The craft of sociology: Epistemological preliminaries (R. Nice, Trans.). de Gruyter. Brown, P. (2000). The globalisation of positional competition? Sociology, 34(4), 633–653. https:// doi.org/10.1177/s0038038500000390 Brunold-Conesa, C. (2010). International education: The International Baccalaureate, Montessori and global citizenship. Journal of Research in International Education, 9(3), 259–272. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1475240910382992 Bunnell, T. (2011). The International Baccalaureate: Its growth and complexity of challenges. In R.  Bates (Ed.), Schooling internationally: Globalisation, internationalisation and the future for international schools (pp. 165–181). Routledge. Bunnell, T. (2014). The changing landscape of international schooling: Implications for theory and practice. Routledge. Bunnell, T., Fertig, M., & James, C. (2017). Establishing the legitimacy of a school’s claim to be “International”: The provision of an international curriculum as the institutional primary task. Educational Review, 69(3), 303–317. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2016.1213224 Doherty, C. (2018). Keeping doors open: Transnational families and curricular nationalism. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 27(2–3), 200–216. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09620214.2017.1415162 Dugonjic-Rodwin, L. S. (2014). Les IB Schools, une internationale élitiste: émergence d’un espace mondial d’enseignement secondaire au XXe siècle. Université de Genève. Hayden, M., & Thompson, J. (2008). International schools: Growth and influence (Vol. 92). UNESCO: International Institute for Educational Planning. Hill, I. (2002). The history of international education: An International Baccalaureate perspective. In M. Hayden, J. Thompson, & G. Walker (Eds.), International education in practice: Dimensions for national and international schools (pp. 18–29). Routledge. Hill, I. (2007). International education as developed by the International Baccalaureate Organization. In M. Hayden, J. Levy, & J. Thompson (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of research in international education (pp. 25–38). SAGE Publications.

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IGI Services. (2012). The IB Diploma Programme: Graduate destinations survey 2011/2012. Global report. International Graduate Insight Group. International Baccalaureate. (2014a). 10 reasons why the IB Diploma Programme (DP) is ideal preparation for university. International Baccalaureate Organization. International Baccalaureate. (2014b). 2013 annual review. International Baccalaureate Organization. International Baccalaureate. (2014c). Education for a better world. International Baccalaureate Organization. International Baccalaureate. (2018). The IB Diploma Programme statistical bulletin: May 2018 examination session. International Baccalaureate Organization. International Baccalaureate. (2019a). Find an IB world school. https://www.ibo.org/programmes/ find-­an-­ib-­school/. Accessed 1 Dec 2019. International Baccalaureate. (2019b). The IB Diploma Programme statistical bulletin: November 2018 examination session. International Baccalaureate Organization. Kenway, J., & Fahey, J. (2014). Staying ahead of the game: The globalising practices of elite schools. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 12(2), 177–195. https://doi.org/10.108 0/14767724.2014.890885 Kenway, J., & Fahey, J. (2015). The gift economy of elite schooling: The changing contours and contradictions of privileged benefaction. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36(1), 95–115. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2014.970268 Kenway, J., & Koh, A. (2015). Sociological silhouettes of elite schooling. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2015.977557 Kenway, J., Fahey, J., Epstein, D., Koh, A., McCarthy, C., & Rizvi, F. (2017). Class choreographies: Elite schools and globalization. Palgrave Macmillan. Lahire, B. (2012). Monde Pluriel. Penser l’Unité des Sciences Sociales. Seuil. Lee, J. M. J., Edwards, K., Menson, R., & Rawls, A. (2011). The college completion agenda 2011 progress report. College Board Advocacy & Policy Center. Lowe, J. (1999). International examinations, national systems and the global market. Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education, 29(3), 317–330. https://doi. org/10.1080/0305792990290309 Lowe, J. (2000). International examinations: The new credentialism and reproduction of advantage in a globalising world. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 7(3), 363–377. https://doi.org/10.1080/09695940050201352 Maire, Q. (2015). The construction of educational reality: Insights from schools offering the International Baccalaureate Diploma Across Australia. Paper presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Annual Conference, Fremantle. Marginson, S. (1997). Markets in education. Allen & Unwin. Resnik, J. (2009). Multicultural education—Good for business but not for the state? The IB curriculum and global capitalism. British Journal of Educational Studies, 57(3), 217–244. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­8527.2009.00440.x Resnik, J. (2012). The denationalization of education and the expansion of the International Baccalaureate. Comparative Education Review, 56(2), 248–269. https://doi.org/10.1086/661770 Sassen, S. (2001). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2007). A sociology of globalization. W. W. Norton. Sklair, L. (2001). The transnational capitalist class. Blackwell. Tarc, P. (2009). Global dreams, enduring tensions: International Baccalaureate in a changing world. Peter Lang. Vauchez, A. (2011). Interstitial power in fields of limited statehood: Introducing a “Weak Field” approach to the study of transnational settings. International Political Sociology, 5(3), 340–345. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-­5687.2011.00137_4.x Walker, G. (2003). Now for the stage of influence. International Schools Magazine, 6(1), 9. Weenink, D. (2008). Cosmopolitanism as a form of capital: Parents preparing their children for a globalizing world. Sociology, 42(6), 1089–1106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038508096935

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Weenink, D. (2009). Creating a niche in the education market: The rise of internationalised secondary education in the Netherlands. Journal of Education Policy, 24(4), 495–511. https://doi. org/10.1080/02680930902774620 Weenink, D. (2012). Les Stratégies Éducatives des Classes Supérieures Néerlandaises: Professions Intellectuelles Supérieures, Managers et Entrepreneurs Face au Choix Entre Capital Culturel «Classique» et Capital Culturel Cosmopolite. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 191–192(1), 28–39. Windle, J. (2015). Making sense of school choice: Politics, policies, and practice under conditions of cultural diversity. Palgrave Macmillan. Windle, J., & Maire, Q. (2019). Beyond the global city: A comparative analysis of cosmopolitanism in middle-class educational strategies in Australia and Brazil. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(5), 717–733. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2019.1573905 Wright, E., & Lee, M. (2019). Re/producing the global middle class: International Baccalaureate alumni at ‘world-class’ universities in Hong Kong. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(5), 682–696. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2019.1573880

Chapter 3

The IB Diploma and the Nation-State: Positional Competition and Academic Distinction Abstract  The analysis of the international position of the IB Diploma presented in the previous chapter invites more detailed, country-specific analyses. This chapter uses existing research to review the diffusion of the IB Diploma across high school credential markets internationally, focussing on its school and student recruitment, academic profile and association with international mobility. Research on the IB Diploma in North America, South America, Europe, East and Southeast Asia and Oceania is used to identify commonalities and contrasts between its position in different credential markets. The chapter reveals that the position of the IB Diploma in a given country is dependent on the education system features within which it becomes embedded. This complexifies attempts to reach general conclusions about the IB Diploma internationally. Nevertheless, academic and social discrimination appear to be consistently associated with the presence of the IB Diploma in high school certification markets. This finding is used to guide the credential-based and academic competition-focused theoretical lens adopted to examine the specific structures of the Australian high school credential market in the rest of the book. Keywords  Credentialism · Academic distinction · University selection · Social class · United States

Introduction The international analysis of the IB Diploma outlined in the previous chapter revealed that schools preparing students to acquire this private certificate are concentrated in a small number of countries. Moreover, there appears to be significant country-to-country variation in the extent to which international (university) study mobility is a driver of IB Diploma acquisition (Lowe, 2000). This is partly due to the variable recognition granted to the IB Diploma by domestic universities, to the differences in languages of instruction and perceived ‘quality’ of the IB Diploma and local credentials, and to the class relations and trajectories associated with IB Diploma students, including the place of local and foreign universities in their process of class (re)production. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Q. Maire, Credential Market, International Study of City Youth Education 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80169-4_3

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The international patterns revealed in Chap. 2 invite further contextualisation of the IB Diploma within national settings. This can be done by examining existing research on the IB Diploma across continents, countries and regions. In this chapter, I use extant scholarship to construct a country-by-country analysis of the major features of IB Diploma schooling. I particularly focus on characterising the schools and students enrolling in the IB Diploma and tease out the similarities and differences existing between the IB Diploma in different parts of the world. Given the analytical lenses commonly used in IB Diploma research (see previous chapter), I pay attention to evidence on the relationship linking the IB Diploma and international mobility, on one hand, and academic competition on the other. Not all regions and countries are included in the present analysis. North and South America, Western Europe and Oceania are the main focus of the chapter, while parts of Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa are absent. This is in part for lack of published research on the excluded regions, but more importantly determined by the international distribution of IB Diploma schools and students. Starting with the United States, the place of the IB Diploma in secondary schooling across countries is analysed in decreasing order of international market share (based on the number of schools as of early 2020), concluding with a brief description of the IB Diploma in the Middle East. The implications of these country-specific descriptions for the analysis of the IB Diploma in Australia are then teased out in the chapter’s conclusion.

The United States While it may be relevant, in some contexts, to approach IB Diploma supply and acquisition from the point of view of international study mobility, it is not the case in the country with more than three times as many IB Diploma schools as any other—the United States. The emergence of an IB Diploma/Certificate market in the late 1970s in the United States followed the arrival of the College Entrance Examination Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) programme for senior high school students in the mid-­1950s. The emergence of both of these private certification systems was heavily shaped by the desire to develop separate or advanced programmes for high achievers in the context of the ‘second transformation’ of American education (Trow, 1961) and the ‘democratisation’ of access to US colleges and universities. In other words, the stories of the IB Diploma and Advanced Placement programmes cannot be told without mentioning social interests for academic elitism under a regime of (increasingly) mass participation. As early as 1967, the principal of the United Nations International School (UNIS) in New York, the first US school to offer the IB Diploma and one of the earliest IB Diploma schools in the world, feared that because of its ‘package’ examination structure, ‘the introduction of the IB might have the effect of splitting off the IB course, as an élite (super-‘College Bound’) group within the school’ (Peterson, 2003). This led the IB organisation to issue certificates of achievement in individual

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subjects to students not completing the entire IB Diploma. This was bound to have an important impact on the structure of IB Diploma study in the United States, where students commonly opt for a combination of individual subject rather than the entire IB Diploma. UNIS stood out among IB schools worldwide by its internationalism (Fox, 1985), but the IB Diploma soon expanded in more socially typical US schools. The first (public) high school to offer the IB Diploma/Certificate—Francis Lewis High School in Queens, New York—did so in 1977. At this school, international university recognition was an ornament more than the core reason for adopting the programme. Instead, the desire to serve the interests of students considered ‘gifted and talented’ was far more prominent (Peterson, 2003; Fox, 2001). The IB programme found its way into US high schools in the context of the rhetoric of US educational decline of the early 1980s, itself shaped by Cold War international conjuncture. Thus, ‘although individual supporters from particular schools may well [have] desire[d] a curriculum promoting “international understanding,” the IB [was] predominantly adopted as a way of increasing academic-­ standards’ (Tarc, 2009). The 1983 A Nation at Risk report epitomised (and contributed to) the movement emphasising the importance of ‘excellence’ and ‘standards’ in education to sustain American prosperity (Finn & Hockett, 2012), and this formed the context in which the IB Diploma grew substantially (Bunnell, 2012). In fact, Starting with Students, submitted as an appendix to A Nation at Risk, celebrated the fact that ‘consideration for the needs of more gifted students […] has been manifest for a quarter-century in the Advanced Placement program [and] the International Baccalaureate’ (Adelman & Reuben, 1984). By the early 1990s, 68 public schools offered the IB Diploma or Certificates, with more diverse academic and social profiles than in many other countries (Bagnall, 2010). Nevertheless, even in the US, the IB Diploma still ‘predominantly serves students from middle to upper class families’ (Tarc, 2009). The number of IB Diploma schools grew rapidly in the following decades. By 2002, 387 US schools offered the IB Diploma, over five times as many as what was the case a decade earlier. The growth of the IB school population continued apace in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. By early 2020, the number had once again more than doubled in size, reaching 950 schools. The US IB Diploma market dwarfs those found in all other countries. The decentralised nature of curricular authority in the United States, as well as the academic competition imperative US schools have been subjected to for four decades, have positioned the IB Diploma as an instrument usable in the academic struggle schools have been made to wage against one another. Two studies in the 1980s found that ‘the main factors influencing schools’ decisions to adopt the IB were academic excellence, the challenge inherent in the syllabuses, the appeal to gifted students, and the opportunity to upgrade and enrich the curriculum school-­ wide’ (Fox, 2001). Close to 30 years later, in 2008, the same motivation prevailed behind schools offering the IB Diploma (Siskin & Weinstein, 2008b). Already in the early years, the IB programme was often used as part of a ‘magnet’ strategy to attract academically-oriented students (Peterson, 2003). The appeal of credential

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distinction in the arms race for academic advantage in a highly decentralised schooling context was to prove a fertile ground for constructing the largest IB Diploma market in the world. A distinctive feature of the IB Diploma in the US is its concentration in public high schools. As shown in the previous chapter, close to seven in eight IB schools in the US are public schools. One of the main implications is that the IB Diploma is primarily accessed by domestic students. Around one in three IB students in US private IB schools are international students, but fewer than one in 10 students in public IB schools are international students; overall, the IB Diploma is largely a domestic matter in the US (Caspary, 2011b). In 2010, 2.9% of public high schools offered IB courses in the core US high school curriculum areas. The proportion of US public schools offering the IB Diploma varies from state to state, ranging from less than 1% in Iowa to 2% in Ohio, 3.6% in California, 7.2% in Colorado and 10.3% in South Carolina (Lee et  al., 2011). Larger schools have been found to be more likely to offer Advanced Placement or IB courses (Theokas, 2013; Waits et al., 2005). Although district-wide models of IB implementation exist (Siskin & Weinstein, 2008a; Beckwitt et  al., 2015), the decision to offer the IB Diploma generally arises from individual schools. Unlike in other countries, the IB Diploma is not the dominant private credential in the US high school certification system. The College Board’s Advanced Placement, offering 38 advanced courses for high school students, is the most commonly studied ‘advanced program’ in the country. Among 2009 high school graduates, 1.9% had completed IB courses but 36.3% had completed Advanced Placement courses (Snyder et al., 2019). Between 2001 and 2011, the number of high school graduates having sat an Advanced Placement examination close to doubled (Theokas, 2013). Between 2008 and 2014, the number of public high schools with IB Diploma/Certificate graduates rose by 43% (Caspary et  al., 2015). The same logic of academic distinction has driven both trends. The IB shares with the Advanced Placement its reputation for ‘high academic standards’, and what distinguishes these programmes from regular high school curricula in the US is their ‘excellent reputation’ (Finn & Scanlan, 2019). Students engaging with the Advanced Placement typically complete one or several individual courses in subjects of their choice, as the Advanced Placement was not designed as a complete credential ‘package’. Relatedly, one particularity of the IB Diploma in the United States is the importance of individual subject studies, i.e. the completion of IB Certificates. The graduating class of 2013 from US public and private schools was equally divided between IB Diploma and IB Certificate graduates (Pilchen et al., 2019). The credit-based modular system of high school studies in the US, where students can add IB Certificate or Advanced Placement units to their regular programme of studies, explains this pattern of use. This illustrates how the position of the IB Diploma in high school systems is dependent on the broader credential market in which it becomes inserted. In the US, the IB Diploma is generally considered an ‘advanced’ or ‘rigorous’ academic programme for high school students (Theokas, 2013). The IB Diploma is perceived as ‘an elite program for a small number of high-achieving students’ and

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US high schools’ IB Diploma programmes are typically ‘run as extensions of honors programs or programs for elite students, with entrance requirements [and] complex application processes’ (International Baccalaureate, 2009). Two-thirds of IB Diploma schools have been found to formally select students into the IB Diploma, using students’ Grade Point Average (GPA) and test scores as the primary selection criteria (Siskin & Weinstein, 2008b). The IB is often retailed in ‘top-tier’ secondary schools and operates as a form of soft tracking within them, selecting the most academically successful students (typically in the top 10% of the academic distribution) (Weis et al., 2014). In Chicago Public Schools, students are required to submit an application as early as grade 8 to access the IB Diploma and ‘minimum eligibility is based on the student’s performance in the previous school year on standardized examinations in reading comprehension and mathematics, as well as in coursework’ (Cortes et  al., 2013). Selection through pre-IB tracks or informal streaming is the dominant model of access to the IB in Chicago Public Schools (Coca et al., 2012). Education for ‘gifted learners’ or ‘bright students’ has remained part of the imagery associated with the IB Diploma, and participation in ‘gifted and talented’ programmes in primary school often feeds into IB participation in the senior years of high school (Cortes et  al., 2013; Weis et  al., 2014; Kyburg et  al., 2007). But the informal and formal processes of academic selection into the IB Diploma must not be underestimated to grasp its academic standing. Indeed, as is the case for students acquiring any credential, the best predictor of the academic outcomes of IB students is their past academic achievement (Suldo et al., 2018). Even within the schools where it is available, the IB has been accessed by only a small proportion of any student cohort. On average, just over one in 20 students enrolled in US public high schools offering the IB participate in the IB (Theokas, 2013). Moreover, the process of academic selection into the programme has been found to filter students not only based on their academic skills but also their dispositions toward school learning and academic labour and their educational aspirations. In the case study work conducted by Weis et al. (2014), the authors found that ‘those students who self-select into more rigorous APs and the IB program are more intent on gaining entry to top-tier colleges’. Research also suggests that the main reason for participating in the IB Diploma/Certificates is the belief that it will assist participating students in getting a place in college, earning credits and improving their GPA in the competition for sought-after higher education places (Finn & Scanlan, 2019; International Baccalaureate, 2009). The IB has also been found to operate as a form of ‘resegregation’ in schools having undergone racial desegregation, supported by the implicit idea that ‘the IB program belong[s] to white students’ in these schools (Rosiek & Kinslow, 2016). The structure of the IB market has thus been clearly fashioned by the social struggles for academic advantage waged through the US school system. One of the implications of this academic positioning within the high school credential market is that, despite being primarily a public-school reality, the IB Diploma is a socially selective credential. The nature of selection into the IB and the common operation of the IB as an elite academic stream within schools have led it to filter

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students based on their academic dispositions. This has resulted in marked patterns of socioeconomic and ethnic participation. For instance, Black and Hispanic students are under-represented in the IB Diploma/Certificate (Kettler & Hurst, 2017), as they are in Advanced Placement participation (Theokas, 2013). On the other hand, Asian student participation in Advanced Placement examinations is over twice as high as the national average (Theokas, 2013), and their over-representation is further exacerbated in the case of the IB Diploma (see Fig. 3.1). Students from low-income families are also under-represented in the IB, despite a relative improvement in their share of IB students observed in recent decades (Perna et al., 2015; Caspary et al., 2015). Predictably, upper- and middle-class students also do better academically once enrolled in the IB Diploma than do lower-class students (Caspary et al., 2015). Do IB graduates from US schools seek to study in foreign universities, as part of international trajectories of global or transnational class formation? Data from 2005 IB graduates suggests that over nine in 10 high school graduates from US schools who had sat IB exams enrolled in US tertiary education between then and 2011, including three in four who had enrolled immediately upon completing high school (Halic, 2013). Data from 2013 high school graduates, focussing specifically on domestic (non-international) students, returns a lower rate of enrolment in US postsecondary education for IB graduates (82.2%), but still reveals a gap of more than 15% points with the broader population of high school graduates, who are less likely to enrol in tertiary education (Pilchen et al., 2019). Both of these analyses

Fig. 3.1  Ethnic representation in IB Diploma/Certificate relative to representation in overall senior high school student population (%, 2015–16) Source: Digest of Education Statistics 2018 (Snyder et al., 2019) for the ethnic profile of US students in grades 9–12 in 2016 and Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) data for the ethnic profile of IB enrolment for the 2015–16 school year

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show that IB studies have been primarily inserted in domestic trajectories of education-based class formation. In addition to the superior rate at which they participate in post-secondary education, 95% of IB graduates entering higher education have been found to enrol in universities (four-year institutions) as opposed to colleges (two-year institutions), while the comparative rate for all high school graduates was just 56% (Halic, 2013). The gap was lower when focussing specifically on US (domestic) students but still amounted to 35% points (74.7% versus 40%) (Pilchen et al., 2019). IB students are also more likely to seek and gain access to more selective higher education institutions (IGI Services, 2012a; Shah et al., 2010; Caspary, 2011b; Pilchen et al., 2019). This suggests that the most distinctive feature of the cohort of students participating in the IB in the US is an academically competitive orientation rather than international mobility trajectories. Supporting this claim is the finding that most IB Diploma graduates from non­US schools who entered US higher education in the early 2000s were American and highly academically successful students (Caspary, 2011a). The relationship between IB students, (domestic) higher education and academic success thus stands out in the largest IB Diploma credential market in the world, for students completing IB studies in both US and non-US schools. Just like the Advanced Placement has been caught up in the intensifying ‘arms race’ for academic advantage in seeking access to a highly stratified space of higher education (Klugman, 2013; Schneider, 2009), so has the IB Diploma become embedded in a US high school credential market where the forces of academic competition prevail. In other words, credentialism at the high school level is critical to understanding the IB Diploma in the US. This academic distinction-driven logic of IB Diploma use is equally relevant to understand the position of the IB Diploma in other credential markets.

Canada The IB Diploma arrived in Canada in the 1970s, first at an international school member of the global United World Colleges network. Ashbury College, an elite private school in Ottawa, began offering the IB Diploma in 1975. The IB Diploma then expanded into other schools, mostly non-international private schools, with the first public school offering the IB Diploma in 1978. At Sir Winston Churchill High School in Calgary, the IB Diploma was introduced for the ‘brightest and most motivated’ students (Bagnall, 2010). By the end of the 1980s, the IB Diploma had become available in most of Canada’s main cities, including Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg. By 1992, 47 schools were offering the IB Diploma in Canada, two-thirds of which were now public senior colleges. Students often enrolled in these schools specifically to access the IB Diploma. In Canadian IB Diploma schools, international students were a minority, perhaps one in seven students at most, and these students accounted for an even smaller share of the IB Diploma cohort—about one in 10 in the early 1990s (Bagnall, 2010).

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Most schools had established a ‘pre-IB’ programme and ‘were using the IB as an honours/enrichment program’ for academically successful students (Bagnall, 2010), with GPA used as the main selection criterion into the IB Diploma. In the early 1990s, every second IB Diploma school selected students into the IB Diploma, most often based on academic results, and ‘even in those schools that claimed to have open entry, the course was seen as an advanced program that was suitable for the brighter, more academically orientated students’ (Bagnall, 1994). This shows similarities with the position of the IB Diploma in the United States high school certification market. One major difference with the United States was the more difficult embedding of IB Diploma studies within the domestic high school credentialing system. Still in the 1990s, practically all Canadian IB Diploma schools required their students to complete the state or provincial examinations in addition to their IB Diploma. But like in the US, IB Diploma students overwhelmingly aspired to study at university, and their elite social origins set them apart from the broader population of senior high school students (Bagnall, 2010). These early features of the IB Diploma in Canada have endured, albeit with progressive changes taking place since the 2000s. IB Diploma retailing is now dominated by the province of Ontario, where 82 schools offered the programme in 2017 (Resnik, 2020) in a country of 187 IB Diploma schools in early 2020. As in the United States, the IB Diploma market in Canada is now dominated by public schools. These public IB Diploma schools’ marketing practices have shown a clear bend toward using the IB Diploma for recruiting academically successful students (Resnik, 2020). A distinctive embedding of the IB Diploma in local schooling structures is evident in Anglophone-majority areas, where the IB Diploma is used by schools as a vehicle to recruit students seeking to maintain their French-speaking proficiency (Resnik, 2020). Among Canadian universities, the IB Diploma has also been found to benefit from a credit of recognition and perceptions of high academic status (Fitzgerald, 2017). Canada-wide, the IB Diploma is primarily marketised by its retailers to students seeking university entry, and international mobility is of secondary importance to academic advantage in these promotional practices (Resnik, 2020). Case study research at a Catholic school in Ontario shows that the search for academic advantage also prevails in students’ investment in the IB Diploma (Tarc & Beatty, 2012). The need for IB Diploma students to also complete the provincial high school certificate has disappeared from the Canadian provinces where most IB Diploma schools are found. In fact, the regime of recognition of the IB Diploma by Canadian higher education institutions means that students are typically awarded the local high school diploma in addition to the IB Diploma if they complete the latter. This can prove particularly advantageous for competitive university entry, as in British Columbia (Resnik, 2020). Unlike the IB Diploma student population in most other countries, most students in Canadian schools are Canadian nationals fluent in at least two languages, typically English-French bilinguals (IGI Services, 2012b). The

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bilingual study requirements of the IB Diploma thus have a particular meaning in Canada, where English and French both have an official status.

India With 138 schools, the Indian IB Diploma market is the fourth largest one in the world. However, relative to the overall Indian high school student population, the IB Diploma remains a niche credential in the country. The situation of the IB Diploma is very different in India to what it is in North America. India does not have a country-wide public high school system, so the retailing of the IB Diploma is a private matter. Within the diverse population of private schools, elite international schools lead the IB Diploma space in India (Iyer, 2016). However, unlike in the other large country where international schools dominate the IB Diploma market, i.e. China, these schools primarily recruit Indian nationals (IGI Services, 2012c) with emigration aspirations. India is thus the country that most genuinely exemplifies the rhetoric of international study mobility through an internationally recognised high school credential. Nevertheless, this model of international study emigration corresponds to specific coordinates in the Indian social space. Indian emigrants are a small minority of the Indian population and emigration is largely a male phenomenon (over four in five outbound students) concentrated in urban and wealthy families (Kapur, 2010). Emigration from affluent households is often associated with the possession/acquisition of university qualifications for the emigrant, and the main destinations are wealthy Western countries, with close to one in three urban emigrants moving to the United States. Moreover, IB Diploma graduates represent just a fraction of this broader population of Indian higher education international emigrants, most of whom cross borders to study in foreign universities without completing the IB Diploma. The emigration pattern of Indian upper-class families is also atypical domestically and internationally. As Kapur (2010) notes, ‘Indian elites have extremely high migration rates compared to the general population’, a feature that distinguishes India from most other IB Diploma countries and helps explain the student profile of Indian IB Diploma students. Even when the IB Diploma is used as part of circuits of international study mobility, however, one cannot understand these trajectories without consideration of the domestic space of higher education. The unique elite status of higher engineering education in India (Subramanian, 2019) and the severe academic selectivity to access the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) contribute to explaining the high rate at which wealthy Indian families seek higher technology education for their offspring in foreign countries like the US (Bassett, 2016), where the academic competition for entry is milder for fee-paying international students. In such international educational trajectories, the IB Diploma can find a place of choice, but its use makes little sense without re-contextualising it within educational value systems that are both national (e.g. the importance of elite engineering education for class

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reproduction in India) and international (e.g. the status of US universities within the global space of higher education).

East and Southeast Asia Until the twenty-first century, the IB Diploma had little appeal in Asian countries outside of Australia and, more marginally, New Zealand (Fox, 2001). The last two decades, however, have seen the IB Diploma growing in various East and Southeast Asian countries. One of the specificities of the IB Diploma in this region is the relationship between national language and IB Diploma languages of instruction. Across Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Macao, mainland China and Taiwan, where over 200 IB Diploma schools can now be found, English is a medium of instruction in all IB Diploma schools, and over four in five such schools are private institutions (Wright & Lee, 2019). This linguistic feature distinguishes the IB Diploma from most of these countries’ mainstream high school certification systems. One important property of the IB Diploma in East and Southeast Asia appears to be its concentration in fee-paying schools located in major cities. In most major Eastern and South-eastern Asian cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Jakarta and Manila, access to the IB Diploma has been found to be restricted on economic grounds through expensive school fees, ranging from an average of US$ 16,181 in Manila to US$ 34,993 in Shanghai (Wright & Lee, 2019). Access to the IB Diploma, in addition to being geographically circumscribed, appears to be socially restricted based on families’ economic resources. In Hong Kong, where 33 schools offer the IB Diploma, every third IB Diploma school (including the Li Po Chun United World College of Hong Kong) is international. Yet, the label of ‘international school’ is associated with highly variable enrolments of domestic students, temporarily mobile international students and permanently settled international students (Bunnell et al., 2017). Moreover, higher education mobility is equally variable in the student body of international schools. This calls for adopting a cautious stance in associating the IB Diploma with international mobility in Hong Kong. In China, the profile of IB Diploma students is distinctly more international than it is in other countries. This can be explained by the fact that the IB Diploma is primarily retailed in high-fee international schools to which Chinese nationals do not have access (Lee et al., 2014, 2016; Wright & Lee, 2014). The majority of IB Diploma schools are found in Beijing and Shanghai (Wright & Lee, 2014). Given the predominantly expatriate recruitment of the IB Diploma in China, international university mobility is common for students completing the IB Diploma in Chinese schools, especially toward the United States and universities in English-speaking countries more broadly (Lee et al., 2014, 2016). Equally linked to the participating population is that a distinctive attribute of IB Diploma graduates from Chinese schools is their privileged social origins (Lee et al., 2014). Finally, the IB Diploma

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is primarily associated with gaining positional advantage in competitive university entrance (Wright & Lee, 2014), although this has a distinctly more international flavour than in other countries (more research is needed to measure this property of the IB Diploma in China). As in most other countries in the region, the major period of growth for the IB Diploma in Japan has been the twenty-first century. As in Ecuador, the Japanese government entered into a partnership with the IB organisation in 2011 to build a large domestic IB Diploma market. However, unlike in Ecuador, private schools have dominated the Japanese IB Diploma landscape throughout this phase of growth (Sanders & Ishikura, 2018). With 50 schools offering the IB Diploma in early 2020, this process has been less abrupt than in Ecuador, and Japan still has fewer IB Diploma schools than Australia despite having five times its population. The 50 schools offering the IB Diploma also represent just a quarter of the stated government goal of having 200 Japanese schools retailing the IB Diploma by 2018 (Sanders & Ishikura, 2018). Since Japanese is not an official language of instruction in the IB Diploma, the linguistic demands that IB Diploma studies place on students limit the appeal of the programme for most Japanese students envisioning domestic social trajectories. Given the structure of authority over Japanese higher education, its dual public/ private organisation and the nationally-organised test-based process of higher education selection for public universities (and some private universities), it is the more expensive private rather than public (national or local) universities that have led the way in granting recognition to the IB Diploma in Japan (Sanders & Ishikura, 2018). It is thus unsurprising that private Japanese universities receive more applications from IB Diploma graduates than do public universities. However, what is striking is the concentration of IB Diploma graduate applications in a handful of elite private universities, especially Keio University and Waseda University (Sanders & Ishikura, 2018), the two most prestigious private Japanese universities (Amano, 2011). Just four of Japan’s 600 or so private universities received more than half of all IB Diploma graduate applications sent to Japanese universities (Sanders & Ishikura, 2018). National universities have historically held the status of the most elite and prestigious institutions in the country, but this has been progressively changing with the emergence of elite private universities (Amano, 2011; Hiroshi, 2007). These are the universities that typically capture the interest of IB Diploma graduates seeking to enter Japanese higher education. Japan is one of the rare countries for which the destinations of IB Diploma graduates can be ascertained. A two-way pattern of international mobility is evident. Only 31.6% of transcripts sent by IB Diploma graduates from Japanese schools to higher education institutions worldwide went to Japanese universities (Sanders & Ishikura, 2018). Yet, Japanese universities remain the preferred destination of IB Diploma graduates from Japanese schools, ahead of universities in the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Singapore (Sanders & Ishikura, 2018). Meanwhile, most of the IB Diploma graduate applications received by Japanese universities were from Japanese nationals who had completed their IB Diploma outside of Japan. Over six in 10 transcripts received by Japanese universities from all IB Diploma graduates

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(Japanese or not, from Japanese schools or not) came from Japanese nationals who had completed their IB Diploma outside of Japan (Sanders & Ishikura, 2018). At least in Japan, the IB Diploma thus appears to be used as part of returning migration trajectories rather than higher education study-driven emigration. The IB Diploma is also available in other countries in the region, such as Singapore and Thailand. In one of Singapore’s elite academic schools, research indicates that the IB Diploma was adopted and shaped into an elite stream within the school for university-bound students (Loh, 2016). In Thailand, a sizeable number of students appear to use the IB Diploma as a means of gaining access to international universities in the US, England and Australia (Lowe, 2000). However, in a high-fee case study school where the study body is deliberately made international by restricting the enrolment of Thai students, Lowe (1999) found that only a minority of those who continued to university did so overseas. The very diverse profiles of the IB Diploma in different East and Southeast Asian countries does not support any straightforward generalisation as regards the embedding of the IB Diploma within domestic credential markets.

England The first English school to offer the IB Diploma was St Clare’s College, Oxford, which became an IB Diploma school in 1976. A few additional schools joined St Clare’s College in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while the market expanded more significantly in the 1990s. By 2003, there were 50 IB Diploma schools in England (Bunnell, 2008). Between 2003 and 2006, the IB Diploma market then grew by 60%, from 50 to 80 schools (Bunnell, 2008). With 94 IB Diploma schools in the United Kingdom in early 2020, the overall size of English IB Diploma retailing is comparable to what it was 15 years earlier. However, this stability masks a significant process of growth and contraction between these two time points. The necessity to contextualise the IB Diploma within the broader high school credential market in a given country is perhaps nowhere as evident as in England. In this country, the high school certification market has undergone various restructurings in recent years. The British government announced in 2006 that public funding was to be made available to allow every local education authority to have at least one IB Diploma school by 2010 (Bunnell, 2008). In the same year, the status prospects of the IB Diploma were significantly enhanced when a conversion scale of IB Diploma scores into the University Central Admission System (UCAS) tariff system was established (Bunnell, 2008). This was a crucial driver of IB Diploma growth. The UK IB Diploma market expanded significantly in the following years and peaked at around 230 schools in 2010 (Bunnell, 2015). This followed a major growth of the IB Diploma in English state schools, temporarily making them numerically dominant in the British IB Diploma landscape. In both England and Wales, the IB Diploma grew predominantly among the most affluent ‘public schools’ (Bunnell, 2008), contributing to shaping the IB Diploma as an elite

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credential market segment. The academically profitable conversion of IB Diploma points into UCAS points (at least at certain levels of academic performance) (Green & Vignoles, 2012) and public funding for IB Diploma retailing in state schools were both essential. Data from students entering universities in England in 2006–7 suggests that IB Diploma graduates have been over-represented in the prestigious and long-standing British universities, disproportionately recruited from upper class families and predominantly graduated from private schools (Green & Vignoles, 2012). In the early 2010s, IB Diploma graduates were more than twice as likely to enter one of the 20 most elite British higher education institutions than were A-level university entrants (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2011). Their over-representation in elite institutions has been attested even after controlling for prior academic achievement (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2016). The Higher Education Statistics Agency was also able to track the post-study outcomes of IB Diploma graduates, finding IB Diploma graduates more likely to access high-paying and graduate-level occupations than their A-level peers (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2011). The countries of residence of IB Diploma graduates seeking entry to British higher education institutions were distinctly international. Over 35% were domiciled in the United Kingdom, but an equal proportion came from European Union countries, especially Germany, Greece and Poland (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2011). Outside of Europe, the largest share of IB Diploma graduates seeking access to British universities came from Malaysia and Hong Kong (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2011). However, these do not reflect the student population in British IB Diploma schools. For students from domestic schools, British citizenship prevailed (IGI Services, 2012d). On the other hand, managerial and professional families have been found to be over-represented in the IB Diploma graduate cohort, with over one in three IB Diploma graduate having at least one parent in one of these occupational groups (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2011). The IB Diploma in England has remained concentrated in independent (elite private) schools and state (public) schools in London and South-Eastern England (Outhwaite & Ferri, 2017). The concentration of IB Diploma graduates in these two areas is over 20% points higher than the share of these two regions in the A-level graduate population (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2011). Meanwhile, IB Diploma graduates seeking entry to British higher education were more than three times more likely to have graduated from private school than were their A-level graduate peers in the early 2010s (41.3% versus 13.0%) (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2011). Even after the implementation of the IB Diploma in more state schools, the share of private school graduates remained more than 20% points higher among IB Diploma than A-level graduates (36.1% versus 13.8%) (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2016). The recent history of the IB Diploma in England demonstrates that the presence of an IB Diploma in a given country must be analysed by contextualising it within the structure of the domestic high school credential market. The current school distribution of the IB Diploma, especially in state schools, is the result of its growth and contraction through successive reforms of A-level qualifications between 2002

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and 2014 (Outhwaite & Ferri, 2017). The critique of a decrease in ‘quality’ (i.e. exclusionary power) levelled against A-levels by some schools and commentators in the late 2000s due to a trend of ‘grade inflation’ was a key contextual factor behind the growth of the IB Diploma in schools seeking academic distinction (Bunnell, 2008, 2015). In this context of domestic credential uncertainty, the IB Diploma became positioned as ‘an elite programme of study alongside other “baccalaureate” curricula and in competition to A level’ (Bunnell, 2008). In England, too, credentialism at the high school level has thus been critical to the trajectory of the IB Diploma. One in five IB Diploma students who received a perfect IB Diploma score of 45 at the May 2007 examination session worldwide were from English schools, testifying to the importance of academic power in the operation of the IB Diploma in Britain. The scale of engagement with the IB Diploma in England makes sense only because it could deliver academic advantage in a selective university admission process. After its peak in 2010, the British IB Diploma market segment shrunk significantly, with a decline of almost 90 IB Diploma schools observed between 2010 and 2014 (Bunnell, 2015). The beginning of the decline in 2010 coincided with the downward revision of the conversion of ‘average’ IB Diploma scores into UCAS tariffs (Bunnell, 2015) and changes to the public funding of the IB Diploma in state schools. This highlights the importance of the domestic credentialing system in shaping how the IB Diploma develops. The presence and position of the IB Diploma in a given country depends on the broader credential market within which it becomes embedded, and the academic struggles waged within it, rather than on intrinsic properties of the curriculum or on a supposed expansion of international mobility aspirations, at least in countries with internationally prestigious universities. It will be essential to take this into consideration to understand the history of the IB Diploma in Australia.

South America Until the early 2000s, Argentina was the largest IB Diploma centre in South America with just over 40 schools, followed by Mexico, Chile and Peru with no more than two dozen schools each. Moreover, in the early 2000s, only 5% of IB Diploma schools in Latin America were public schools (Hill, 2003). In this region, the socioeconomic elitism of the IB Diploma was unmistakable. Recent developments, however, have significantly expanded the overall supply of the IB Diploma in the region, as well as creating further differentiation between IB Diploma markets in different South American countries. In Ecuador, a contentious governmental initiative to build a large IB Diploma market in public high schools has been implemented since 2006 (Barnett, 2013). Especially in the early years, schools were carefully selected, including academically, to ensure the success of the initiative (Resnik, 2014). This new group of IB Diploma retailers has come to supplement (and quantitatively outweigh) the elite,

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high-fee private schools in which the IB Diploma was available in the country, where bilingual education operates as a form of educational—and more broadly cultural—capital (Prosser, 2018). As was shown in the previous chapter, this has made Ecuador the second largest IB Diploma country in the world, with 269 schools, and the third largest in number of IB Diploma candidates, behind the United States and Canada. IB Diploma students in these public schools are often selected among high-­ achieving students (Barnett, 2013), making the IB Diploma into an elite stream within an academically stratified credential market. The emergence of ‘pre-IB’ streams in grade 10 has also become common practice in schools offering the IB Diploma, taking IB Diploma-induced academic tracking further down the learning progression. The language components of the IB Diploma and the large scale of the IB Diploma market have also generated a competition between schools (public and private) to attract IB-trained and English-speaking teachers (Resnik, 2014). Altogether, the growth of the IB Diploma in Ecuador appears to have been associated with increasing between- and within-school academic stratification. After Ecuador, the largest groups of South American IB Diploma schools are found in Peru, Argentina and Costa Rica. In both Peru and Costa Rica, significant government or public initiatives have underpinned the development of a market for the IB Diploma, especially in public schools. In Costa Rica, although the IB Diploma was initially promoted by a non-government organisation, the state progressively took charge of the initiative. In all three countries, private school students tend to outperform public school students in their IB Diploma examinations and, across these three contexts, the common property of the IB Diploma is its retailing and acquisition in public schools as an academically selective programme (Beech et al., 2018). In an Argentinian school studied by Lowe (1999), most students were drawn from the local middle classes, and the majority of IB Diploma graduates went on to study at local universities (Lowe, 2000). Elite Argentinian schools with a reputation for academic ‘excellence’, namely non-Catholic private (i.e. full-fee paying) schools, have been an important group offering the IB Diploma (Prosser, 2014). Most of these elite schools have bilingual tuition, typically in Spanish and English (or Spanish and German/French), and the appeal of the IB Diploma has primarily been due to its ability to facilitate the acquisition of academic and broader social power (especially cultural capital) (Prosser, 2014). The IB Diploma in Argentina has a degree of insertion in an international circuit of education, with local recognition by public universities being limited while international and private domestic universities are more open to accepting the IB Diploma as a university entry permit, as in Japan. However, the appeal to cultural distinction within local and national contexts is equally important to understand the emergence and growth of the IB Diploma in Argentina, where ‘elites have long looked to Europe for confirmation of their own civility’ (Prosser, 2014). In a case study involving El Salvador, Lowe (1999) found that most IB Diploma schools were high-fee schools and the majority of IB Diploma students were from the local upper and middle classes. Teaching was also bilingual—Spanish and

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English—, making the language study requirements of the IB Diploma little different from regular instruction in the school. In El Salvador, case study research suggests that IB Diploma students commonly use the IB Diploma to seek entry to foreign (mostly US) universities, unlike the Argentinian situation, where students seem to mostly used the IB Diploma to seek access to local elite universities (Lowe, 2000). However, while virtually all IB Diploma students in Lowe’s case study school went to university, only around three in 10 did so overseas, typically in the United States. In this context, ‘the use of English [in the IB Diploma was] particularly valued, both for the status it confers and because English gives access to the business and commercial world’ (Lowe, 1999). In São Paulo and Brazil more broadly, the relatively small IB Diploma market is dominated by high-fee private ‘international schools’ (Almeida, 2015). The absence of Portuguese as an official language of instruction in the IB Diploma makes this credential less straightforward to integrate in the domestic high school credential market in Brazil compared to the official recognition of Spanish as a language of instruction in the IB Diploma, which enables a broader use in Spanish-speaking South American countries (e.g. Ecuador and Argentina). Beyond country-to-­country variations, however, a common feature of the IB Diploma markets in South America is their close association with practices seeking to generate academic distinction, domestically and internationally, for middle- and upper-class families.

Europe In Germany, the number of IB Diploma schools grew significantly in the first half of the 2010s to reach 73 schools in 2016 (from 44 schools in 2011) (Keßler & Krüger, 2018). Throughout this growth period, however, the proportion of private schools among IB Diploma schools remained stable at around 63%, many of which enrol a share of foreign nationals (Keßler & Krüger, 2018). The number of ‘international’ schools (not all of which offer the IB Diploma) has grown significantly in recent years, and most of these are concentrated in Germany’s large cities (Deppe et al., 2018). Nine in 10 private schools offering the IB Diploma do not teach in the country’s first language and have English as their sole medium of instruction (Deppe et al., 2018), a property distinguishing the IB Diploma in Germany from its corresponding situation in other wealthy Western countries and linking it to the IB Diploma context in East and Southeast Asia. On the other hand, students with an international migration history remain a minority in the German IB Diploma market (Kotzyba et al., 2018). In public schools offering the IB Diploma, funding for the programme must often be secured from families or other private sources rather than from the public purse (Keßler & Krüger, 2018), unlike the situation evident in Australia and the United States. One specificity of the German context is that students opting for the IB Diploma in state schools also have to complete their Abitur (Keßler & Krüger, 2018), analogous to the situation in Canada until the 1990s. In Germany, the growth

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of the IB Diploma has been explained by credentialism in the form of growing rates of Abitur (high school certificate) completion and the resulting intensifying competition for high school academic distinction (Hornberg, 2018; Deppe et  al., 2015; Keßler & Krüger, 2018). Credentialism appears to be an important thread linking the histories of the IB Diploma in countries as different as the United States, England and Germany. Spain is the European country with the largest IB Diploma market, with 129 schools in early 2020. With Spanish as an official language of instruction in the IB Diploma, growth could take place in both state and private Spanish schools. The IB Diploma has been growing steadily since the first Spanish school offered the programme in 1997, including a significant increase in the number of IB Diploma schools in the last 5 years. More than two in three Spanish IB Diploma schools are private institutions, a share over 30% points higher than the overall proportion of private secondary schools in Spain (see previous chapter). In public schools, students are often required to complete the local high school certificate alongside their IB Diploma (Valle et al., 2017). Evidence of academic selection into the IB Diploma, effectively operating as an elite track within public schools, has emerged, as has the tendency to see more experienced teachers over-represented in the IB Diploma (Valle et  al., 2017). The academically competitive logic of investment in the IB Diploma is thus evident in Spain too. Although less present than in Spain and Germany, the IB Diploma is offered by more schools in Sweden than any other Nordic country, with 29 retailers in early 2020. Many of Sweden’s IB Diploma schools are found in the affluent suburbs of Stockholm, where upper-class families have had a long history of private schooling. Although the recent growth of the IB Diploma has made it somewhat less socially elitist than in the past, it remains associated with Sweden’s elite high schools and families (Börjesson et al., 2016). In a country where over four in 10 upper secondary schools use ability grouping/tracking (Ramberg, 2016), the IB Diploma has taken a place, alongside science programmes and a small number of social science programmes, at the apex of the social stratification of Swedish upper secondary education (Börjesson et al., 2016). In the Netherlands, where 19 schools offered the IB Diploma in early 2020, the emergence of the IB Diploma and other ‘international education’ tracks and streams have been analysed from the point of view of school and student competition (Weenink, 2009). On schools’ side, the decision to offer the IB Diploma has been found to occur in both ‘expansive’ and ‘threatened’ schools in a country characterised by per capita funding, public funding for private schools, a formal ‘choice’ regime and the absence of enrolment zones. The adoption of the IB Diploma in both categories of schools appears to respond to domestic rather than international forces. On students’ side, participation in the IB Diploma has been explained as part of domestic class reproduction strategies. In both types of schools, the IB Diploma has been made to operate as an elite academic stream (Weenink, 2009). Here, too, the relevance of the phenomenon of high school credentialism cannot be ignored.

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The Middle East The IB Diploma’s official languages of instruction and examination include neither Arabic, nor Hebrew, nor Turkish. Accordingly, language limitations make the IB Diploma a rather marginal certificate in this region. However, the transnational economic networks Middle Eastern countries are integrated in have shaped the presence of a few IB Diploma schools in the region. In a high-fee private bilingual school in Jordan where around six in seven students are Jordanian, Lowe (1999) found that the IB Diploma was used by most IB Diploma graduates to go to university overseas, in the United States and the United Kingdom. Most of these students then returned to Jordan after graduating from overseas universities. In Israel, interest in the IB Diploma has risen in a context of competitive tension in the use of the matriculation examination system to access higher education (Yemini & Dvir, 2016), i.e. credentialism. In Turkey, international schools are a minority share of the IB Diploma market. In the 12 non-international private schools offering the IB Diploma in 2007, domestic enrolments were the norm (Halicioğlu, 2008). IB Diploma students seeking to enter Turkish universities are also required to complete the Turkish high school programme, and since the IB Diploma does not provide any specific advantage for matriculation-based university selection (Halicioğlu, 2008), the IB Diploma cannot easily be used as part of domestic strategies of academic advantage. Generally speaking, in this region of the world, the association between IB Diploma and transnational class formation is not straightforward.

Australia With 77 schools in early 2020, the IB Diploma is more represented in Australia than in any other country with fewer than 30  million inhabitants. The logics of IB Diploma retailing and acquisition have both received attention from Australian researchers. The role of the pursuit of academic advantage has been studied in different schools and states, and various implications have been drawn about the credential ecology of the IB Diploma in Australia. Research suggests that Australian school IB programmes (including but not limited to the IB Diploma) are concentrated in private schools located in the affluent suburbs of large cities, with a skewed social recruitment toward upper middle-­class and upper-class families (Kidson et  al., 2019; Dickson et  al., 2017). Previous research also found that the majority of IB Diploma students in Australian schools were born in Australia and monolingual, suggesting a predominantly local take up of this credential (Doherty et al., 2012; IGI Services, 2012e). Analysing IB Diploma retailing in three (one private and two public) Australian schools, Doherty (2013) argued that, in the context of competitive pressures for student enrolments, the IB Diploma functions as a ‘point of difference’, or instrument of distinction, in local school markets. Her case study research suggests that

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private schools implementing the IB Diploma have done so ‘more for its academic standards than any internationalist ethics’ (Doherty, 2013). Meanwhile, in the case of public IB Diploma schools, the two cases involved indicate that retailing the IB Diploma is used ‘to recruit and retain academically ambitious students’ (Doherty, 2012). Academic distinction and advantage thus seem to be at the forefront of the use of the IB Diploma in both public and private schools. The same research project highlighted the different school and local ecosystems in which the IB Diploma operates. In the first public school, demand for enrolment in the IB Diploma exceeded the number of places available, creating IB Diploma scarcity in the local context. In the second public school, access to the IB Diploma was academically selective and the school had introduced the programme to compete with local private schools to attract academically successful students (Doherty, 2013). Although the over-representation of public schools in Doherty’s case study research cautions against generalising her results to the broader Australian IB Diploma school population, this school-to-school variety highlights the importance of engaging in a detailed examination of the features of IB Diploma retailing and acquisition. Is international university study mobility common practice among IB Diploma students in Australian schools? Existing research does not answer this question satisfactorily. IB Diploma students have been found to contemplate ‘imagined transnational routes and mobile orientations’ (Doherty et al., 2009), but no actual research has been conducted on Australian IB Diploma graduates’ international study mobility practices. Comparing the post-school aspirations of IB Diploma and local credential students within IB Diploma schools, Doherty et  al. (2012) found that IB Diploma students more frequently intended to pursue university study outside of Australia than their peers did. Once again, however, no data on their actual post-­ secondary study pursuits was collected. Data collected from teachers can be useful to identify the distinctive properties of IB Diploma students. A survey of 253 teachers from 26 Australian IB Diploma schools conducted in the late 2000s found that, in teachers’ eyes, the most distinctive characteristic of IB Diploma students was their intention to study at university (Doherty & Shield, 2012). Equally important is the fact that, to these teachers, an ‘internationally mobile lifestyle’ and a ‘multilingual background’ were the least distinctive characteristics of the IB Diploma cohort, at least among the list of descriptors included in the study design (Doherty & Shield, 2012). This suggests that examining the IB Diploma from the point of view of the accumulation of academic capital may prove essential to understanding its presence in Australia. Indeed, IB Diploma graduates appear to be significantly more successful in gaining access to elite Australian universities than are other graduates (Edwards & Underwood, 2012), just as is the case in the United States and England. The consolidation of academic power seems to be essential to understanding the socio-academic uses of the IB Diploma in Australia. In a South Australian school where the IB Diploma was introduced in 1999, research examined 116 grade 10 students’ choices between the state certificate and the IB Diploma for their senior years. Virtually all students—including those choosing the state certificate—saw

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the rules regulating the conversion of credential scores into tertiary admission scores as an advantage for the IB Diploma (Coleman, 2009). Analysing how Australian universities portray the competitive benefits that the IB Diploma affords its graduates in accessing their institution, Doherty (2012) concluded that ‘explicit concerns about maximising university entrance scores are in the public representation and consumption of the IB in Australia’. A 2006 survey of 159 senior academic and administrative staff at 40 Australian and seven New Zealand universities found that seven in 10 perceived the IB Diploma to be superior to the local alternative, although the study equally showed that staff often had little tangible data on which to base their assessment (Coates et  al., 2007). Meanwhile, schools advertising their IB Diploma programme have been found to focus on promoting it as a vehicle for academic advantage (Whitehead, 2005), above a tendency to encourage international mobility (although these are not mutually exclusive). A separate study concluded that Australian teachers tend to perceive the relationship between Australian state certificates and the IB Diploma as one of vertical stratification, where the IB Diploma is most appropriate for academically successful students (Dixon et  al., 2014). A careful study of the IB Diploma in Australia thus cannot avoid examining empirically the making of academic power through the IB Diploma. Research using a sample of 138 IB Diploma students at one Australian university indicates that, after accounting for students’ social origins and high school academic performance, IB Diploma graduates’ results were not better than those of graduates with other high school graduates (Edwards & Underwood, 2012). Students’ social origins may, however, be precisely what most distinguishes the IB Diploma student cohort. The same study suggests that socioeconomically advantaged students tend to be over-represented among IB Diploma graduates enrolling at Australian universities (Edwards & Underwood, 2012). However, since the study involved a single institution, and since area-based measures of students’ social origins were used rather than individual-based measures, these results are imprecise. Doherty et al.’s research (2012) also suggests that the social recruitment of the IB Diploma may be more elitist than that of the domestic public high school credentials. However, the authors’ analysis was based on a small sample of state certificate students and their parents (71 students and 35 parents across 26 schools, i.e. fewer than 3 students and 1.5 parents per school). The analysis of credential market stratification within IB Diploma schools was also not contextualised within the broader stratification existing between IB Diploma schools and other schools. More research is thus needed to satisfactorily identify the social recruitment into the IB Diploma in Australia. Perhaps the most robust results about the IB Diploma in Australia concern the credential differentiation within schools offering the IB Diploma alongside a state high school certificate. The main finding is that stratification appears to systematically follow from the establishment of such within-school credential differentiation, just as in the United States. In a South Australian school in 1999, students argued that the ‘best teachers’ were teaching the IB Diploma, and some explained that this played a part in them choosing this credential, as did the absence of the ‘less able’ students in IB Diploma classes (Coleman, 2009). Reports that the IB Diploma

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cohort benefited from smaller class sizes were also made by some students (Coleman, 2009). Research conducted in an Australian public school offering the IB Diploma a decade later suggests that smaller classes for the IB Diploma may be a significant phenomenon (Doherty, 2013), thus supporting the concentration of resources in a specific credential market segment. Doherty’s case study research also found that some Australian schools organise additional (i.e. supplementary to regular school hours) tutorials specifically for their IB Diploma students (Doherty & Shield, 2012). Examination preparation, routines and drills, coaching and mock marking using previous years’ examination papers were found to be core to the learning culture in IB Diploma classes (Doherty & Shield, 2012). In these case study schools, evidence of the IB Diploma operating as a (formal or informal) form of ability streaming has been collected, as has the practice of constructing ‘pre-IB Diploma’ preparatory tracks to organise academic selection into the IB Diploma credential (Doherty & Shield, 2012), as in Canada and the United States.

Generalisations and Conclusion The detailed examination of IB Diploma retailing and acquisition internationally shows both important similarities and country-by-country differences. In some countries (e.g. the US and Canada), the IB Diploma has become embedded in domestic school structures dominated by public schools, while in others (e.g. England, Argentina and Australia), the IB Diploma is primarily a private school reality. Where it is predominantly associated with private schooling, the IB Diploma can be more or less concentrated in ‘international’ (e.g. China) or domestic schools (e.g. Spain). But even where it is mostly found to be available in private ‘international’ schools, the extent to which these international schools cater to foreign families is uneven, as the cases of Sweden, Germany and Hong Kong show. Altogether, these differences highlight the great complexity of characterising the international situation of the IB Diploma without losing significantly in contextual relevance. The analysis of the IB Diploma in different countries highlights the more or less active role played by nation-state authorities in enabling and supporting the IB Diploma. It also reveals different articulations with domestic higher education. The IB Diploma is more or less recognised as an alternative to the local high school certificate, leading to different regimes of study where the IB Diploma is completed independently from or alongside the high school certificate. Moreover, the IB Diploma can be more or less positively recognised by countries’ higher education authorities, in some cases accepted for enrolment by some institutions but not others, and the relative value of the IB Diploma compared to the domestic high school certificate can be more or less preferential. As Doherty (2013) argues, the IB Diploma ‘can only be animated through the particularities of local school systems’, and the constitution of IB Diploma markets thus ‘results from strategies aimed at insertion of the IB into national education markets and its adaptation to different national systems’ (Resnik, 2012). In fact, taken globally, what stands out is the

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impossibility to grasp the reality of the IB Diploma under a single interpretive regime dominated by international mobility and the reconfiguration of nation-states’ social fabric under forces of ‘globalisation’. Although information is not uniformly available for all countries, the IB Diploma appears to be a phenomenon concentrated in cities. Access to the alleged internationalism of the IB Diploma thus remains bound to urban conditions of existence. On the other hand, international mobility trajectories appear very unevenly associated with IB Diploma acquisition internationally. As Lowe (1999) has argued, the IB Diploma-international mobility equation is by no means unproblematic. The majority of IB Diploma students, just like the majority of schools offering it as a high school study programme, are inserted in local and state circuits of education more than in international ones, despite the marketing efforts of IB Diploma schools and the IB Organization. In most countries, international study mobility using the IB Diploma is only a minority phenomenon among IB Diploma graduates. This association appears strongest—although far from systematic—in India and some schools in South America and Southeast Asia, once again showing great country-to-­ country (and even school-to-school) variation. Moreover, the exact patterns of international study mobility of IB Diploma students are plural, with outbound mobility to access higher education in foreign countries evident in some countries (e.g. India) while returning mobility for national expatriates is more common in others (e.g. Japan), thus precluding the possibility of simple generalisations. If the nature of IB Diploma schooling and IB Diploma recognition regimes vary, similarities between countries are discernible in the way the IB Diploma is used within schools and by families. Where the IB Diploma is available alongside the high school certificate within schools, which appears to be the dominant model around the world, within-school stratification tends to follow the introduction of the IB Diploma. The IB Diploma tends to operate as a special stream, track or class, selecting a sample of students from the broader high school student population. In such contexts, the IB Diploma operates as an academically selective stream, formally or informally recruiting the most academically successful students. Associated with this outcome are pre-IB Diploma selection mechanisms, which generate the pattern of academic stratification evident in most countries. This fact was encapsulated in Doherty’s claim that the retailers and users of the IB Diploma ‘are more alert to its “B” potentials, than its “I” qualities’ (Doherty, 2012). The importance of credentialism to explain the emergence of the IB Diploma, as well as the consistent pattern of academic discrimination associated with it, suggest that, of the two hypotheses offered by Lowe (2000) and discussed in the previous chapter, the one relating to positional advantage in an intensifying competition for higher education places may be more generally relevant than the one relating to the distinctive status of English instruction, which seems more relevant to make sense of the IB Diploma in South America and parts of Southeast Asia. As Resnik (2009) argues, the growth of the IB Diploma ‘not only responds to the increase in the number of mobile families in the world; it also responds to the search of a more exclusive education by national elites’, and the latter logic may be more important than

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the former overall. No study has yet found credentialism to be irrelevant to the historical trajectory of the IB Diploma in a given country. The importance of academic competition in shaping patterns of retailing and acquisition of the IB Diploma provides the foundation for systematically analysing the IB Diploma from the point of view of the consolidation of academic power, as is done in the rest of the book. In turn, this calls for a theorisation of the IB Diploma as a credential rather than simply a curriculum or study programme. Making sense of the IB Diploma implies situating it within the intensifying academic competition for selective university places in a context of mass credentialing at the high school level (Tarc, 2009; Lowe, 1999). Related to its distinctive academic pedigree, the other consistent attribute of the IB Diploma internationally is that it tends to show a socially biased recruitment. The social elitism of the IB Diploma population is perhaps the second most common thread across countries (Lowe, 1999, 2000) and globally (Bunnell, 2011), albeit to varying degrees depending on its insertion in local credential markets. The social selectivity of the IB Diploma is an unambiguously more common feature of this private credential than is its association with international study mobility. In fact, there is not a single country where evidence shows that IB Diploma students are socially representative of the student body in the senior secondary years—let alone dominated by socially disadvantaged students—, or even representative of their grade cohort within IB Diploma schools. Analysing the IB Diploma as a credential thus compels us to examine its socio-academic uses, as I seek to do in the following chapters.

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Chapter 4

The Definition of Recognised Academic Competence in Credential Markets

Abstract  Educational credentials are certificates of academic competence issued to students who demonstrate mastery of a specific body of knowledge under regulated assessment conditions. The definition of recognised academic competence in a given credential determines students’ opportunities for acquiring it. As a result, where several credentials coexist, the relative demands of different certificates shape their respective socio-academic recruitment. To make sense of patterns of investment in different regions of a credential market, it is necessary to compare the curriculum and assessment demands that different certificates place on students. The case of a high school credential market in Australia is used to illustrate how the academic demands of the state high school certificate and the IB Diploma dictate the profits associated with different credentials. The chapter concludes by arguing that curriculum and assessment structures are a crucial element behind the segmentation of the high school credential market in Australia. Keywords  Curriculum · Assessment · Examinations · Choice · Inequality · Stratification

Introduction In building theories of educational inequality, sociologists most commonly investigate how the organisation of school systems contributes to social inequalities in educational opportunities and outcomes. Much less attention is given to out-of-­ school family practices relevant to school learning (Lahire, 2012, 2019), and even less is said about what the social inequalities in academic outcomes owe to the selection, organisation and modes of transmission of the knowledge that makes the curriculum (Lahire, 1999, 2008). This is problematic, because the relationship between unequal family resources, the organisation of schooling and educational inequalities is produced through differentiated abilities to invest in and master the demands of the curriculum. In other words, the curriculum is the medium through which social resources are converted into academic capital. The curriculum must

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Q. Maire, Credential Market, International Study of City Youth Education 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80169-4_4

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thus be considered as an essential component of the social processes of production of academic value. This is particularly important in analysing how value is made in credential markets. The quantification (e.g. through scores) and qualification (e.g. through grades or distinctions) of credential value analysed in detail in Chap. 10 rests on conventions on the relative difficulty of different forms of curriculum expertise, both across and within subjects. The structures of the knowledge system (i.e. the curriculum) and the assessment system associated with a given credential are the main building blocks of the definition of legitimate academic competence. These include the conditions that students must meet for being awarded the certificate, as well as the nature, depth, complexity and breadth of the content they need to master to meet assessment requirements. Students may be required to complete a set list of subjects or may be able to select a range of subjects following a number of more or less flexible rules; the number of courses or subjects to be completed may be higher or lower; the rules of combination of study units can be more or less prescriptive; students may be assessed using various kinds of written, oral or other performance-based productions; assessment activities may be more or less numerous and of varying durations; they may take place over time or be concentrated in a critical period (i.e. at the end of the course of study); assessment may be more or less individual or collective, technologysupported or unassisted; student productions may be assessed within the school or externally; the system used to describe or report students’ assessment products may use various formats (e.g. numeric or categorical); and the combination of individual assessment results may follow different rules (e.g. raw scores versus weighted and/ or scaled scores at the individual, school, district or state levels). All these credential properties help determine the demands that a credential places on students and its ability to operate as a vehicle of academic distinction. The differentiation of the credential market produced by the shift from a monopoly credential situation to one of credential competition raises additional questions. In particular, it compels us to investigate what the distribution of academic value in the credential market owes to differences in the definition of recognised academic competence across curricula and assessment systems. In high school credential markets where local or state certificates coexist with the IB Diploma, curriculum and awarding conditions may vary significantly from certificate to certificate. It is thus essential to compare these credential structures to understand the relative standing of different certificates.

Curriculum and Educational Inequality Central to any credential is its curriculum, i.e. the body of knowledge that students must master. Curricula are segmented and stratified bodies of knowledge and skills to be acquired by students, whose mastery is generally expected to be demonstrated in various forms of assessment. An original contribution of Richard Teese’s research

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has been to show that the curriculum is not a neutral vessel in the making of educational inequalities. Rather, the curriculum is a hierarchical structure that operates as the locus of investment of family and school resources to produce academic distinction. Particularly useful to make sense of inequality in unified (i.e. non-tracked) school systems, Teese’s theory of the relationship between social classes and the curriculum articulates what educational inequality owes to the specific cultural and cognitive demands embodied in codified study subjects. On one hand, Teese’s work has shown that the cultural demands of curricula generally reside in the shaping of subject content into specific and highly codified forms of language practice, more or less distant from students’ daily use of language. The language skills expected in academic subjects are perhaps the most evident type of cultural demand that discriminates between students from different social origins (Teese, 2007). On the other hand, school curricula’s cognitive demands are generally demands of abstraction and theory-mastery: ‘powers of abstraction and concentration, sensitivity to form and structure, logical and retentive abilities, language and communicative skills, personal organization, intrinsic motivation, self-confidence and maturity of perspective and argument’ are expected of all students to succeed in the academic curriculum (Teese, 2000). These are not evenly distributed across social space either. These cultural and cognitive demands form the very structure of the curriculum. Curricula are generally made of a set of discrete subjects, to be assembled using an additive model (i.e. students must study X subjects meeting Y criteria to be awarded their certificate). It is thus through the structure of individual subjects that the curriculum places demands on students, so that school subjects can be defined as ‘codified, authoritative systems of cognitive and cultural demands’ (Teese, 2000). Subjects are generally (albeit not always) relatively coherent bodies of knowledge built from the knowledge produced in scientific or other epistemic communities. The mode of conversion of these ‘expert’ bodies of knowledge into curriculum subjects generally implies that subjects become structured around ‘generic cognitive demands in codified bodies of specialised knowledge’ (Teese, 2007). For the same reason, ‘most subjects in the curriculum have a theoretical emphasis. They are concerned with understanding processes and patterns, and with managing abstract ideas’ (Teese & Polesel, 2003). Since students from different social origins are unequally prepared to perform this intellectual conversion (Lahire, 2008, 2011), the definition of recognised academic competence in the curriculum is central to the making of social inequality in education. In the secondary years, the architecture of the most academic region of the curriculum is derived from the academic disciplines as fields of knowledge rather than from the existing knowledge of learners accessing the curriculum (Hannan, 1985). For instance, the educational authority of mathematics and the sciences in the curriculum stems from the scientific authority of mathematicians and physicists rather than from a democratic pedagogical model of access to mathematical areas of knowledge and ways of knowing. This has important implications for the social openness of the curriculum. In the case of mathematics, for instance, ‘strong elitism is a salient feature of the ethos’ of professional mathematicians (Zarca, 2011), and

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the hierarchical structure of mathematical expertise finds itself structuring the organisation of mathematical learning in school. This is evident in the construction of a theory-driven hierarchy of mathematical ability in the high school curriculum, a hierarchy that generally excludes working-class students as much as it enables middle- and upper-class students to demonstrate their expertise (Teese, 2000). The social implications of the fact that a school subject’s authority is tied to its institutional pedigree in professional communities are not only evident in terms of social class recruitment. The curriculum is also a highly gendered space (Fullarton & Ainley, 2000), and the organisation of the relationship between subject structure and knowledge area is an important driver of this gendered distribution. For instance, mathematics is a highly masculine profession (Zarca, 2006; Case & Leggett, 2005), and this pattern is equally evident in the domination of boys in high school mathematics in Australia (Lamb & Ball, 1999; Teese et al., 1995). The gendered structure of mathematical practice and culture tends to lead girls and boys, through socialisation, to internalise a gendered perception of mathematical ability—including self-­ rated ability—which supports the gendered division of mathematical participation and learning (Whitehead, 1996; Nuamah, 2019). In the high school curriculum, learning units within a given area of knowledge tend to be organised sequentially (rather than serially) and vertically to culminate in the highest cognitive demands of the high school curriculum. In the case of the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE), Richard Teese’s research has empirically demonstrated that the vertical integration of subjects is one of increasing abstraction and de-contextualisation away from the out-of-school social situations which students experience (Teese, 2000; Teese & Polesel, 2003). In mathematics, for instance, the hierarchy of content is designed as an ‘induction into progressively more abstract domains of reasoning’ (Teese & Polesel, 2003). As one progresses through the curriculum, one thus moves toward more remote relevance and cognitive mastery that increasingly appears to be ‘for its own sake’ for many students. But the sovereignty of scholastic abstraction is not restricted to mathematics and science subjects. In the VCE, for instance, the cognitive requirements of most high school subjects, such as English and foreign languages, often revolve around the core idea of conceptualisation (analysis, synthesis, and abstraction), and its varied manifestations ‘span the different disciplines’ (Teese, 2000). This definition of academic worth serves discriminating purposes far more than assisting with the promotion of universal knowledge acquisition.

Credentials, Curriculum and the IB Diploma in Australia In Australia, the high school credentialing system is organised as eight distinct certificates, one in each state and territory. In most states, high school certification is dominated by a single state-issued certificate. One exception is the state of Victoria, where a second certificate issued by the same public authority currently exists. The Victorian Certificate for Applied Learning (VCAL) provides a vocationally oriented

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alternative to the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) and qualifies students for further studies, including in Technical and Further Education (TAFE, i.e. non-­ university tertiary education) institutions and, in some cases, universities (albeit not through the standard tertiary admission route). Outside of Victoria, however, public credential authorities offer a single product in Australia (the VCAL will also be reintegrated into the VCE by 2025, bringing Victoria in line with the other Australian states and territories). Internationally, in dual systems where state-issued academic and vocational high school certificates coexist, the latter do not always allow students to apply to university. In most jurisdictions, the regular high school certificate remains the standard entry pathway into university. In Australia, it is thus in state-­ centred credential markets dominated by a single certificate that the IB Diploma has come to be inserted. As I will examine at length in Chap. 12, the IB Diploma started expanding in Victoria (and Australia more generally) in the 1990s, when inclusive (i.e. unified) high school certificates had been established in most states and territories. This raises the following question: What does the availability of the IB Diploma imply for the definition of recognised academic competence in formerly unified high school credential markets? The availability of the IB Diploma in Australian schools creates a situation of public-private credential competition and institutes a duopoly structure in the credential market. Is this transformation associated with a diversification of the forms of academic expertise recognised in the curriculum, or do the same academic hierarchies prevail across certificates? What does this imply for the production of academic value in the credential market? In this chapter, I seek to answer these questions by focussing on the state of Victoria, Australia.

Curriculum Hierarchy and Credential Hierarchy The Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) is the main high school certificate in the state of Victoria in Australia. It is issued by a public body, the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA). For the IB Diploma, on the other hand, the IB organisation maintains private control over its senior high school credential. The minimum number of contact hours per subject is defined by the IB organisation; the syllabus for each subject is developed by the IB organisation; the bi-annual examination sessions are superintended by the IB organisation; the examination papers are produced by the IB organisation; the benchmark for individual grades in a subject is dictated by the IB organisation; the external assessment procedures are overseen by the IB organisation; and the final decision of conferral of the IB Diploma is at the discretion of the IB organisation. Even though both credentials must be approved as valid senior secondary qualification by the state qualifications accreditation body, the Victorian market for high school academic credentials is thus structured around two competing certificates, one administered by public education authorities and the other privately controlled.

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In this section, I compare six properties of the VCE and IB Diploma curricula to unearth their respective definitions of legitimate academic competence. These properties include their curriculum architecture, curriculum volume, curriculum assemblage, curricular variety, language study requirements, and academic profitability. This approach offers a useful point of entry into the relative educational demands placed on students by different credentials, which underpins their contribution to the academic stratification of the credential market.

Curriculum Architecture The Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) is structured into subjects (called ‘studies’) organised sequentially as sets of four successive units. A unit corresponds to a semester-length course of study, so that completing units 1 to 4 typically amounts to studying the subject for 2 years full-time (i.e. during Years 11 and 12, the two final years of secondary schooling). Each unit is designed to include 50 h of classroom instruction, for a total of 200 h over 2 years if students study the complete sequence of units, 1 through to 4 (VCAA, 2018). Students generally complete between 20 and 24 units across five or six studies in their senior secondary years (VCAA, 2019). The IB Diploma Programme is offered as a two-year certificate of secondary education for students in grades 11 and 12. Students need to enrol in the programme for both years in order to be eligible for taking the final examinations and being granted the IB Diploma. Students undergo 2 years of study leading to end-of-course assessment in six subjects and also complete three ‘core units’. The three core units include an extended essay, designed as an independent research piece culminating in a 4000-word paper, a theory of knowledge course in which students are invited to adopt a reflexive approach to knowledge, and a creativity, activity and service project-based unit (often involving community or ‘service learning’ activities). Theory of knowledge is expected to include a minimum of 100 teaching hours over 2 years, Creativity, activity and service is expected to involve at least 150 h of active participation, and a minimum of 40  h of work are recommended to students for the extended essay (International Baccalaureate, 2016). This brings the IB Diploma study requirements to a grand total of nine subjects. Richard Teese’s work has conclusively shown that, in the VCE, progression in the curriculum demands engagement with increasingly abstract bodies of knowledge and forms of learning. Is this definition of academic competence also prevalent in the IB Diploma? The comparison of the grade descriptors for a low and a high grade in different IB Diploma subjects makes it possible to sketch an answer to this question. Starting with mathematics, the description associated with a score of 3 (below average) to the description associated with a score of 7 (the highest) clearly reveals the hierarchical structure of abstraction in IB Diploma mathematics. A student obtaining a 3 ‘demonstrates partial knowledge of the syllabus and limited understanding of mathematical principles in performing some routine tasks [and]

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attempts to carry out mathematical processes in straightforward contexts’. On the other hand, a student obtaining a 7 ‘demonstrates a thorough knowledge and understanding of the syllabus; successfully applies mathematical principles at a sophisticated level in a wide variety of contexts; successfully uses problem-solving techniques in challenging situations; recognizes patterns and structures, [and] makes generalizations’ (International Baccalaureate, 2014, my emphasis). The increase in formal cognitive demands requiring theoretical manipulation between scores 3 and 7 is evident: the higher the score, the higher the demands of self-­ referential symbolic manipulation. Because these grade descriptors apply to all mathematics subjects, conceptual mathematical fluency is highly rewarded even in entry-level mathematics in the IB Diploma (i.e. Mathematical Studies). In IB Diploma science subjects, students are assessed using common grade descriptors across different sciences. The comparison of scores 3 and 7 descriptors supports the claim that, in the IB Diploma too, the theoretical core of the different sciences represents the highest form of learning expected from students. The student obtaining a score of 3 ‘shows a partial comprehension of basic concepts and principles and a weak ability to apply them’ and ‘shows some ability to manipulate data and solve basic or routine problems’ (International Baccalaureate, 2014, my emphasis). On the other hand, a student scored 7 displays ‘a thorough command of concepts and principles’, ‘selects and applies relevant information, concepts and principles in a wide variety of contexts’ but also ‘constructs detailed explanations of complex phenomena and makes appropriate predictions’ (International Baccalaureate, 2014, my emphasis). Above all, a top-scoring student in IB Diploma sciences masters concepts and principles and is highly capable of manipulating them skilfully and creatively, whereas a student failing to reach an average grade possesses no more than basic mastery of scientific concepts and is inefficient at manipulating and using them in novel contexts. The main structural similarity between the IB Diploma and the VCE is thus that the hierarchical structure within subjects finds greater abstraction and conceptual demands at its apex. Even though the overall hierarchical structure of abstraction within subjects is comparable in the IB Diploma and the VCE, it does not mean that their respective difficulties are equivalent. Here, research conducted by Dixon et al. (2014) indicates that IB Diploma subjects place a greater emphasis on theoretical depth than the Australian state curricula, especially in the sciences and, within the sciences, especially in chemistry. The volume and level of cognitive and cultural demands placed on students may thus be greater in the IB Diploma, pushing the logic of abstract relevance and self-referential study further than in the VCE. This narrower definition of recognised academic competence in the IB Diploma is likely to position it as a socially exclusive credential in the Australian credential market.

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Curriculum Volume If the intensity of the cultural and cognitive demands expected from students in a subject like chemistry are greater in the IB Diploma than in the Australian state certificates, as argued above, their intensity is also elevated through the volume of curriculum engagement required of students. In their final year (twelfth grade), Australian students typically study four to six subjects, with (minor) variations from state to state (Fullarton & Ainley, 2000), while all IB Diploma students need to complete six subjects to receive their IB Diploma. Moreover, IB Diploma students also need to complete three core study components, while VCE students can be awarded their certificate by completing just four subjects. This is likely to exert a significant degree of socio-academic selectivity into the IB Diploma, only recruiting students who feel able to take on a volume of study greater than is typically expected in the final school year. Even outside of any formal barriers of entry into the IB Diploma, self-selection based on perceived competence is thus likely to lead to a skewed academic and social recruitment. Beyond this quantitative argument, it must also be noted that the total cultural and cognitive demands of any curriculum cannot be reduced to the sum of the demands of its individual subjects. There is a systemic dynamic at play that makes the requirements of the entire curriculum superior to the sum of requirements of its individual subjects. The way in which students can assemble their studies matters as much as the number of subjects they have to complete.

Curriculum Assemblage The first curriculum assemblage rule shaping the demands of a credential is the presence and number of compulsory subjects or fields of knowledge. The more prescriptive the selection of subject is for students, the more likely it is to be experienced as a closed and exclusive system. In the VCE, the only compulsory study is a Units 3–4 sequence in English. No other curriculum area or subject is compulsory, and similar rules apply in most state high school credentials around Australia. This leads to specific patterns of engagement in curriculum areas, where participation is more common in certain regions of the curriculum. The liberal model of subject choice in the Victorian state credential has led to shifting fortunes for different subjects and curriculum areas within the VCE in recent decades. Victoria has witnessed a decline of the humanities and a rise of the sciences and mathematics, as well as business and technology among Australian secondary school students (Hannan, 1987). Foreign language studies and the arts have long been the curriculum areas in which student engagement is most limited in the senior years in Australia (Blackburn et al., 1985). Albeit to a more limited extent, the same can be said of the humanities, at least since the 1980s. English and mathematics, on the other hand, have become the foundation of senior high schooling in

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the era of mass participation (Blackburn et al., 1985). As a result of these long-term trends, the current patterns of curricular engagement in Year 12 (i.e. the twelfth grade) are uneven across curriculum regions (Fig. 4.1). Most students study some form of mathematics and English in grade 12. From students’ point of view, the need to study these two subjects in the IB Diploma is thus not likely to significantly restrict access to this private credential. This is not true of all curriculum areas and participation rates rapidly decline, from six in 10 students in the humanities and social sciences to three in 10  in non-English languages and the arts and just one in 10 in health and physical education. In the IB Diploma, by contrast, although mathematics is technically the only compulsory field of study, the rules regulating engagement in the curriculum are more restrictive than in the VCE. The curriculum assemblage rules require that students select six subjects drawn from six different subject groups: (1) studies in language and literature (language A), (2) language acquisition (language B), (3) individuals and societies, (4) sciences, (5) mathematics, and (6) the arts. Students can replace their arts subject choice by an additional subject in curriculum areas one to four, but engagement with curriculum areas one to five is compulsory. Accordingly, even though no specific subject other than mathematics is prescribed, students must manage four other curriculum areas—two language ones, humanities and social sciences, and sciences. The degree of flexibility in assembling a curriculum menu that suits students is far more limited in the IB Diploma than in the VCE, potentially presenting a ‘risk’ or a less appealing study combination for students not confident in their ability to master the demands of five (to six) different curriculum areas. The second curriculum assemblage rule is the possibility of specialising, or multiplying engagement in the same areas of knowledge. In the VCE, students can select two, three or more subjects from the same curriculum area and have these count toward their VCE score; they can even take multiple versions of mathematics. Outside of English, few demands of breadth of study and exposure to various

Fig. 4.1  Percentage of Australian twelfth grade students studying different curriculum areas (2013) Source: ACARA (2016)

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epistemic cultures is required. In the IB Diploma, on the other hand, there is no curriculum area in which students can study more than two subjects. Students are also prevented from taking two mathematics subjects. VCE students can complete their certificate by selecting subjects from only two curriculum areas (e.g. English and sciences), while a minimum of five different curriculum areas need to be covered by IB Diploma students. Accordingly, opportunities for specialising, both in the sense of selecting subjects only from a narrow range of curriculum areas and selecting multiple subjects from the same curriculum areas, are more limited in the IB Diploma. This has important implications for the comparative academic selectivity and social recruitment of the two segments of the credential market. If students must study a greater number and/or broader range of subjects, the cognitive demands of the curriculum are magnified. In addition, the combination of subject-based demands also increases the cultural requirements placed on students: to be successful in the IB Diploma, it is far more imperative for students to be academically well-rounded and to possess advanced self-organisation and time management skills than it is in the VCE. These skills are no doubt important in the VCE, but they are not as critical as in the IB Diploma. The greater possibility for curriculum specialisation in the VCE is also important because the relationship and proximity between subjects and areas of knowledge is variable across the curriculum and depends on the architecture of different subjects. For instance, ‘overlapping or mutually supporting and reinforcing content’ (Teese, 1994) characterises the relationship between physics and mathematics more than that of other pairs of subjects (Teese et al., 1995), as the strong correlation in student scores in these subjects indicates (Teese, 1995), even though they are formally classified in different curriculum areas in both the VCE and IB Diploma. Therefore, having to pick subjects from six different curriculum areas necessarily means having to select beyond mutually supportive areas of the curriculum. This exerts further demands on the student in terms of managing concurrent cultural and cognitive loads in different branches of knowledge. Finally, the fact that students can assemble a subject menu specialised in mathematics and the sciences in the VCE and the IB Diploma is also an important factor to understand gendered patterns of engagement in these respective credentials. Chapter 2 showed that girls tend to be over-represented in the IB Diploma, including in Australia. Among high-achieving students, Teese et al. (1995) have shown that the tendency for curriculum specialisation in mathematics and the sciences is one of the key ways in which high-achieving boys assert their academic power in the credential market, while high-achieving girls tend to select more diverse curriculum menus, straddling languages, the humanities and science/mathematics. As the former possibility is absent from the IB Diploma, a more limited proportion of high-­achieving boys is likely to see the IB Diploma as the best option to demonstrate their academic power, while the curriculum assemblage conditions of the IB Diploma may not appear as restrictive to high-achieving girls.

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In summary, the compulsion of mathematics and science studies, on one hand, and second language and humanities/social science study requirements, on the other, grants less freedom for cultural and cognitive specialisation in the IB Diploma than in the VCE.  These conditions have implications for the academic rights of entry to the IB Diploma. The compulsory nature of mathematics and science subjects in the IB Diploma makes this certificate especially disposed to contribute to academic discrimination between students, including through the efficacy of school resources in producing unequal levels of mastery. At the same time, the greater study requirements of the IB Diploma are likely to deter students less confident in their science or humanities abilities, but also students uncertain about the breadth of their academic competence.

Curriculum Variety Another feature of curricula that underpins the social definition of legitimate academic ability is the variety of subjects available in the curriculum. The more diverse the menu of subjects that students can select to meet the awarding conditions of a credential, the more likely it is that students with different interests and competencies can assemble a menu that enables them to demonstrate their academic abilities. The VCE offers an extensive range of subjects across curriculum areas including languages, humanities and social sciences, sciences, mathematics, technologies, health and physical education, extended investigation and arts. In 2019, over 20 language subjects were available in addition to five English language subjects. The catalogue of VCE studies is extensive, but school-to-school variation in available subjects means that this variety only corresponds to what is theoretically available to students. Larger schools tend to offer greater curricular variety than do smaller schools, both in the VCE (Lamb, 2007) and other Australian state curricula (Perry & Southwell, 2014). Research conducted in Victoria also indicates that the range of subjects effectively available to students is narrower in schools serving more socially disadvantaged communities (e.g. in the western suburbs of Melbourne) (Helme et al., 2009). In the IB Diploma, the number of subjects theoretically available (i.e. developed by the IB organisation) in the different subject groups ranges from four in Group 5 (Mathematics) (from the May 2021 examination session onward, Group 5 will include only two subjects) to 10 in Group 3 (Individuals and societies), and even more in Groups 1 and 2 due to subjects being available in different languages. As with the VCE, IB Diploma schools generally offer only a subsample of all the subjects theoretically available in each subject group. The social and school size patterns of access to the breadth of the curriculum are thus likely to carry over to the IB Diploma, although empirical analysis is needed to confirm this hypothesis. One of the major differences between the VCE and the IB Diploma curricula lies in the role of vocational studies. Over 25 vocational education and training (VET) studies were available as part of the VCE in 2019, including a number of ‘scored’ studies that can count toward a student’s tertiary admission score. VET studies

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cover a wide range of trade and service activities such as business, agriculture, engineering, health, hospitality, plumbing and sport and recreation. Students also have the option of including Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) units as part of their VCE. In New South Wales, too, students can include a VET subject in their Higher School Certificate curriculum menu and have it included in the computation of their tertiary admission score (Vickers, 2011). Around one in six twelfth grade students in Australia in the late 1990s included at least one vocational subject in their study programme (Fullarton & Ainley, 2000), and VET participation has further expanded in recent years. Unlike the VCE, where vocational studies can count toward students’ certificate score and tertiary admission, the IB Diploma does not offer any vocational subjects. As a result, unlike the VCE, the IB Diploma exclusively values academic competencies and is less inclusive of a breadth of study interests (Australian Council for Educational Research, 2006). This is likely to have significant implications for the accessibility of the IB Diploma to a broad range of students. Since vocational subjects are particularly studied by socially and academically disadvantaged students (Lamb & Ball, 1999; Teese & Polesel, 2003; Polesel, 2008), their unavailability as part of the IB Diploma makes it more socially and academically discriminating than the VCE.

Languages When contextualised within the broader Australian high school credential market, what may be most distinctive about the IB Diploma curriculum is its dual language study policy. The extent to which this distinguishes the IB Diploma from other domestic credentials is rather specific to Australia. Unlike what one finds in South America and Europe, where bilingual IB Diplomas are prevalent, Doherty (2009) has hypothesised that the language study requirements of the IB Diploma are likely to operate as a form of social selection in the Australian context. Apart from the study of ‘community’ languages, foreign language study has long been ‘a dry process’ (Hannan, 1985) with a limited appeal to large segments of the Australian social space. Among students who graduated from the VCE in 2018, only one in five had studied a grade 12-level language other than English (Department of Education and Training, 2019). Except for Mandarin, the dominant foreign language subjects in the curriculum of Australian high school credentials tend to have only remote educational value (being generally not required for selective university courses) or interactional value (being generally of limited domestic communicational relevance). In grades 11 and 12 in Victorian public high schools, the most commonly studied language subjects are Chinese (Mandarin), French and Japanese (Department of Education and Training, 2019), two of which have little connection with the non-English languages most commonly spoken by Australian residents. In Victorian non-Catholic private schools, where, as the analysis will show, the Victorian IB Diploma school market is concentrated, senior years students most

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commonly study French, Chinese, Japanese and German (Tuckfield, 2017), calling for similar conclusions.

Academic Profitability From students’ point of view, in credentials requiring individual subject choice, each subject ‘is seen as a more or less accessible and favourable opportunity to earn marks in academic competition’ (Teese, 2007). Given the rules regulating students’ curriculum assemblage in the VCE and other Australian high school certificates, and given the statistical procedures applied to score distributions in different subjects (see below), the curriculum becomes structured into unequally academically profitable regions and subjects based on students’ likelihood of receiving high scores. Subjects’ academic selectivity (i.e. the likelihood of students of different ability levels to select them), students’ knowledge and skills, and the structure of knowledge and nature of assessment in different subjects combine to produce unequal chances of obtaining high scores in different subjects, making them unequally profitable for the constitution of academic capital. The extent to which subjects are accessible to a broad population of students and their average academic yield can be mapped for both the VCE and IB Diploma to compare the academic structure of their respective curricula. The lack of Australia-­ specific data for the IB Diploma makes the comparison very imperfect, as Australian VCE students are effectively compared to the worldwide population of IB Diploma students. Seven in 10 IB Diploma candidates at the November 2018 examination session were schooled in just five countries: Australia, Peru, Ecuador, Singapore and Argentina (International Baccalaureate, 2019). With over one in two candidates from South American countries and just 15% of candidates coming from Australian schools, the results presented below must thus be taken as an invitation for further research and as more illustrative than explanatory. In the IB Diploma, subjects are offered at two levels of difficulty: Standard Level (SL), with a recommended course of study of 150 h minimum over 2 years, and Higher Level (HL), with a recommended minimum of 240 teaching hours over 2 years. Students are required to complete a minimum of three and no more than four Higher Level subjects to be awarded their IB Diploma. Among HL subjects, the most common studies are English second language, Spanish first language and History. In this group, the mean academic score is lowest in History and highest in English. Among SL subjects, the most common studies are Mathematics, Mathematical Studies and Biology. Here, mean scores show limited variation but are consistently low. The most academically profitable subject is Chinese foreign language, followed by a group of four subjects with comparable academic yields: two English first language subjects, economics and chemistry. Figure 4.2 reveals that the SL/HL divide is an important element of the structure of the IB Diploma curriculum. In fact, nine of 11 frequently studied SL subjects have a mean score inferior to 4.5. This suggests that SL subjects may be chosen

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Fig. 4.2  Academic profitability of IB Diploma subjects (2019) Source: International Baccalaureate (2020) Note: the graph includes all subjects with at least 1000 candidates. Subjects labelled ‘A’ are Group 1 subjects; subjects labelled ‘B’ are Group 2 subjects; subjects labelled ‘Ab.’ are Ab Initio language subjects (i.e. foreign language initiation); ‘Lit’ refers to Literature and ‘Lal’ refers to Language and Literature. The curriculum area to which a subject belongs is indicated in brackets. ‘SL’ are standard level subjects and ‘HL’ are higher level subjects

more often to fulfil the strict curriculum assemblage requirements of the IB Diploma rather than out of elective preference. By contrast, 10 of the 12 commonly studied HL subjects have a mean score superior to 4.5. This suggests that investment in HL subjects is often approached as a form of academic specialisation in which students invest and are rewarded by higher marks. Figure 4.2 equally shows that, at the international level, curriculum areas are also important to understand the accessibility and academic profits of different IB Diploma subjects. The often-studied and high-scoring HL subjects are found across most subject groups, except the arts. This means that, in most curriculum areas, advanced learning can be made academically profitable through methodical preparation. By contrast, the often-studied but low-scoring SL subjects are often science and mathematics subjects. This suggests that, for many IB Diploma students, the study of mathematics and science may be experienced as a forced choice rather than an elective choice, unlike language and social science subjects. The distribution of subject scores across curriculum areas implies the unequal academic profitability of different curriculum areas themselves, at least given the socio-academic profile of students enrolling in the IB Diploma worldwide (Fig. 4.3). In all six curriculum areas, most candidates score at least 4 out of 7. However, the proportion of scores superior or equal to 4 is comparatively low in the sciences and mathematics at around six in 10, while it exceeds nine in 10 for the language subject groups. Certificate-wise, the most academically discerning subjects in the IB

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Fig. 4.3  Percentage of candidates scoring 4 or above, by IB Diploma subject area (2019) Source: International Baccalaureate (2020)

Diploma are thus science and mathematics. These subjects are the most discriminating between students, i.e. the ones that most effectively assert differences in academic abilities. On the other hand, the proportion of students scoring below 4 is lowest in the two language subject areas, where at least nine in 10 students score a 4 or above. These subject groups make a weaker contribution to the distribution of students into two groups, i.e. those who are awarded the IB Diploma and those who are not, as well as to the gradation of the IB Diploma scores. How does this overview of the academic profitability of different regions of the IB Diploma (worldwide) compare to the academic stratification of the VCE? Figure  4.4 plots the number of candidates and mean scaled subject scores in all subjects with at least 2000 candidates in the 2019 graduating cohort. The mean academic profitability is highest in Specialist Mathematics, a subject that stands above all others in allowing the vast majority of its students to be rewarded with a very high score (40.1 on average). By contrast, the most broadly accessible mathematics subject, i.e. Further Mathematics, rewards its average student with a study score below 28, a score even slightly inferior to the score of the average student in English (28.1). Finally, more recently developed and applied subjects, such as Food Studies, Outdoor and Environmental Studies, Product Design and Technology, Studio Arts, and Media are the least academically profitable high-participation subjects. Even though the difference in reference populations between the two maps makes a systematic credential-to-credential comparison impossible, a few general conclusions can be drawn from this analysis. First, in both the IB Diploma and the VCE, the subjects that command broad participation rarely offer high average academic yields. The average score of students in the most commonly studied subjects is never very high, meaning that broad participation often comes hand in hand with academic discrimination within the subject. By contrast, the most academically profitable subjects are generally taken

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Fig. 4.4  Academic profitability of commonly studied twelfth grade VCE subjects (2019) Source: VCE 2019 Unit Completion Outcomes data and VTAC (2019) Note: the graph includes all subjects with at least 2000 candidates. The number of candidates refers to the number of students completing the highest unit (typically Unit 4) in a given subject. The scaling of VCE studies is analysed below

by only a small minority of students, both in the VCE and the IB Diploma. In this respect, the structure of academic profitability of the VCE and IB Diploma may not lead to different academic recruitments across these two credentials in Australia. The second observation is that many of these subjects recruiting lower-achieving students in the VCE are simply not available in the IB Diploma. As a result, the IB Diploma is likely to be more academically exclusive than is the VCE, by virtue of its narrower definition of academic competence. Third, the most commonly studied mathematics subject in both curricula is a lower-level subject. In other words, in both cases, mathematics is constructed as a stratified field of knowledge in which advanced or high-level mathematics is made into an exclusive, restricted space to be accessed only by a small proportion of students. While this has been previously reported regarding the VCE (Teese & Polesel, 2003; Teese, 2000), the present analysis indicates that it is also the case in the IB Diploma, even though the international findings presented in Chaps. 2 and 3 suggest that access to the IB Diploma is already academically and socially restrictive. This further highlights the commonality of the academic hierarchy existing in both the IB Diploma and the VCE. Fourth, in both the IB Diploma and the VCE, high-level science and mathematics subjects tend to be among the most academically profitable, and their students are almost systematically rewarded with higher average scores compared with

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standard-level subjects. This indicates that the IB Diploma’s rules of curriculum assemblage do not prevent students from making profitable academic investments in mathematics and science, as high-achieving students do in Australian state high school certificates. Finally, in both the VCE and the IB Diploma, arts studies are neither academically profitable nor compulsory. This highlights the importance of the rule allowing IB Diploma students to relinquish their arts subject in favour of an additional subject from another curriculum area, even though it is one of the six curriculum areas of the IB Diploma. One can thus hypothesise that if IB Diploma students had to complete arts studies, either the social recruitment of the IB Diploma would be different or this curriculum area’s academic profitability would be transformed. The fact that IB Diploma students can choose to remove the arts from their curriculum menu, even though they cannot do so for any other curriculum area, is an important mechanism enabling students to consolidate their academic power in the IB Diploma.

Examinations and Inequality The exchange value of a credential generally draws on students’ demonstration of the acquisition of knowledge components, appraised in formal assessment settings. As Ashenden et al. (1984) have argued, ‘of all the hidden and subterranean influences on the curriculum none is more decisive than assessment.’ Especially when tied to credentialing and certification, assessment heavily dictates what schools and students can make of the curriculum (Connell, 1993). As a result, the way assessment is constructed in a credential shapes its definition of legitimate academic competence. A major distinction between assessment systems is found between school-based assessment, generally conducted by students’ own teachers, and external assessment. External assessment typically requires specific assessment conditions, and examinations have long been a standardised format for external assessment. As argued in the introduction, the expansion of the credential-based monopolisation of social opportunities has been historically linked to examination systems (Weber, 2013). Yet, examinations are neither socially nor academically neutral (Teese, 2000). Examinations are specific assessment situations in which emotional self-­ control, memorisation skills and the ability to complete assessment tasks under conditions of urgency are rewarded. The prevalence of standardised and external examinations in high school credentials tends to generate a particularly significant backwash effect on teaching and learning, especially in science and mathematics. In these subjects, highly resourced schools tend to be able to master the demands of the curriculum systematically and with a high level of reliability, especially if these demands are made transparent in successive examination papers or examiner reports. It is thus far more frequent for schools to ‘teach to the test’ in these subjects than in the traditional humanities

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(Teese, 2000). As a result, mathematics and the sciences are more prone to the effect of resourcing inequality than are other subjects, for ‘the capacity to reduce teaching to methodical routine and to saturate the instructional environment with resources is much greater’ in these subjects (Teese, 2000). Because of the role of examinations and external assessments in the making of academic inequality, between-credential differences in approaches to assessment can produce differences in the socio-academic accessibility of different certificates. This is relevant to the high school credential market in Australia. In the VCE, the proportion of external assessment is generally identical within curriculum areas but varies across them. For most VCE studies, between 50% and two-thirds of the final study score is based on external assessment (VCAA, 2018). The weight of external assessment tends to be higher in mathematics and science subjects and lower in English and humanities and social science studies. In the IB Diploma, students’ academic performance is evaluated using a combination of internal and external assessment. Generally speaking, the IB Diploma assessment relies heavily on externally marked examinations. The upper limit of internal assessment is set to 50% of the total grade for each subject, but the IB organisation considers that the weight of internal assessment should generally be kept under 30% in each subject (International Baccalaureate, 2013). Although the place of externally assessed examinations varies from subject to subject, examinations and external assessment dominate the scoring of all IB Diploma subjects. As a result of these assessment policies, a systematic difference between certificates exists in the Australian credential market. The importance of external assessment in the IB Diploma typically exceeds the weight of external assessment in the VCE. Previous research indicates that this is also true when the IB Diploma is compared to other high school certificates in Australia (Dixon et al., 2014). The heavily examination-centric IB Diploma assessment regime is significantly different from ‘the more progressive practices of moderated school-based assessment in some parts of Australia’ (Doherty et al., 2009), especially Queensland. The hypertrophied place of external examinations in the IB Diploma is thus likely to skew its academic and social recruitment toward students with the educational dispositions required for succeeding under examination conditions.

 cademic Risk, Self-Exclusion and Credential A Value Predictability Differences in the definition of recognised academic competence between the IB Diploma and Australian high school certificate are evident in both curriculum and assessment. But it is in their approaches to overall scoring and credential awarding that the IB Diploma and the VCE differ most systematically. Both the IB Diploma and the VCE use an additive model of scores obtained in individual subjects to generate an overall credential score. However, the way these two certificates go about

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calculating this overall score is very different, as are the conditions for this score to lead to the awarding of the credential. VCE students are awarded their VCE if they meet the study requirements set out by the VCAA.  No particular score is required to acquire this credential (VCAA, 2018), although this does not mean that all VCE graduates can extract social value out of their high school certificate at the same rate (see Chap. 10). In the IB Diploma, on the other hand, based on their results in six subjects (plus three core components), students are required to reach a total score of 24 (i.e. an individual score of 4 on average in each subject) in order to be awarded the certificate. The IB Diploma is thus constructed on a ‘pass or fail’ model of certification. A range of scoring-­ related conditions can prevent IB Diploma students from receiving their certificate (International Baccalaureate, 2016), even if they successfully complete the 2 years of study and participate in all assessment activities. This means that the VCE and the IB Diploma are fundamentally different in their awarding structure: the former is participation-based while the latter uses a pass/fail model. This has particular implications for the logic of credential choice in the Victorian market. Given its peculiar scoring structure in which low scores can result in non-­ awarding of the IB Diploma and, thus, of a tertiary entrance rank for university application, uncertainty about their ability to perform at least reasonably well in six different subjects is likely to deter students from choosing the IB Diploma. Studying the IB Diploma comes with a risk of not being awarded a credential at all due to sub-standard academic performance, while this risk is largely absent from the VCE. Again, this is likely to exclude the least self-confident learners from engaging in the IB Diploma. The ways in which IB Diploma and VCE scores are converted into tertiary admission scores also reveals how differently academic value is generated in these two credentials. In both the IB Diploma and the VCE, scores in individual subjects are assembled into overall study scores, which are then converted into numerical tertiary admission ranks (ATAR) for students seeking to enter Australian universities. However, the method used to convert IB Diploma and VCE scores into ATAR is different. While in the IB Diploma, the grades awarded in each subject are the scores that students ultimately receive, in the VCE, an elaborate process of statistical transformation takes place to convert assessment grades into subject scores. VCE scores undergo scaling, standardisation and normalisation so that students’ scores represent a precise description of their rank position relative to the performance of other students in a highly discriminating scale. In the IB Diploma, by contrast, no such statistical transformation takes place, and the description of students’ performance relative to other students is tied to a seven-point scale without decimals. From a subjective point of view, the degree of uncertainty in the return on academic investment in a given subject is thus lower in the IB Diploma. Since, at least for highachieving students, the predictability of returns on one’s investment (rather than the intrinsic appeal of the knowledge encoded in a subject) is precisely a key driver of choice in credential markets, as attested by the tendency for them to select subjects where high scores are a common currency (Teese & Polesel, 2003), the IB Diploma

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may prove particularly appealing to academically successful students with an acutely calculative approach to subject (and credential) choice. Empirical support for this claim is provided in Chap. 7, where it is shown that the rules of conversion of subject scores into credential score and ATAR, especially the presence or absence of subject scaling, loom large in students’ reasons for enrolling in the IB Diploma.

Credential Hierarchy: Student and Teacher Views Since curricular and assessment demands are not equivalent across certificates, students’ estimation of their ability to master these demands is likely to play a decisive role in shaping pattern of investment in different subjects within a credential, but also in a given credential over another. In a survey conducted in 2015, final year IB Diploma students in Australia assessed the comparative demands of the state certificate and IB Diploma. They were asked to express their agreement with the following statements: • Studying the IB Diploma is more demanding than studying the local high school curriculum • The pace of study in the IB Diploma is faster than the pace of study in the local high school curriculum • IB Diploma students study their subjects in greater depth than state certificate students To be sure, caution is needed in interpreting IB Diploma students’ responses, as students may have internalised external discourses on the distinctive worth of the IB Diploma (Wright & Lee, 2020). Their views may thus not accurately reflect the objective demands placed on students in different high school study programmes. A more comprehensive study would ask the same questions to students enrolled in the state high school certificate in the same schools to obtain firmer conclusions. Still, the triangulation of the analyses of curriculum- and assessment-based definitions of academic competence, student views and teacher views is useful to strengthen the reliability of the overall credential comparison. Of the 147 IB Diploma students who completed the survey, a minimum of 87.8% (129) responded to each of the three questions. The proportion of students who agreed with each of the three statements is reported in Fig. 4.5. Close to three in four IB Diploma students (74.6%) agreed that the curriculum demands a greater depth of study in the IB Diploma than in other Australian state high school certificates. Their views are consistent with Dixon et al.’ (2014) conclusion that IB Diploma subjects place a greater emphasis on theoretical depth than the Australian state curricula. More than four in five IB Diploma students (83.1%) also agreed that the pace of study is faster in the IB Diploma. Again, their views support the argument made earlier: if students need to master a greater volume of knowledge to demonstrate their ability in a given subject, the pace of study to allow them to master this content increases. Finally, over nine in 10 students (90.7%) agreed

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Fig. 4.5  Percentage of IB Diploma students who agree or strongly agree with comparative statements on the IB Diploma (2015) Source: IB Diploma student survey, 2015

that the IB Diploma is more demanding overall than the state certificates. This is consistent with earlier findings by Bagnall (1994) in Canada and Australia. Taken together, these results lend credit to the claim that the structural features of credentials are decisive to understand the demands they place on students and thus, ultimately, their respective market position. The claim of an accelerated pace of instruction in the IB Diploma classes is also supported by previous research using observational methods. Case study research in Australian IB Diploma classes conducted in one school in 2009 revealed a ‘fast-­ paced instruction, seamless routines […] and absence of behaviour management concerns’ (Doherty & Shield, 2012). In another school, IB Diploma teachers ‘aimed to cover the IBD curriculum within three semesters so the balance could be devoted to revision and “mock” exam practice. This goal further increased the pacing of instruction’ (Doherty & Shield, 2012). These findings have important implications for the position of the IB Diploma in the high school credential market. Indeed, the comparatively high-paced instruction in the IB Diploma is critical to its socio-­ academic recruitment, for pace of learning is one of the central mechanisms through which subjects are made academically and thus socially discriminating (Teese, 2007, 2014). Triangulating the analysis of curriculum structures and student views with teacher perspectives further strengthens this conclusion. In 2013–2014, researchers from Deakin University interviewed the IB Diploma coordinators in 46% of Australian schools offering the IB Diploma at the time (29 out of 63) and surveyed heads of departments or discipline coordinators in mathematics, science, English and history in 16 of them. In the case of mathematics, for instance, their study concluded that, according to most school teachers and leaders, students enrolled in the IB Diploma study mathematics in greater ‘depth’ (Dixon et al., 2014). In this context, the word ‘depth’ precisely refers to greater theoretical and conceptual demands. In addition, teachers who taught mathematics in the IB Diploma considered that the

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‘standard of achievement’ expected in the IB Diploma Mathematics HL exceeds the standard expected in the higher-level mathematics subject in state certificates (Dixon et al., 2014). Overall, IB Diploma teachers believed that the IB Diploma was more suited to ‘high-ability’ students: the state certificate ‘caters better for the lower end of academic abilities whilst the IB Diploma caters better for the upper end of academic abilities’ (Dixon et  al., 2014). In other words, a common perception among IB Diploma teachers is one of a vertical stratification of mathematics subjects between the IB Diploma and the state curriculum. In their opinion, IB Diploma mathematics subjects are more academically demanding than their state certificate counterparts. The same conclusion is reached in English and science, where the IB Diploma syllabi are considered more ‘intellectual’, ‘abstract’ or ‘demanding’ by Australian teachers (Dixon et al., 2014). This vertical stratification may not be due solely to the respective structures of the IB Diploma and VCE curricula. It may have at least as much to do with the way the programme is used by schools, teachers and families, as the following chapters will show. Still, teachers, like students and curriculum analysis, point to structural differences in curricula and assessments between the IB Diploma and state certificates, and these differences must be considered to understand the socio-academic recruitment of—and academic value associated with—different segments of a credential market.

The Comparative Social Stratification of Credentials The analysis presented so far suggests that, compared to the VCE, the structure of the IB Diploma is likely to make it particularly academically selective in the Australian context, far more than the state high school certificate. Moreover, the procedures regulating the constitution of academic capital in the IB Diploma are also likely to be particularly appealing to academically successful students for whom the predictability of a high yield for their academic investment is important. But can a comparative analysis of credential structures also explain the social patterns of access to the IB Diploma observed internationally? An essential finding of the sociology of education is the fact that a curriculum’s academic selectivity tends to systematically lead to its social selectivity, by virtue of the social distribution of academic capital. As Richard Teese’s research has repeatedly shown (Teese et al., 2009; Teese, 2000, 2014; Teese & Polesel, 2003), a strong correlation exists between the academic recruitment of a subject and its social recruitment. Internationally, curriculum differentiation in non-tracked high school curricula has also been found to be a central element of the translation of social inequality into educational inequality. This has been empirically verified in countries such as England (Moulton et al., 2018; Henderson et al., 2018; Iannelli, 2013), the United States (Attewell & Domina, 2008), Scotland and Ireland (Iannelli et al., 2016).

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One of the main reasons for the correspondence between the social structure and academic structure of the curriculum is that its cognitive and cultural demands are not socially neutral. The academic curriculum, especially its academically dominant regions, is constructed as a distillation of middle class culture (Teese, 1981). If it is true that the power of economic and cultural resources can be converted into academic capital only through the demonstration of cultural mastery of the curriculum and its demands, it is equally true that the discriminating logic presiding over the organisation of knowledge in the curriculum means that the academic curriculum is the key vehicle through which the economic and cultural capital of families is transmuted into educational power (Teese, 1981, 1998). The more academically discriminating these demands are, the more likely they are to be socially discriminating as well. In early twenty-first century Victoria, the most socially selective subjects were Music history, Classics, Renaissance history, French, German and Chinese, while the ones that most exclusively recruited poor students were Turkish and Vietnamese (Teese et al., 2009). The former group also contained some of the most academically selective subjects, while the latter predominantly recruited lower-achieving students. In the current credential market context, the rules of IB Diploma curriculum assemblage, including the need to study a non-English language, make it likely that socially and academically advantaged students will be disproportionately represented within it. Indeed, if a subject’s academic selectivity tends to imply its social selectivity, by extension, one can hypothesise that it is all the more likely to be true about a credential. The more academically demanding a credential is, the more socially exclusive it is bound to be. This hypothesis is systematically put to the test in Chap. 8.

Conclusion The structure of credentials students invest in is not indifferent to the making of educational inequality. The properties of each certificate are a constitutive feature of their position in the credential market. This chapter has examined the definition of recognised academic competence embodied in the curricula, assessment systems and awarding rules of the certificates that make up two high school certificates in Australia. Despite a number of similarities, especially as regards the domination of abstraction in defining academic worth and the weight of external assessment, the analysis has revealed structural differences between credentials and argued that these differences are bound to determine how schools and families invest in different regions of the market. The IB Diploma and the VCE are not equivalent systems of accreditation of academic worth. This is evident in the fact that, although the VCE is not a socially and academically inclusive curriculum, the IB Diploma is even less so (see Chap. 8). With highly prescriptive rules of curriculum assemblage, a high curriculum volume, high cognitive and cultural demands, limited curriculum variety through the

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exclusion of vocational studies and heavy external examinations, the IB Diploma is made academically and socially exclusive. Its structure shows little indication of any effort to make the IB Diploma suitable for a socially and academically diverse student population (more on this in Chap. 11). Instead, the combination of these elements makes the IB Diploma unwelcoming for participation by a large body of students in a mass credential market. These credential structures reveal that, in both the IB Diploma and in the VCE, and arguably more severely in the IB Diploma, ‘the needs of the strongest students come to prevail—in how the curriculum is organized (as a structure of progressive difficulty), in the discriminating power of assessment instruments, and in the refinement of reporting grades’ (Teese, 2000). The different credentials available in a given market are never fully substitutable goods. They possess different properties that shape their socio-academic recruitment and academic value. The extent and rigidity of this market segmentation is in inverse proportion to the ease with which schools and families can opt for one or the other certificate and derive the same academic profits from their investment. Credential markets represent a form of educational differentiation that shares properties with tracking or streaming within schools. In both cases, a differentiation in cultural and cognitive demands, instruction and unequal learning opportunities available to students is visible (Gamoran, 2010). However, credential alternatives constitute a more complex form of educational differentiation. In an academic credential market, two or more distinct ‘games’ exist, and each of these games has its own set of rules, yet both ultimately function as resources for students competing for the same places in higher education. High school certificates such as the VCE and the IB Diploma are thus more commensurable than are the VCE and the VCAL.  They are potential investment options for the same categories of students, yet they are also not fully commensurable, as this chapter has made clear. This makes them especially likely to operate as a form of hidden academic stratification beneficial to academically endowed students within formal credential ‘choice’ regimes.

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Weber, M. (2013). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (E. Fischoff, H. Gerth, A.  M. Henderson, F.  Kolegar, C.  W. Mills, T.  Parsons, et  al., Trans., Vol. 2). University of California Press. Whitehead, J. M. (1996). Sex stereotypes, gender identity and subject choice at A-level. Educational Research, 38(2), 147–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013188960380203 Wright, E., & Lee, M. (2020). Does the International Baccalaureate ‘work’ as an alternative to mainstream schooling? Perceptions of university students in Hong Kong. Studies in Higher Education, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1793929 Zarca, B. (2006). Mathematician: An elitist and male-dominated profession. Sociétés contemporaines, 64(4), 41–65. https://doi.org/10.3917/soco.064.0041 Zarca, B. (2011). The professional ethos of mathematicians. Revue Française de Sociologie, 52(5), 153–186. https://doi.org/10.3917/rfs.525.0153

Chapter 5

Urban Schooling, Private Schooling and the IB Diploma in Australia

Abstract  The distribution of credential study opportunities across schools is a decisive aspect of the structure of high school credential markets. For credentials not universally available, the profile of schools in which they can be studied contributes to determining the social categories of students having access to them. The analysis presented in this chapter demonstrates that the IB Diploma is a niche market segment offered in a small number of Australian schools. It reveals the high concentration of the IB Diploma in private schools and in Australian cities and finds that international schools are a minor group among them. The chapter goes on to show that the majority of schools offering the IB Diploma also offer the state-based high school certificate, creating a situation of within-school credential differentiation and underpinning a process of certificate choice among students. After highlighting the high cost of IB Diploma retailing to schools, the chapter concludes by discussing the reasons leading schools to make this private credential available to their students. Keywords  Urban education · Private schools · Segregation · School choice · Markets

Introduction Across education systems, both public and private schools (as well as, in some instances, technical and vocational education providers) prepare students to acquire high school certificates. In most countries, the mainstream high school diplomas are designed and administered by local, state or national authorities. In recent decades, however, alternative certificates not issued by public institutions have emerged. In this book, I describe these as ‘private credentials’ to highlight the contrasted source of authority over these new diplomas compared to the administration of ‘state certificates’. This must not be taken to mean that state authorities play no role with respect to private credentials, as I demonstrate in Chap. 10. Unlike their public counterparts, private certificates tend to be offered in only a fraction of high schools in a given country. From a sociological point of view, this © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Q. Maire, Credential Market, International Study of City Youth Education 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80169-4_5

109

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5  Urban Schooling, Private Schooling and the IB Diploma in Australia

brings the issue of the school distribution of credential study opportunities to the fore, a matter that is largely settled in single certificate markets. The geographical distribution of credential access becomes decisive, as does the issue of access to the various certificates in different types of schools, given that the main users of private schools tend to be middle- and upper-class families. In this chapter, I examine the geographical and school sector availability of different options in the high school credential market in Australia to better understand what the arrival of the IB Diploma in a largely single certificate credentialing system does to social access to the different parts of the market.

Schools as Credential Retailers Schools do not directly supply or control the supply of credentials; they are institutional intermediaries assisting families in acquiring credentials; hence, their role can be described as one of retailing. Schools provide learning experiences relevant to the acquisition of specific credentials and are influential in marketing and managing entry to credentials. Because the services they provide are tied to, and oriented toward, specific certificates, high schools can be conceptualised as credential retailers (Cambridge, 2002). Although the notion of ‘retailers’ is not entirely adequate, it is perhaps what comes closest to the proper role and activity of schools as regards credential acquisition. Most Australian high schools retail the mainstream state-­ designed and accredited certificates (e.g. Higher School Certificate or Victorian Certificate of Education) with, in some jurisdictions, alternative vocational certificates (e.g. the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning) as well. In a number of schools in Australia, this offering is supplemented with the IB Diploma.

A Credential Market Within Schools The two dominant modalities for the provision of competing certificates in the school system are (1) separate retailing in different schools, and (2) joint retailing in the same schools but targeting different groups of students. This distinction is important because it implies different modes of separation of learners: in the former case, between-school separation (and segregation) prevails; in the latter, the institutionalised separation of different educational trajectories is embedded in divisions between classes and between more or less formal tracks and streams. These modalities can coexist within the same school system. In France, for instance, students preparing for different categories of high school certificates can be enrolled either in separate institutions offering one type of certificate or in comprehensive high schools offering different certificates. The issue of the between-school distribution of access to different high school certificates is important in education systems offering multiple state high school

A Credential Market Within Schools

111

credentials (e.g. academic and vocational), but it is raised anew in the case of emerging private certificates in ‘unified’ credential markets. For private certificates, a distinctive regime of limited distribution and exclusive availability in specific schools tends to prevail. Access to different regions of the credential market becomes conditioned upon access to specific schools. In turn, this invites researchers to examine whether formal or informal restrictions exist to access such schools in order to grasp the social distribution of credentialing opportunities. In Australia as in most countries, the IB Diploma is both (1) offered in some schools but not in others, and (2) supplied alongside the state certificate in most of the ‘IB schools’. In other words, the introduction of the IB Diploma has led to a double process of between- and within-school differentiation in the institutions granting access to different regions of the credential market. This dual differentiation has implications for the analysis of the supply of and demand for high school credentials. As the rest of the analysis will demonstrate, when different credentials become subject to socially and academically differentiated modes of appropriation, market differentiation turns into market stratification, and market power can be used to guide strategic investments in credential structures to constitute or reinforce educational advantage. In 2018, 72 Australian schools prepared their students for the acquisition of the IB Diploma. Only a small proportion of Australian high school students thus have access to this segment of the credential market. Figure 5.1 shows that, among these, four-in-five offer both state-based and IB Diploma certificates, in public as well as private schools. Put differently, most IB Diploma schools tend to be retailers of at least two different credentials, creating a situation of credential competition within the school. IB Diploma only

State high school certificate and IB Diploma

100 80.0

80

79.3

60 40 20

20.7

20.0

0 Public

Private

Fig. 5.1  Percentage of IB Diploma schools offering study programmes for one or two high school academic certificates, by school sector (2018) Source: IB Diploma school websites

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5  Urban Schooling, Private Schooling and the IB Diploma in Australia

This has implications for the distribution of resources and students across credential market segments within schools offering multiple certificates. Previous research conducted in Australia suggests that such curricular markets produce ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ among teachers and a disproportionate allocation of resources to the IB Diploma students, who often learn in smaller classes (Doherty & Shield, 2012; Paris, 2003). The credential differentiation arising from the implementation of the IB Diploma may thus be produced not only through academically stratified student enrolment into the IB Diploma but also by negatively impacting the learning opportunities available to other students, through resource concentration in the IB Diploma programme and relative resource deprivation in the state high school certificate programme.

 he Spatial and Institutional Structures of IB T Diploma Schools The international analysis of the IB Diploma developed in Chaps. 2 and 3 showed that the IB Diploma is an urban phenomenon, concentrated in large cities and their suburbs. It also revealed that, outside of North America and a small number of other systems (e.g. Ecuador), the IB Diploma is concentrated in private schools, and that the place of ‘international’ schools in the IB Diploma school market varies significantly from country to country. What are the structural properties that characterise IB Diploma schools in Australia?

The Geography of IB Diploma Availability The Australian market for high school certificates has distinctive geographical properties: because of the concentration of population in urban centres and the characteristics of local economies, schools offering senior secondary credentials tend to be concentrated in urban spaces. Given its distribution across states and territories, a concentration of the IB Diploma in Australia’s major cities can be expected. But how different is the geospatial distribution of IB Diploma schools compared to schools offering twelfth grade in general? The comparison is presented in Fig. 5.2. While the high school certificate market is highly urbanised in Australia, this is even more conspicuously the case for the IB Diploma. Where just under six in every 10 schools offering twelfth grade in Australia (59%) are located in a major city, this is true for 91.7% of IB Diploma schools. The remainder of IB Diploma schools are found in (mostly inner) regional centres (5.6%), and IB Diploma study opportunities are entirely absent from very remote places. The proportion of IB Diploma schools outside of Australia’s major cities would need to be 4.9 times greater than it

The Spatial and Institutional Structures of IB Diploma Schools Major Cities

All high schools

Inner Regional

Outer Regional

59.0

113 Very Remote

21.0

IB Diploma schools

14.6

91.7

0%

20%

40%

5.4

5.6

60%

80%

2.8

100%

Fig. 5.2  Distribution of high schools and IB Diploma schools across urban and non-urban areas (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis

currently is for the IB Diploma supply to match the general distribution of high schools in Australia. In the Australian context, it is the relative sparsity of IB Diploma schooling in regional centres that distinguishes the IB Diploma from public high school certificates. While 35.6% of Australian high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are in (inner or outer) regional centres, only 8.4% of IB Diploma schools are found in these places. The proportion of regional schools is over four times greater in the general population than in the IB Diploma school population. The private IB Diploma credential has thus not come to compete with public high school certificates in regional centres to the same extent as in Australia’s cities. Despite its concentration in Australian cities, the IB Diploma is not distributed evenly across urban space. Figures 5.3 and 5.4 map the distribution of IB Diploma schools in Australia’s two major cities, Melbourne and Sydney. Melbourne has over 300 schools or campuses where students can complete their final year of high school, half of which are public institutions. These schools are dispersed across all the areas represented by the urban boundary (shaded in grey on the map), with high schools located in Melbourne’s CBD and western, northern, eastern and south-eastern suburbs. Yet, save for the more distributed spread of the three public IB Diploma schools, the IB is largely confined to the inner eastern suburbs, in what Windle (2015) has characterised as the city’s ‘inner circuit of schooling’, where non-Catholic private schools and academic power are concentrated (Teese, 1981). These inner eastern suburbs are, for instance, where students disproportionately enrol in university-approved mathematics subjects in their final year (Teese, 1994). The same spatial concentration of IB Diploma retailing is evident in Sydney. In Australia’s largest city, students can obtain a high school certificate in one of Sydney’s 380 schools or campuses, approximately half of which are public schools. Albeit not evenly distributed across urban space, high schools cover the entire urban area, from the inland western suburbs to the coastal area around the harbour. The

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5  Urban Schooling, Private Schooling and the IB Diploma in Australia

Fig. 5.3  Schools offering the IB Diploma in Melbourne (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: the grey shaded area represents Melbourne, using the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ ‘Urban Centre and Locality’ definition

majority of IB Diploma schools, however, is concentrated in a relatively small perimeter of the city, primarily along the coast and around the north and south shores of the harbour, where academic capital is concentrated. These geographical patterns are far from insignificant given the spatial distribution of social advantage and disadvantage in these two cities. In Melbourne, social disadvantage formerly concentrated in central Melbourne is now primarily located in the north, north west and ‘far’ south east parts of the Urban Centre (Randolph & Tice, 2017), three areas collectively having access to only one IB Diploma school. Following a comparable process of ‘suburbanisation of disadvantage’ that has gathered pace since the 1980s, Sydney’s concentration of poverty is also precisely found in the part of Sydney where the IB is largely absent: the middle (and to an extent outer) suburban areas in the south west, west and north west (Randolph & Tice, 2014). The analysis could be reproduced, mutatis mutandis, in the case of the other major cities where the IB Diploma has a significant presence. The IB Diploma is characterised by a specific form of spatial concentration not only in Australia’s

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115

Fig. 5.4  Schools offering the IB Diploma in Sydney (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: the grey shaded area represents Sydney, using the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ ‘Urban Centre and Locality’ definition

major cities, but more specifically in middle-class or upper-class suburbs of these cities. Socially disadvantaged students thus appear to be at a clear spatial disadvantage as regards their opportunities for accessing the IB Diploma. The geographical distribution of access to the IB Diploma is tied to a socially unequal distribution of access to the private region of the high school credential market.

School Size and IB Diploma Retailing A specific property of IB Diploma schools in Australia is that they tend to be large schools. As Table  5.1 shows, the size of schools is significantly different in IB Diploma schools than among the broader high school population. The average number of students enrolled in IB Diploma schools is 55% higher than in high schools in general, and the same relative size is found when comparing grade 12 enrolments alone (i.e. the average number of twelfth grade enrolments in IB Diploma schools is 53% higher than in high schools overall). Here, too, it would

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5  Urban Schooling, Private Schooling and the IB Diploma in Australia

Table 5.1  Average enrolments in high schools, by IB Diploma status (2018)

12th grade enrolments (N) Total enrolments 12th grade enrolments (%)

All high schools 101

High schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma schools 117

IB Diploma schools 154

773 13.1

967 12.1

1199 12.9

Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis

be mistaken to ascribe this difference to the location of schools alone. The number of enrolments in schools not offering IB in the same suburbs as IB Diploma schools is more similar to the overall high school population than to the IB Diploma school population (i.e. these schools are only 25% larger than high schools in general). The IB Diploma thus seems to have a particular affinity with large schools. This is relevant for a number of reasons. First, a correlation exists between the size of the senior years’ student cohort and the comprehensiveness of curriculum offerings available in the school (Blackburn et al., 1985). The number of subjects offered in the senior years tends to increase as school size rises (Elsworth, 1998), as do the breadth and diversity of curriculum options available to students (Lamb, 2007). Larger schools are thus likely to be the ones best placed to offer a second academic high school credential such as the IB Diploma. Second, as Lamb (2007) has shown, in a city like Melbourne, school size has become intimately tied to social recruitment, with larger schools being consistently those serving socially advantaged families. While until the early 1980s, public school size varied little across the suburbs of Melbourne, schools serving socially advantaged suburbs became larger and schools serving poorer communities became smaller in that decade due to the effects of growing school autonomy and family choice policies (Lamb, 2007). The sweeping school closures and mergers implemented in the early 1990s in disadvantaged communities in response to the changing patterns of school enrolments have not sustainably altered this geographical disparity: by 2004, public schools in high-SES suburbs were close to 1.8 times larger than were public schools in low-SES suburbs (Lamb, 2007). This suggests that, by virtue of the sizes of schools where IB Diploma retailing takes place, this credential is likely to be disproportionately available to socially advantaged students. Third, Lamb (2007) and Teese (2007) have also shown that an increase in school size is associated with an increase in high student academic success in a city like Melbourne, where students attending larger schools have the best chances of being academically distinguished in the most academic subjects. This indicates that, in addition to being more likely to have access to the IB Diploma, students in large city schools are also more likely to accumulate academic capital through it. The extent to which school size differs for IB Diploma schools compared to the broader high school population varies between public and private sectors. In Australia, schools are generally classified into three sectors: government schools

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117

(i.e. public schools), Catholic schools and ‘independent’ schools (i.e. private non-­ Catholic schools). Figure 5.5 displays the mean twelfth grade enrolment levels of high schools and IB Diploma schools by school sector. The twelfth-grade cohort in the single Catholic school offering the IB Diploma is slightly larger than the average size of Catholic high schools in Australia (by 10%). Among non-Catholic private schools, those offering the IB Diploma have a 72% larger twelfth grade cohort than the standard high school does. It is in the public sector, however, that the size difference between twelfth grade cohorts is most significant: IB Diploma public schools are 127% larger than are public high schools in general. Since public schools tend to bring together a broader range of academic and social profiles, the demand for within-school tracking may be particularly high in large public schools in middle-class suburbs, where those committing to public schools compete against families which have exited to local private schools (Rowe, 2017). It is in this context that the very large size of the twelfth-grade cohort in IB Diploma public schools (240 students in 2018) must be understood. This pattern is also related to the trend observed by Lamb (2007) of an increasing polarisation of public schools in Victoria, where educational policies have led schools serving low socioeconomic areas to shrink and decay while public schools in middle and high socioeconomic areas have expanded. On the other hand, the ability of private schools to afford the IB Diploma despite smaller grade level cohorts is consistent with the comparative over-resourcing of private schools, as will be shown in the next chapter.

All high schools

High schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma

IB Diploma schools

300 240

250 200 1 43

150

1 31

1 52

1 44

1 31

1 06 100

76

89

50 0 Government

Private Catholic

Private non-Catholic

Fig. 5.5  Mean twelfth grade enrolments in high schools, by IB Diploma status and school sector (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis

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5  Urban Schooling, Private Schooling and the IB Diploma in Australia

An Internationally Oriented Market? As argued in the second chapter, two points of distinction often associated with the IB Diploma by schools, the IB organisation and some researchers are (1) that it permits international mobility, and (2) that it provides students with a more innovative curriculum and pedagogy (Maire, 2015). If international mobility was a central feature of the IB Diploma, one might expect international schools to be the dominant category of IB Diploma retailers. Meanwhile, if the distinctive approach to learning proposed by the IB Diploma was one of its essential attributes, one would equally expect schools offering teaching and learning approaches based on specific educational philosophies (e.g. Montessori schools or Steiner schools) to be prominent in the list of schools offering the IB Diploma. In Chap. 3, I showed that international schools are one of the categories of schools offering the IB Diploma. However, I also revealed that the place of international schools among IB retailers varies significantly from country to country. In Australia, 14 of the 73 schools offering the IB Diploma in 2019 are either selfdescribed as international schools or drawing on specific educational philosophies. These include nine self-labelled ‘international’ schools, four Montessori schools and one Steiner school. In the majority of international schools offering the IB Diploma, most students have a language background other than English (LBOTE). In most alternative schools, the IB Diploma is the only senior secondary pathway available to students. The share of international and alternative schools means that over four in five IB Diploma schools in Australia (80.8%) are mainstream secondary schools. The ‘international mobility’ aspect of the IB Diploma may thus not be decisive to the overall situation of the IB Diploma in the Australian context. In fact, the representation of LBOTE students among IB Diploma schools is only marginally different from the share of LBOTE students in high schools in general, despite the presence of ‘international schools’ among IB Diploma retailers (see Fig. 5.6). The proportion of LBOTE students in IB Diploma schools is 3.8% points higher than in high schools in general, but fewer than three in 10 students in IB Diploma schools have a non-English language background. Even further, the difference in the proportion of LBOTE students is 0.8% points between IB Diploma schools and other high schools in the vicinity. Of course, these results do not enable us to draw firm conclusions, since the proportion of non-English language background students is only loosely related to international mobility, especially in countries with high proportions of recent immigrants, as in Australia. Nevertheless, in the Australian context, the IB Diploma seems more embedded in domestic than in international ‘circuits of schooling’ (Ball et al., 1995).

The IB Diploma and Private Schooling

119

35 30

28.5

29.3

High schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma schools

IB Diploma schools

25.5 25 20 15 10 5 0 All high schools

Fig. 5.6  Mean school percentage of LBOTE students, by IB Diploma status (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis

The IB Diploma and Private Schooling A major feature of the Australian schooling market is its division between public (or government) and private (or non-government) schools. This feature of the market, labelled as the ‘Great Australian Divide’ by Don Anderson (2013), is salient in many respects, as will be shown throughout this book. For now, it is sufficient to analyse how private schooling has been central to credential-based social class reproduction in Australia (Teese, 1981, 1989), in order to tease out the implications of the school sector distribution of the IB Diploma.

Private Schools and Socio-Academic Segregation Australia has a peculiar history of extensive private schooling (Campbell & Sherington, 2006; OECD, 1977). In 2017, 41.2% of senior secondary students were enrolled in private schools (ACARA, 2019). Since the 1970s, these schools have been receiving increasing levels of public recurrent funding (a form of public subsidy for private preferences), with no limitations placed on a school’s ability to select their students or to charge fees to families and, most significantly, with minimal accountability for their expenditure. Since the 1980s, the resourcing of private schools has entrenched divisions in Australian society, evident in high levels of academic and social segregation between schools and high levels of concentrated disadvantage in (non-selective) public schools (Campbell & Proctor, 2014; Gonski et al., 2011; Gonski et al., 2018; Lamb, 2007; Lamb et al., 2015).

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5  Urban Schooling, Private Schooling and the IB Diploma in Australia

In Australia, private schooling and selective public schooling have been characterised as primarily responding to some families’ desire for ‘academic security’, i.e. ensuring regularity in the mastery of the high-end academic curriculum (Teese, 2007). Because the academic curriculum, especially its most academically discriminating subjects offering high-achieving students opportunities for educational distinction, ‘reaches well beyond the classroom for the aptitudes and dispositions needed to compete successfully’ (Teese, 2000), the distribution of family resources across schools and classrooms matter greatly. Schools enable family economic and especially cultural capital to act as pooled, collective resources for mastering the demands of the curriculum collectively rather than individually. Given their stratified socio-academic recruitment, schools are unequally equipped to exploit the curriculum for the production of academic power, and private schools tend to be most ideally placed to do so (Teese, 1995). As a result of the demand for academic security and the socially unequal distribution of academic capital, ‘academically successful students from culturally and economically advantaged families [are] largely monopolized by private schools, while the population of average or below-average students from modest or poor backgrounds is consigned to public high schools and regional Catholic colleges’ (Teese, 2000). Because of their social and academic selectivity, private schools are the key institutional vehicle Australian families use to accumulate academic capital. One of the distinguishing features of most Australian private schools is indeed ‘specialization around academic learning, [and] competitive achievement is recognized as the core business of [these] schools’ (Teese, 1998). It is private schools that enable ‘middle-­ and upper-status parents to exercise power through the curriculum’ (Teese, 1998), collectively rather than individually—or, more specifically, transmuting the collective pooling of resources into marks of individual academic prowess. Given that public resources are made available to sponsor private preferences, private schooling ‘offers the convenience of public subsidies to reduce family costs, balanced by fees to maintain social exclusion’ (Teese, 2000). In public schools, academic success tends to be much more directly dependent on students’ out-of-­ school resources. The socio-educational logic according to which the existing pattern of private schooling makes sense is precisely one where middle- and upper-class families seek to manage the cultural and cognitive demands that the curriculum places on students institutionally. The predictable patterns of academic achievement across schools observed year after year indicate that ‘family strategies of segregation and resource accumulation prove highly effective in reducing the curriculum to a manageable process which generates globally high success’ (Teese & Polesel, 2003). Since the success of these social strategies depends on their investment in credentials, a school geography of credentials, curricula and subjects arises, one that relates to the distribution of different social groups in different schools. Access to science, mathematics and advanced academic subjects has a clear school stratification in Australia: private schools and those serving high-socioeconomic status students—two groups that largely overlap—drive stronger demand and higher levels of access to these areas of the curriculum than do socially disadvantaged schools

The IB Diploma and Private Schooling

121

(Perry & Southwell, 2014). Private schools are also better positioned than public schools to generate high levels of academic distinction in the high-end curriculum (Teese, 2007). Especially in the most critical areas of the curriculum, including mathematics, the sciences and some humanities and language subjects, ‘high marks invariably advantage the private system by a large margin’ (Teese, 2000). This implies that the distribution of the IB Diploma across schools is bound to significantly shape the position it occupies in the high school certification market, the kinds of students who have access to it and the socio-educational resources they bring into the market.

A Niche Credential Market Segment An important aspect of the permeation of the IB Diploma into Australian high schools is revealed by examining the proportion of high schools offering this alternative certificate across sectors (see Table 5.2). Apart from the Australian Capital Territory, where every fifth school offering twelfth grade offers the IB Diploma, the latter remains a niche market segment in most states, ranging from being absent from the Northern Territory to accounting for 1.8% (Western Australia) to 4.5% (South Australia) of high schools. On average, just three in 100 schools offering senior secondary studies in Australia offer the IB Diploma. Accordingly, the IB Diploma remains a niche market segment in most states. Tied to the IB Diploma’s limited availability across Australian schools is its relative presence in public and private institutions. Table 5.2 shows that the confidential presence of the IB Diploma overall is highly differentiated across school sectors. The IB Diploma is virtually absent from private Catholic schools (0.3% of them) and only just over one in 100 public high schools offer the IB Diploma. By contrast, Australia-wide, one in 12 non-Catholic private secondary schools (8.2%) offer the IB Diploma. This demonstrates that the IB Diploma is significant among the credential offerings of non-Catholic private schools, a sizeable phenomenon to consider if one wishes to understand how these schools operate and the strategies they use to help their students achieve academic distinction in the credential market.

Table 5.2  Percentage of high schools offering the IB Diploma, by state and sector (2018) Public Private Catholic Private non-Catholic All schools

ACT 22.2 0.0 30.0 20.8

NSW 0.0 0.0 7.6 2.3

NT 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

QLD 3.9 0.0 3.5 3.0

SA 0.7 3.3 14.8 4.5

TAS 0.0 0.0 15.4 3.3

VIC 1.0 0.0 10.9 3.5

WA 0.0 0.0 6.3 1.8

Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis

Total 1.1 0.3 8.2 3.0

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5  Urban Schooling, Private Schooling and the IB Diploma in Australia

This sectoral divide is consistent across Australian states and territories. Based on the accreditation of the IB Diploma as a legitimate school certificate by state qualification authorities, private schools are free to implement the IB Diploma, granted that they complete the IB organisation process for becoming a member school. Public schools, on the other hand, typically need to seek approval from their state education department. As of October 2019, there were public schools implementing the IB Diploma in four states and territories: Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory, South Australia and Victoria. While South Australian and Victorian school authorities have welcomed IB Diploma retailing in their public schools, New South Wales does not authorise it for public high schools (Kidson et  al., 2019). Outside of Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory, the IB Diploma is more represented among private schools. Irrespective of the specific attributes of the different high school certificate markets in Australia, there is a strong association between non-Catholic private schools and IB Diploma retailing.

The IB Diploma and the ‘Great Australian Divide’ Given the concentration of the IB Diploma in Australia’s cities, its over-­representation in private schools may be due to geographical factors. To test this hypothesis, Fig. 5.7 displays the sector breakdown of Australian high schools (2418 schools), high schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma schools (60 schools), and IB Diploma schools (72 schools). Compared to other countries, private schools make up a high proportion of Australian secondary schools. Of the 2418 secondary schools recorded in 2018 as offering twelfth-grade programmes (including either vocational programmes, academic programmes, or both), 1051 (43.5%) were private schools. Despite this already significant representation of private schools in the high school certificate market, the share of private schools is still 1.8 times greater in the IB Diploma. The IB Diploma is predominantly a private school reality, even taking into account the geographical distribution of private schools. To be sure, schools not offering the IB Diploma in suburbs where the IB Diploma is available also differ from the general population of schools offering senior secondary programmes in Australia. However, the non-IB schools in such suburbs are more similar to the average secondary school than to the average IB Diploma school. Accordingly, the implementation of the IB Diploma in some schools and not others cannot be explained by focussing on location alone. Understanding what leads some schools and not others to implement the IB Diploma requires a broader examination of school properties (including their sector, resources and academic recruitment).

The IB Diploma and Private Schooling Public

123

Private Catholic

Private non-Catholic

100% 28.3 80% 50.0 60%

1 5.2

77.8

1 6.7

40% 56.5 20%

1 .4

33.3

20.8 0% High schools

High schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma schools

IB Diploma schools

Fig. 5.7  Distribution of high schools and IB Diploma schools across Australia’s three schooling sectors (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis Table 5.3  Percentage of high schools in major cities offering the IB Diploma, by state and sector (2018) Public Private Catholic Private non-Catholic All schools

ACT 22.2 0.0 30.0 20.8

NSW 0.0 0.0 10.4 3.6

QLD 7.5 0.0 4.5 5.0

SA 2.0 4.2 20.5 8.8

VIC 1.7 0.0 11.8 4.6

WA 0.0 0.0 7.9 3.1

Total 2.1 0.4 10.5 4.8

Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis

Urban Private Schooling and the IB Diploma To gain a better idea of the actual local school markets in which IB Diploma schools are inserted, we can refine the analysis of its distribution across states and sector by looking specifically at schools in major cities, where 91.7% of IB Diploma schools are located (see Table 5.3). In Australian cities, 4.8% of secondary schools offered the IB Diploma in 2018. Considering urban centres only, the IB Diploma is most represented in the Australian Capital Territory (20.8% of high schools), followed by South Australia (8.8% of schools) and Queensland (5% of schools). And in urban space as much as Australia-­ wide, the IB Diploma displays a clear sector pattern: over one in 10 non-Catholic

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5  Urban Schooling, Private Schooling and the IB Diploma in Australia

private secondary schools in Australia’s cities offer the IB Diploma, while the rate is just over one in 47 public schools and one in 236 Catholic schools. This confirms that urban location and private school concentration are two key properties of the IB Diploma in Australia.

Socio-Academic Restrictions to IB Diploma Access There are 15 public schools that offer the IB Diploma, very few given the 1043 government secondary schools that operated in 2018. One may wonder in what ways these 15 schools are different to all other public schools. There are several important ways in which this is the case. First, the locations in which public IB Diploma schools are found suggest they are more socially exclusive than other public schools, ensuring that disadvantaged students are unlikely to have access to it (Rowe & Lubienski, 2017; Smith et al., 2019). Second, and more importantly, public IB Diploma schools tend to be academically selective at a school or programme level, making them more like private schools than other public schools. Historically, Australian public high schools with a middle class clientele have tended to limit access to the most academic areas of the curriculum through restrictive practices (Teese, 1998). Nine of the 15 public IB schools are found in Queensland, suggesting that public school retailing of the IB Diploma is primarily a phenomenon peculiar to that state; it helps explain why public schools are nominally overrepresented among IB Diploma retailers in the state. Of the nine Queensland public schools offering the IB Diploma, all have the status of ‘Independent Public Schools’. The shift toward independent public schooling has been a significant but still under-researched trend among public schools in Queensland and Western Australia, importing private and corporate institutional models into the public sector. Independent Public Schools represent around 20% of public schools in Queensland, but 100% of schools offering the IB Diploma. The IB Diploma is thus not made available indiscriminately across all kinds of public schools, and the IB Diploma may be ‘choosing’ its public schools more than public schools may be free to choose the IB Diploma as part of their credential offerings. To clarify the significance of Independent Public Schooling for the social and academic accessibility of the IB Diploma, it is possible to examine these schools’ abilitiy to exclude students from accessing the IB Diploma. Information from the schools’ websites indicate that three of the nine are selective entry schools whose sole credential is the IB Diploma. Among the six remaining schools, five operate a form of academic selection to enrol in the IB. For the last school, no clear information could be found as to their approach to enrolment in the IB. There is at most one public school in Queensland operating no selection (at the school or curriculum level) into the IB Diploma. What is the situation in the other states and territories where public IB Diploma schools are found? In some states, governmental oversight over IB Diploma retailing explicitly reserves this opportunity for academically successful schools. In

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Victoria, for instance, IB Diploma approval in public schools is granted only ‘where schools are already performing well, including having strong VCE and VCAL results’ (Victorian Department of Education and Training, 2008). Moreover, of the three Victorian public schools offering the IB Diploma, at least two operate a form of selection into the programme (for the last one, information was unavailable to make an assessment). In the Australian Capital Territory, one public school appears to perform no selection into the IB Diploma, while the process for IB Diploma enrolment is uncertain at the other school. Finally, in the South Australian public IB Diploma school, academic selection takes place to enter the IB Diploma. The selection process into the IB Diploma in most public schools can be extensive. In one public school, students wishing to study the IB Diploma are expected to provide evidence of their academic performance and ‘personal qualities and beliefs’, to present a portfolio of work demonstrating the quality of their ‘organisation, attention to detail, academic excellence and innovation’, and to write a statement recounting their academic journey. This process is then followed by an interview with two teachers. Comparable selection mechanisms into the IB Diploma operate in other public schools. All in all, between one and four public schools Australia-wide (5.4% of all IB Diploma schools at most) enable students to enrol in the IB Diploma without any prior economic or cultural selection. All others select their students at the school or credential levels. This fact is important because when public schools are selective on academic grounds at the school level or at the curriculum level, their accessibility to students from all backgrounds can be compromised. In New South Wales, for instance, where the state operates many selective public high schools, academic selection implies social selection (NSW Department of Education, 2018). Since all private schools are economically selective, there are virtually no Australian schools where access to the IB Diploma is free from social or academic restrictions. Moreover, even where enrolment in the IB Diploma is formally open, symbolic barriers to access may exist. As Doherty et al. (2012) note, ‘the IB[’s] ‘risky’ reputation for a demanding workload and academic challenge will serve to filter candidates – steering some students away while welcoming the more able and motivated  – a privilege the generic curriculum cannot claim’. The IB Diploma thus primarily occupies an exclusive segment of the credential market, access to which operates more as a privilege than as a right.

The Price of the IB Diploma Unlike state high school certificates, which are public programmes available to accredited schools, the IB Diploma is a private branded credential alternative (Tarc, 2009). Retailing the IB Diploma thus incurs a cost to schools, in addition to the operational cost of the pedagogical delivery of the service schools offer to families. Previous research suggests that IB Diploma retailing is an expensive business for Australian schools (Doherty & Shield, 2012). The retailing rights and affiliation

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policies of the IB organisation have four main features: (1) schools are self-selected, (2) schools are allowed to implement the IB Diploma alongside the local certificate, (3) accreditation is a long process, and (4) IB Diploma retailing incurs ongoing costs. These four features—especially the direct and indirect costs of the programme—contribute to selecting the schools able to retail the IB Diploma. The primary cost of IB Diploma retailing to schools is an economic cost. As of 2019, a school wishing to implement an IB programme first has to disburse a non-­ refundable ‘application for candidacy’ fee of SGD6,100 (International Baccalaureate, 2019b), or around USD4,500. After being accepted as a candidate school, it generally takes between one and three years for the school to become formally authorised as a certified IB school. Meanwhile, the school is charged a non-refundable SGD13,500 (approximately USD10,000) per year spent as a ‘candidate school’ fee. The application fee and candidate fee provide the school with a range of services, which help them with meeting the requirements for becoming an IB school. Various other fees (e.g. consultancy fees) also exist for schools looking for additional support. Once the school is accepted and officially becomes an ‘IB World School’, it is required to pay an annual school fee for retailing the IB programme(s). For 2019–20, the annual school fee was USD11,650 for schools implementing the IB Diploma alone (with additional fees for each other IB programme offered) (International Baccalaureate, 2019a). Schools also have to cover the cost of evaluation visits conducted by the IB team to assess schools’ compliance with IB policies. Since 2016, schools in the Asia-Pacific region are charged SGD4,720 (or USD3,500, excluding accommodation costs also charged to schools) for an evaluation visit (International Baccalaureate, 2015). On top of the annual membership fee schools pay for offering one or several of the IB programmes, they are also responsible for funding the professional development of their teaching and managerial staff, in order to comply with the qualification requirements established by the IB organisation. In 2019–20, in-school workshops were charged at a rate of SGD195 or SGD288 per participant, in addition to flight, accommodation and incidental expenses for workshop leaders, as well as a 2-day honorarium of USD660 per workshop leader (International Baccalaureate, 2019c). Regional workshops were charged at a rate of SGD350 per participant for 1-day workshops, SGD996 per participant for standard workshops, and SGD1250 per participant for leadership workshops (International Baccalaureate, 2019c). This brief overview of the financial costs of the IB Diploma show that there are ongoing economic obligations associated with implementing the IB Diploma that are likely to restrict the range of schools financially able to retail this credential. As will be shown later, this fact also leads to the selectivity of IB Diploma candidates on economic grounds, as government funding for schools generally does not provide for such expenses. This fee policy has clear implications for the categories of schools likely to consider implementing the IB Diploma. For many schools, the IB Diploma may be considered a luxury credential, and schools’ economic position is likely to determine their likelihood of choosing this private certificate. For this reason, it comes as

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no surprise that wealthy private fee-paying schools are over-represented among IB Diploma retailers, as the next chapter shows. As was alluded to earlier, the school costs associated with IB Diploma retailing (without even mentioning the costs associated with the pedagogical organisation needed to assist students in preparing for the IB Diploma examinations) tend to mechanically advantage larger schools. While larger Australian schools make economies of scale and are in a position to diversify their credential offering, smaller schools experience ‘increased resource pressures […] in pursuing the same educational goals as larger schools’ (Lamb, 2007). Since an essential feature of the Australian school market in recent decades has been an increasing association between school size and socioeconomically advantaged student recruitment (at least in the public sector) (Lamb, 2007; Perry & Southwell, 2014), the structural advantage of large schools in retailing the IB Diploma has important implications for the socioeconomic accessibility of the IB Diploma, as the next chapter demonstrates.

Explaining Schools’ Investment in the IB Diploma Given the cost of the IB Diploma to schools, why retailing the programme at all instead of concentrating on the free-of-charge state high school certificate? In most jurisdictions, public schools willing to implement the IB Diploma need to be granted approval from their educational authority (e.g. Victorian Department of Education and Training, 2008). State or territory authorities are entitled to accept or refuse the implementation of the IB Diploma in the schools they administer. Private schools are free to implement the IB Diploma without direct governmental approval, provided that they meet the criteria established by the IB organisation for becoming member schools. This policy framework is relevant to understanding whether schools are able to offer the IB Diploma or not, but it is does not clarify what drives schools in implementing the programme. Answering this question amounts to identifying the interest schools may have in providing the IB Diploma study opportunity to their students. Since the 1980s, policy reforms allegedly aimed at increasing school choice for families and between-school competition for enrolment have been implemented throughout Australia. One aspect of this agenda has been the promotion of private schooling through a state-sponsored per capita funding system to all schools, irrespective of their public or private status or whether they charge fees: where students enrol, the government provides funding. Another aspect has been a universal and publicised standardised testing regime meant to enable families to compare the quality of schools to promote school choice (Connell, 2015). While the actual degree of competition between Australian schools is limited, as Jensen et al.’s study of the secondary school market in South East Queensland suggests (2013), these policy reforms have incentivised competitive practices and thus affected how schools operate and portray themselves. In a situation of market

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competition, displaying a point of difference compared to other schools is important to be successful. The pressures of real or imagined market competition have thus led some schools to seek such marketing advantages, and the IB Diploma has become one instrument in market differentiation strategies for schools because of its prestigious status (Doherty, 2013). One of the implications of the alleged promotion of market competition through choice policies has been to boost the ‘symbolic economy’ of school markets, i.e. to compel schools to increasingly invest in strategies of self-promotion and brand-­ building. Retailing a credential rich in symbolic capital such as the IB Diploma (Maire, 2015) is likely to yield symbolic profits and increase the status of a school relative to its competitors, at least among families who grant credit to programmes such as the IB Diploma. Status seeking and prestige accumulation are thus important drivers of IB Diploma retailing in non-international schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2008). As I have argued elsewhere based on an examination of the role played by the IB Diploma in the advertising and self-promotion practices of schools, ‘when [IB Diploma] schools engage in marketing practices destined to enhance their reputation and the perception of their academic quality, they generally use the [IB Diploma] to support their claims.’ (Maire, 2015). To these schools, the IB Diploma offers ‘a means of distinguishing themselves from competitors by offering a distinctive educational product’ (Maire, 2015). And the efficacy of symbolic labour of reputation building is due to the general social logic which dictates that, no matter the material foundations of symbolic authority, ‘being considered superior is a great advantage’ (Goblot, 2010, my translation). This is certainly true in the case of credential retailers operating under perceived or real market competition. The school market logic behind schools’ investment in the IB Diploma can also help explain some of the specific properties of IB Diploma schools presented in this chapter. Since school competition is likely to be most acute in large urban centres (if only because of the greater geographical concentration of schools in cities), the interest in and value of a private credential such as the IB Diploma may be higher in these settings. This partly explains the significant concentration of IB Diploma schools in Australian cities. The market pressures felt by larger public schools enrolling socioeconomically advantaged and high-achieving students alongside less privileged and academically successful students may also explain why these schools could find an appeal in the IB Diploma (Doherty, 2012). To attract or prevent an enrolment drift of their most academically successful students to more academically and socially homogeneous (i.e. segregated) private schools, public schools’ ability to provide within-school differentiation and to offer an ‘elite’ or ‘high-end’ track (Maire, 2015) may prove an effective response to family demands for (academic) segregation. In such contexts, safeguarding the enrolment of high-­achieving students and strengthening the way schools enable families to deploy credential-based social reproduction strategies—starting with those allowing families to gain a competitive edge in the selective university entry process—is an important explanation for schools’ IB Diploma retailing.

References

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International Baccalaureate. (2019c). IB Asia-Pacific professional development workshop fees (1 July 2019–30 June 2020). https://www.ibo.org/contentassets/bef893e182bf4da8a1a742b5c cd91cc3/ib-­asia-­pacific-­professional-­development-­2019-­2020-­fees-­schedule.pdf. Accessed 11 Dec 2019. Jensen, B., Weidmann, B., & Farmer, J. (2013). The myth of markets in school education. Grattan Institute. Kidson, P., Odhiambo, G., & Wilson, R. (2019). The International Baccalaureate in Australia: Trends and issues. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 49(3), 393–412. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2017.1415751 Lamb, S. (2007). School reform and inequality in urban Australia: A case of residualising the poor. In R. Teese, S. Lamb, & M. Duru-Bellat (Eds.), International studies in educational inequality: Theory and policy (Inequality: Educational theory and public policy) (Vol. 3, pp. 1–38). Springer. Lamb, S., Jackson, J., Walstab, A., & Huo, S. (2015). Educational opportunity in Australia 2015: Who succeeds and who misses out. Centre for International Research on Education Systems, Victoria University, for the Mitchell Institute. Maire, Q. (2015). The construction of educational reality: Insights from schools offering the International Baccalaureate Diploma across Australia. Paper presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Annual Conference, Fremantle. NSW Department of Education. (2018). Review of selective education access: Findings and action plan. Sydney. OECD. (1977). Australia: Transition from school to work or further study. OECD Publications Center. Paris, P. G. (2003). The International Baccalaureate: A case study on why students choose to do the IB. International Education Journal, 4(3), 232–243. Perry, L.  B., & Southwell, L. (2014). Access to academic curriculum in Australian secondary schools: A case study of a highly marketised education system. Journal of Education Policy, 29(4), 467–485. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2013.846414 Randolph, B., & Tice, A. (2014). Suburbanizing disadvantage in Australian cities: Sociospatial change in an era of neoliberalism. Journal of Urban Affairs, 36(sup1), 384–399. https://doi. org/10.1111/juaf.12108 Randolph, B., & Tice, A. (2017). Relocating disadvantage in five Australian cities: Socio-spatial polarisation under neo-liberalism. Urban Policy and Research, 35(2), 103–121. https://doi. org/10.1080/08111146.2016.1221337 Rowe, E. E. (2017). Middle-class school choice in urban spaces: The economics of public schooling and globalized education reform. Routledge. Rowe, E. E., & Lubienski, C. (2017). Shopping for schools or shopping for peers: Public schools and catchment area segregation. Journal of Education Policy, 32(3), 340–356. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/02680939.2016.1263363 Smith, C., Parr, N., & Muhidin, S. (2019). Mapping schools’ NAPLAN results: A spatial inequality of school outcomes in Australia. Geographical Research, 57(2), 133–150. https://doi. org/10.1111/1745-­5871.12317 Tarc, P. (2009). Global dreams, enduring tensions: International baccalaureate in a changing world. Peter Lang. Teese, R. (1981). The social function of private schools. In H.  Bannister & L.  Johnson (Eds.), Melbourne working papers 1981 (pp. 94–141). University of Melbourne. Teese, R. (1989). Australian private schools, specialization and curriculum conservation. British Journal of Educational Studies, 37(3), 235–252. https://doi.org/10.2307/3121280 Teese, R. (1994). Mass secondary education and curriculum access: A forty-year perspective on mathematics outcomes in Victoria. Oxford Review of Education, 20(1), 93–110. Teese, R. (1995). Scholastic power and curriculum access: Public and private schooling in postwar Australia. History of Education, 24(4), 353–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760950240406

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Chapter 6

Resource Concentration, Social Segregation and Academic Power in IB Diploma Schools in Australia Abstract  In education systems where between-school segregation along social and academic lines is pronounced, as is the case in Australia, the socio-academic recruitment of schools retailing private certificates largely defines the academic resources these students bring into the credential market and, hence, ultimately, the value of different certificates. The comparative analysis of IB Diploma and other secondary schools presented in this chapter reveals that those offering the IB Diploma have access to more resources. Moreover, these schools’ social and academic composition is largely selective and, for the most part, excludes socially disadvantaged and less academic students. Beyond the internal diversity of the population of schools retailing the IB Diploma in Australia, it is argued that the recruitment into and resources available to most of these schools place them in a dominant market position, through which students can be supported in deriving a high academic value from their investment in the IB Diploma. Keywords  School resources · Funding · Segregation · Academic advantage · Social class

Introduction The previous chapter has revealed how the arrival of the IB Diploma in the Australian high school credential market has been restricted to a small number of schools, making the IB Diploma into a scarce certificate. The chapter has also shown that its distribution across schools has been deeply shaped by the stratified structure of Australian schooling: far from being evenly distributed across Australia’s high schools, this new certificate has become quasi-monopolised by private (non-­ Catholic) schools in Australia’s major cities. We must now turn to analysing how the location of the IB Diploma in the school system interacts with the distribution of socio-academic resources across schools. In this chapter, I reveal that the IB Diploma has become intimately tied to patterns of resource concentration, social segregation and academic power concentration in a small segment of Australia’s school system. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Q. Maire, Credential Market, International Study of City Youth Education 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80169-4_6

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Resource Concentration and the IB Diploma The accumulation of resources in specific schools serving middle- and upper-class families has been an important institutional mechanism of social reproduction in Australian education. This is particularly significant in the case of the concentration of resource in Australia’s high-fee private schools, but is also increasingly evident in the different level of resourcing available across public schools (Connors & McMorrow, 2015; Lamb, 2007; Rowe & Perry, 2020; Sherington & Hughes, 2015; Teese & Polesel, 2003). In this section, I show how the unequal resourcing of Australia’s high schools has made them unequal in their ability to invest in different regions of the credential market. Schools retailing the IB Diploma are distinguished by their economic resources as much as by their superior staffing levels.

IB Diploma Schools’ Economic Resources Schools’ position in the credential market can be captured by the pool of resources available to them to maximise their students’ chances of appropriating desired credentials. The most relevant resources in defining schools’ market position include their economic and human resources, as these are directly relevant to their ability to assist students in achieving academic distinction. Information on the economic resources available to IB Diploma schools compared to the resources available to other schools offering senior secondary education can be gathered from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). This federal institution provides detailed annual financial information for all Australian schools, including their gross annual income, deductions and net income. Schools’ total income and deductions are divided by the number of students enrolled in the school to generate their income per student. This makes it possible to propose a meaningful comparison of economic resources available to IB Diploma schools and other senior secondary schools (Table 6.1).

Table 6.1  Average income of high schools, by IB Diploma status (AU$, 2017) All high schools 19,955

Gross income per student Deductions per student 710 Net recurrent income 19,245 per student

High schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma schools 22,560

IB Diploma schools 24,275

1718 20,842

2009 22,265

Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis

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On average in 2017, IB Diploma schools’ net income per student amounted to $22,265, against $19,245 for the overall population of schools offering twelfth grade. In other words, IB Diploma schools disposed of an extra $3020 every year to educate each one of their students. To put this in perspective against the variation in income per student observed in the general high school population, the net income per student was 30% of a standard deviation higher in IB Diploma schools than in high schools in general. The gap is magnified if one examines gross income: it amounted to an extra $4320 available per student in IB Diploma schools, or 42% of a standard deviation. The level of deductions per student claimed by IB Diploma schools was 2.8 greater than in secondary schools in general ($2009 versus $710). One could hypothesise that the concentration of the IB Diploma in affluent suburbs of Australia’s major cities can explain these differences. However, Table 6.1 tells otherwise. The gap in net income per student when IB Diploma schools are compared to other high schools in the same suburb is certainly lower, but it still amounted to $1424 per student (14% of a standard deviation) in 2017. The extra economic resources available to IB Diploma schools are evidence of their position in the upper segment of the school market, and understanding the value of the IB Diploma credential cannot dispense from fully grasping the educational conditions of its acquisition in settings where resources are highly concentrated and significantly superior to the resources available in other schools.

IB Diploma Schools’ Human Resources One of the practical mechanisms by which additional economic resources contribute to creating the differential, distinctive value of the IB Diploma is through investment in school staff. ACARA reports information on the number of students per staff, broken down by their teaching status, for each Australian school. Table 6.2 shows the average number of students for each staff in IB Diploma schools, schools not offering IB in suburbs where an IB Diploma school is located, and in the general population of Australian high schools. Table 6.2  Average staffing levels in high schools, by IB Diploma status (2018)

Students per FTE teacher Students per FTE non-teaching staff Students per FTE staff

All high schools 11.9

High schools not offering IB in suburbs IB Diploma with IB Diploma schools schools 12.1 10.8

33.5

30.1

26.0

8.4

8.3

7.4

Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis. FTE refers to full-time equivalent. The number of students per teacher is not equivalent to class sizes

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While the number of students per teacher (school-wide) is 11.9 on average across all schools offering twelfth grade in Australia, it is 10.8 in IB Diploma schools. This represents a difference of 41% of a standard deviation in the student-to-teacher ratio. In other words, in IB Diploma schools, each staff is responsible for fewer students than in other secondary schools. The ratio of students per full-time equivalent (FTE) non-teaching staff is also significantly lower in IB Diploma than Australian high schools (−7.5 students per non-teaching staff in IB Diploma schools, or 40% of a standard deviation). These human resource indicators are consistent with the data on economic resources and suggest that IB Diploma schools occupy a dominant position in the school market. IB Diploma schools are significantly different not only from high schools but also from other high schools in their suburbs, with 1.3 fewer students per teacher in IB Diploma schools, or 50% of a standard deviation. In the ratio of students per non-­teaching staff, IB Diploma schools are also different from other schools in their suburb (−4.1 students per non-teaching FTE staff, or 22% of a standard deviation). The distinctive market position thus cannot be attributed solely to their location; within their suburbs, they are further distinguished from other local schools in their resource levels. This is all the more significant that the demands students place on teachers are related to their own academic past and social origins and that, as the rest of this chapter will show, IB Diploma schools combine a greater concentration of economic and human resources with a more limited need for these resources to meet curricular and assessment demands, due to their greater social and academic selectivity.

Social Segregation and the IB Diploma If economic and human resources are important for the institutional production of academic power, the socio-academic profile of students is the most direct indicator of schools’ resources from the point of view of credential acquisition. As students’ social origins are associated with unequal economic and cultural resource endowments, schools’ social recruitment is a key indicator of their ability to help students invest profitably in the credential market. Schools’ social recruitment refers to the specific cultural or educational habits and other forms of ‘cultural goodwill’ (Bourdieu, 2010), ethical dispositions toward schools and credentials, linguistic resources, behavioural routines, sense of diligence in educational matters, forms of relationship to school authority and rules, time management skills, dispositions toward learning, educational aspirations, sense of educational investments, knowledge of the fluctuations in the social profitability of credentials, economic resources available for learning, networks of social relationships and all other socially variable properties that families bring to the school; in short, the various forms of capital and class ethos that families owe to their social position and trajectory. Since these can affect the extent to which students depend on schools to meet the cognitive and cultural demands of credentials’

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curricula and assessment, but also schools’ ability to create learning conditions conducive to credential acquisition, they are central to the ability of achieving academic distinction in the credential market. Various indicators are available to assess the comparative social recruitment of IB Diploma and other secondary schools. Three of them are used in this section: (1) the tuition fees charged by IB Diploma schools for senior secondary education enrolment, (2) schools’ Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA), and (3) the student composition of schools categorised into four social classes based on their parental levels of education and occupations.

IB Diploma Schools’ Economic Selectivity Precisely because there are differences in the extent to which schools can facilitate students’ credential acquisition, and because economic capital is distributed highly unequally across social groups, some families are simultaneously in a position and willing to make a very significant economic investment in high tuition fee-schools. The fees charged by IB Diploma schools to enrol students can thus be used as an indirect indicator of their social selectivity. The ‘segregative advantage of fees’ (Teese & Polesel, 2003) guarantees a level of social selectivity that assists schools in ensuring the academic success of their students, for a selective social recruitment represents an asset to school in the competition for credential acquisition preparation. Previous research has highlighted that schools offering the different IB study programmes charge significant fees to families (Dickson et al., 2017). Economists have also identified a broader phenomenon of tuition fee inflation in private schools in the state of Victoria (Lye & Hirschberg, 2017). The alchemy of social exclusiveness and resource concentration means that, in addition to fees being on average much higher in non-Catholic private schools than in Catholic and public schools, these non-Catholic private schools have the lowest student-teacher ratios (Watson & Ryan, 2010). To what extent do these findings reflect the situation of IB Diploma schools? Information on the tuition fees charged by the 73 schools offering the IB Diploma in 2019 was collected and analysed (for additional information on the tuition fee data collection and treatment processes, refer to the appendix). By convention, the tuition fees charged by public schools offering the IB Diploma were set to zero, even though informal fees exist. The state-by-state distribution of average tuition fees charged by IB Diploma schools is presented in Fig. 6.1. On average in 2019, families had to disburse $17,882 per annum to enrol in a school offering the IB Diploma. Because of the significant presence of public schools in the Queensland IB Diploma school population, average tuition fees were lowest in that state, at $6142 per annum. At the other end of the spectrum, average IB Diploma school fees were highest in New South Wales, reaching an average of $24,326. In three states, the average IB Diploma senior secondary enrolment fees exceeded $20,000, and Queensland was the only state where the average fees were

6  Resource Concentration, Social Segregation and Academic Power in IB Diploma…

138

24,326

25,000

20,785 20,000

15,000

21 ,256

1 8,952

1 3,1 1 8

1 7,882

1 2,600

10,000 6,1 42 5,000

0 ACT

NSW

QLD

SA

TAS

VIC

WA

Total

Fig. 6.1  Average annual senior secondary tuition fees charged by IB Diploma schools, by state (AU$, 2019) Source: IB Diploma school website data

inferior to $10,000. However, as mentioned in the previous chapter, these schools’ limited social selectivity through fees was compensated by social selectivity based on academic performance. To make sense of these figures, it is useful to compare them to the mean household annual disposable income in 2017–18 in Australia for different income groups. The average tuition fees charged by IB Diploma schools in Australia in 2019 represented 32.3% of the 2017–18 mean disposable income of Australian households. They amounted to 16% of the disposable household incomes in the highest quintile, but 28.5%, 38%, 51.6% and 85.9% of the disposable household income of the fourth, third, second and first quintiles, respectively. In other words, even the second quintile of households would need to spend half of their disposable income on tuition fees to be able to enrol a child in the average IB Diploma school. This is a strong indicator of the socioeconomically selective recruitment into IB Diploma schools and, therefore, of the effective social restrictions existing to access the private segment of the Australian high school credential market. Another way of making sense of the social recruitment of IB Diploma schools through their tuition fees is to compare these to the fees charged by other schools. In recent years, the Good Education Group has published annual information on the tuition fees of private schools in Victoria. Victorian IB Diploma school data can be compared to the reported figures in the Good Schools Guide Victoria 2019 (Good Education Group, 2018) (Table 6.3). Of the 16 Victorian private schools offering the IB Diploma in 2019, the most affordable charged $4564  in tuition fees. Only two schools charged less than $10,000, while 10 charged more than $20,000 and seven asked for more than $30,000. The average tuition fees charged by schools offering the IB Diploma were superior to the average private school fees for grade 12 enrolment in any of the metropolitan regions of Victoria by at least $7000. In fact, the average tuition fees

Social Segregation and the IB Diploma

139

Table 6.3  Lowest, highest and average annual senior secondary tuition fees in Victorian private schools and Victorian IB Diploma private schools, by region (AU$, 2019)

Private schools

Northern metro. region Eastern metro. region Southern metro. region Western metro. region Victorian private IB Diploma schools (N = 16)

Least expensive school 2500

Most expensive school 26,800

Average 8100

6600

37,000

17,400

2000

34,000

15,800

2200

26,700

8000

4564

41,544

24,683

Source: IB Diploma school website data and Good Schools Guide Victoria 2019 data Note: the fact that the most expensive Victorian IB Diploma school has higher tuition fees than any metropolitan private school is explained by this private school’s regional location

in Victoria’s IB Diploma private schools were similar to the fees charged by the most expensive private schools in the northern and western metropolitan regions of the state. If the case of Victoria can be generalised to Australia more broadly, the data suggests that the economic selectivity of the IB Diploma is stark.

IB Diploma Schools’ Socio-Educational Advantage Another indicator relevant to assess the social recruitment of IB Diploma schools is their Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA), published by ACARA. ICSEA is a scale developed to capture the socio-educational background of students and characterise schools’ level of educational advantage with respect to academic achievement (Australian Curriculum, 2015b). The ICSEA scale combines two student factors (their parents’ levels of education and occupations) and two school factors (their geographical location and proportion of indigenous students) to assign a single numerical value of educational (dis)advantage to each school. ICSEA values range from 500 (for a school serving students from ‘extremely educationally disadvantaged backgrounds’ (Australian Curriculum, 2014)) to 1300 (representing a student population with extremely advantaged backgrounds). The scale has been calibrated by ACARA to have an average ICSEA value of 1000 (Australian Curriculum, 2015a). The ICSEA standard deviation is 100, implying that, on average, the ICSEA point gap between a randomly selected school and the ICSEA mean of 1000 is 100 points. ICSEA values below 900 and beyond 1100 can be considered as representing, respectively, school populations with significantly disadvantaged and significantly advantaged social backgrounds. The most socioeconomically disadvantaged schools typically have ICSEA values between 700 and 900, while the

140

6  Resource Concentration, Social Segregation and Academic Power in IB Diploma…

most socioeconomically advantaged schools tend to have ICSEA values between 1100 and 1200 (Bonnor & Shepherd, 2016). Of the 72 schools offering the IB Diploma in 2018, 70 had a valid ICSEA score. The two schools with a missing value were assigned their most recent ICSEA (2015 for one school and 2016 value for the other school). Table 6.4 presents ICSEA values for IB Diploma schools, schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma schools, and the general population of secondary schools offering twelfth grade studies. The extent to which schools offering the IB Diploma are located in socioeconomically privileged communities is confirmed by the fact that schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma schools had an average ICSEA of 1066 in 2018, 63% of a standard deviation above the national value for high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme. Yet, what is most striking about schools offering the IB Diploma is that their socioeconomic recruitment is significantly more privileged than that of neighbouring schools. IB Diploma schools are as socioeconomically privileged relative to other schools in their suburbs (64 ICSEA points) as schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma schools are relative to the overall population of secondary schools (63 ICSEA points). Overall, the level of socio-­ educational advantage in IB Diploma schools is 1.26 standard deviations greater than it is in the general high school population. The market for the IB Diploma credential is fundamentally a socially exclusive market, even within their already middle- and upper-class local contexts. Mean ICSEA values are important, but they are not informative about the distribution of ICSEA scores across different schools. To examine this distribution, Fig. 6.2 displays the proportion of high schools with ICSEA values above certain thresholds (e.g. 1000, 1050, 1100 etc.), based on their IB Diploma status. All IB Diploma schools have an ICSEA superior to the national average. In other words, no IB Diploma school serves a community that can be described as socio-­ educationally disadvantaged. As much as 87.5% of IB Diploma schools have an ICSEA at least 50% of a standard deviation above the standard value of 1000, and still more than three quarters of IB Diploma schools have an ICSEA superior to one full standard deviation above the Australian average value. Two-thirds of IB Diploma schools have an ICSEA score superior to 1.2 standard deviations above 1000, and every second IB Diploma school has an ICSEA above 1140, or 1.4 Table 6.4  Average ICSEA (socio-educational advantage) score of high schools, by IB Diploma status (2018)

Mean Median Standard deviation

High schools 1002.1 1010.0 108.4

High schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma schools 1065.8 1092.5 102.8

IB Diploma schools 1128.7 1141.0 50.6

Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis

Social Segregation and the IB Diploma

141

IB Diploma schools 100

All high schools

1 00 87.5 76.4

80

66.7 60

54.5

40

50 31 .5

30.6 1 5.0

20

1 0.7

1 5.3 6.7

4.1

2.1

>1140

>1160

>1180

0 >1000

>1050

>1100

>1120

Fig. 6.2  Percentage of high schools and IB Diploma schools with ICSEA (socio-educational advantage) scores above selected thresholds (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis

standard deviations above the standard ICSEA of Australian schools. Finally, more than three in 10 IB Diploma schools have an ICSEA superior to 1160, and one must go as high as an ICSEA of 1180 to find only a small minority of IB Diploma schools (15.3%) above the threshold. Even more telling is the comparative distribution of IB Diploma schools against Australian schools offering twelfth grade as a whole. For ICSEAs above the national median of 1000, IB Diploma schools are over-represented by a factor of 1.8. This climbs to a 2.8 rate of over-representation for schools with an ICSEA superior to 1050; and the proportion of IB Diploma schools with an ICSEA superior to 1100 is five times greater than the corresponding proportion of such schools among all Australian high schools. This over-representation even rises to a factor of 7.5 for schools with an ICSEA superior to 1140 and 1160. Put differently, the more one makes the ICSEA threshold of social privilege severe and exclusive, the more the over-representation of IB Diploma schools increases. The school market in which the IB Diploma is retailed is not only privileged overall; the majority of schools in which the IB Diploma is made available are socially exclusive. On the retailer side, access to the IB Diploma market segment is far more socially restrictive than is access to state certificates. Is the socially restricted access to the IB Diploma exclusively due to the over-­ representation of non-Catholic private schools among IB Diploma retailers? Figure 6.3 compares the mean ICSEA score of high schools and IB Diploma schools by sector. Figure 6.3 demonstrates that, irrespective of the sector, IB Diploma schools are systematically more socio-educationally privileged than are high schools offering twelfth grade studies. Put differently, in all sectors, the market for the IB Diploma

142

6  Resource Concentration, Social Segregation and Academic Power in IB Diploma… All high schools

High schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma schools

IB Diploma schools

1200 1147

1150 1100

1077

1038

1050 1000

1091

1079

1142 1104

1003 956

950 900 850 Public

Private Catholic

Private non-Catholic

Fig. 6.3  Mean ICSEA (socio-educational advantage) score of high schools, by IB Diploma status and sector (2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis

exists in schools that are more socially advantaged than are other schools from the same sector. Among the general population of secondary schools, a clear pattern of increasing social advantage emerges as one rises from public schools to Catholic schools to non-Catholic private schools: the level of socio-educational advantage in this last group is 1.2 standard deviations higher than it is in public schools. Yet, the average non-Catholic private high school is still less socially selective than is the average public school offering the IB Diploma (1077 versus 1079 ICSEA scores). The gap between IB Diploma schools and all high schools is equivalent to 1,22 ICSEA standard deviations for public schools, 1.09 SD for Catholic schools, and .65 SD for non-Catholic private schools. The social recruitment of IB Diploma schools relative to their sector is more elitist among public schools than among non-­ Catholic private schools. Even more revealing is the fact that IB Diploma schools are also more privileged than are high schools not offering the IB Diploma in the same suburbs (Fig. 6.3). This implies that the socially restrictive structures of the IB Diploma market segment cannot be accounted for by the socioeconomic characteristics of families in the local schooling markets in which the IB Diploma becomes available. Within an already socially skewed geographical distribution, the IB Diploma still selects primarily the more privileged local schools—or, put differently, even within socially privileged suburbs, it is still only in the more socially exclusive schools in the vicinity that the IB Diploma is made available.

Social Segregation and the IB Diploma

143

IB Diploma Schools’ Social Class Recruitment Since the ICSEA score is a composite, school-level indicator bringing together school and student-level attributes, it remains a fairly abstract tool for grasping the social recruitment of the IB Diploma. In addition to the ICSEA, ACARA also reports schools’ social recruitment profile as a distribution of their students across four quartiles of socio-educational advantage (SEA). All families enrolling a student in an Australian school are required to complete a form selecting their occupation in a framework of pre-defined occupational groups and reporting their highest level of schooling and non-school (i.e. tertiary or vocational) education.1 This information is used by ACARA to construct a scale of socio-educational advantage (SEA) based on its ability to predict reading performance in the national achievement test (ACARA, 2018), making this indicator particularly relevant to assess the social concentration of academic power in different schools. Given that SEA values represent students’ parents’ occupational situation and educational credentials, they can be interpreted as a proxy indicator of families’ economic capital (considering parental occupations as a proxy for their level of labour income and their labour income as a proxy of their economic resources) and cultural capital (considering school and post-school educational outcomes as a proxy of their cultural resources). While the precision and accuracy of SEA scores are limited, they can still provide useful information at the student level to complement the findings provided so far. Comparing levels of socioeconomic closure in the senior secondary years across different groups of schools should take into consideration (1) the significant variability in school sizes—to avoid assigning the same weight to schools with 1300 students versus 300 students—and (2) the variation in the proportion of twelfth grade students in the total student population in the school (some schools have secondary-­ only enrolments while others are combined primary and secondary schools). To do so, a school weight was generated for each high school where the school weight represents its share of all twelfth grade enrolments in Australia multiplied by its proportion of twelfth grade students in the school’s overall student population. Figure 6.4 reports the (weighted) proportion of students from each SEA quarter in three groups of schools: all high schools offering twelfth grade (2288 schools), schools not offering IB in suburbs with schools offering the IB Diploma (56 schools), and IB Diploma schools (69 schools). In the overall high school population, families from the four socioeconomic background groups are represented in comparable measure, albeit with a slight over-representation of high-socioeconomic background families (27.1%) and a small under-representation of low-socioeconomic background families (23.1%). A marked shift occurs when one turns to schools not offering IB in suburbs where the 1  Detailed information on the student background data collection procedure is available from ACARA (2019).

144

6  Resource Concentration, Social Segregation and Academic Power in IB Diploma… Bottom SEA Quarter

All high schools

2nd SEA Quarter

23.1

High schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma schools

24.4

1 5.1

IB Diploma schools

4.6

0

3rd SEA Quarter

25.4

1 7.4

1 1 .2

27.1

23.8

43.7

24.5

20

Top SEA Quarter

59.7

40

60

80

100

Fig. 6.4  Mean percentage of students from each socioeconomic quarter, by IB Diploma status of high school (weighted, 2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis

IB Diploma is retailed: in these schools, over four in 10 students (43.7%) come from families in the highest quarter of the socioeconomic distribution, while only 15.1% of students are from the most socioeconomically disadvantaged quarter of families. Yet these schools’ social recruitment is still significantly less advantaged than it is in IB Diploma schools. What seems most distinctive about IB Diploma schools is their social recruitment, even relative to other local schools engaged in the high school certification market. Close to six out of every 10 students in IB Diploma schools (59.7%) come from upper class backgrounds. The concentration of high-SES students is 2.2 times (or 32.7% points) higher in IB Diploma schools than in all schools offering twelfth grade. Equally striking is the exclusion of lower-class students from IB Diploma schools: fewer than five in every 100 students (4.6%) are from these socially disadvantaged backgrounds in IB Diploma schools. The concentration of low-SES students is five times smaller in IB Diploma schools than in the total population of schools offering twelfth grade. IB Diploma schools are starkly socially selective, marked simultaneously by the widespread exclusion of socially disadvantaged students and the systematic over-recruitment of socially advantaged students. In fact, IB Diploma schools are characterised by the exclusion of low-SES students to an even greater extent than by the concentration of family economic and cultural capital. Access to this private credential is thus largely denied to lower-SES students and captured by high-SES families. The contrast is most clearly visible when the ratio between high-SES and low-SES students is compared in Australian high schools and in IB Diploma schools. In the former, there are 1.2 upper-class students for every lower-class student. In IB Diploma schools, there are 13.1 upper-­ class students for every lower-class student.

Social Segregation and the IB Diploma

145

As Fig. 6.4 shows, this social exclusiveness is not fully due to the concentration of IB Diploma schools in the affluent suburbs of Australia’s cities. While this certainly contributes to the social selectivity of IB Diploma schools, it does not explain it entirely. The proportion of upper-class students in IB Diploma schools is still 16% points higher than in neighbouring schools (59.7% versus 43.7%). Lower-class students are 3.3 times more represented in schools not offering IB than in IB Diploma schools from the same suburbs (15.1% versus 4.6%). The upper-class/lower-class ratio is 4.5 times greater in IB Diploma schools than in other high schools in the vicinity (13.1 versus 2.9). When it comes to elite social recruitment, IB Diploma schools are thus at least as different from other local schools engaged in the high school certification market as these local schools are from the general population of schools offering senior secondary education. Are public schools offering the IB Diploma the exception to this skewed social selectivity? Their overall ICSEA value suggests that they are not, but it is worth examining their socioeconomic recruitment in further detail. Figure 6.5 compares the (weighted) distribution of students across the four SEA quarters in public and non-Catholic private schools offering twelfth grade, and Fig. 6.6 does the same for IB Diploma schools in these two sectors. Public secondary schools disproportionately enrol socioeconomically disadvantaged students (31.8% of their recruitment) while they under-recruit students from socioeconomically privileged families (18.4% of their enrolments). By contrast, in non-Catholic private high schools, only 6.6% of students are from the lowest quarter of the socioeconomic distribution of families, while over one in two (51.7%) are from the most socioeconomically privileged quarter of families. This is an 60

40

51 .7

31 .8

27.1

22.7

20

26.9 1 8.4

1 4.9 6.6

0 Bottom SEA Quarter

2nd SEA Quarter

3rd SEA Quarter

Public

Top SEA Quarter

Bottom SEA Quarter

2nd SEA Quarter

3rd SEA Quarter

Top SEA Quarter

Private non-Catholic

Fig. 6.5  Mean percentage of students from each socioeconomic quarter in high schools, by sector (weighted, 2018) Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis. The graph excludes Catholic schools as only one Catholic school offers the IB Diploma

146

6  Resource Concentration, Social Segregation and Academic Power in IB Diploma… 69.9

60 39.3

40

20

30.7 21 .4

1 9.8 1 0.4 1 .7

7.0

0 Bottom SEA Quarter

2nd SEA Quarter

3rd SEA Quarter

Public

Top SEA Quarter

Bottom SEA Quarter

2nd SEA Quarter

3rd SEA Quarter

Top SEA Quarter

Private non-Catholic

Fig. 6.6  Mean percentage of students from each socioeconomic quarter in IB Diploma schools, by sector (weighted, 2018) Source: ACARA school data.

unambiguous confirmation that the ‘great Australia divide’ (Anderson, 2013) has an evident social class logic when it comes to the high school certification market. The sectorial divide in social recruitment is also observed among IB Diploma schools, but it looks very different given the generalised social elitism of the IB Diploma. Among both public and non-Catholic private schools offering the IB Diploma, the slope of social recruitment rises from socially disadvantaged families to socially advantaged families. In non-Catholic private schools offering the IB Diploma, seven in 10 students (69.9%) are from upper-class social origins, while fewer than one in 50 students (1.7%) are from lower-class backgrounds. This pattern is an exacerbated version of the social recruitment of non-Catholic private secondary schools. In public IB Diploma schools, just over one in 10 students (10.4%) are from lower-class origins while close to four in 10 (39.3%) are from upper-class families. As raised when examining schools’ ICSEA scores, the analysis of the SEA distribution confirms that public schools offering the IB Diploma are much more alike non-­ Catholic private schools offering senior secondary studies than alike public schools in general: students from the upper half of the social class distribution make up 78.5% of enrolees in non-Catholic private high schools, 41.1% of public high schools but 70% of public schools offering the IB Diploma.

Schools’ Academic Power and the IB Diploma

147

Schools’ Academic Power and the IB Diploma Australia’s stratified school system has developed in response to the demands of the stratified academic curriculum that dominates credential markets (Teese et  al., 2009). If the business of private and other socially selective schools is precisely the making of academic distinction (Teese, 2014), it comes as no surprise that academic success is unequally distributed across Australian schools. In Victoria, one in four students in the most socially advantaged schools obtain a score of 40 or above in the Victorian Certificate of Education, while only one in 50 students do so in the most socially disadvantaged schools (Bonnor, 2019). A similar pattern is evident in the rate of Distinguished Achievers in the New South Wales’ Higher School Certificate and in the Queensland Certificate of Education. The Australian school market is thus characterised by a high degree of stratification, with a marked concentration of social and academic advantage in some schools and the accumulation of academic difficulties and social disadvantage in others (Teese, 2014). So far, it is primarily the resources available to schools offering the IB Diploma and their social recruitment that have been analysed. But the most direct indicator of schools’ ability to achieve academic success in the credential market is their academic recruitment. Students’ accumulated knowledge and competencies in school subjects represent the most central resource in the acquisition of credentials, for they are the springboard on which schools’ pedagogical action can take place. School results in the National Assessment Program in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) conducted annually by ACARA provide useful information on the academic power of IB Diploma schools. The average performance of their grade 9 students in the national achievement test is the best available indicator of the academic competence of their senior high school students against the curricular demands of high school credentials. The academic competencies tested in grade 9 include four literacy skills (grammar, writing, narrative writing and spelling) and numeracy. Table 6.5 summarises the mean NAPLAN score of high schools and IB Diploma schools in the five academic competencies assessed in grade 9 NAPLAN. As with the analysis of the distribution of students across four SEA quarters presented above, the results of the analysis are weighted by the school enrolment and

Table 6.5  Mean NAPLAN (national standardised test) grade 9 scores of high schools, by IB Diploma status (weighted, 2018)

All high schools High schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Dip. schools IB Diploma schools

Narrative Grammar writing 587.1 602.8 607.1 624.0

Numeracy Spelling Writing 589.9 589.3 547.4 607.3 606.6 568.0

620.7

621.6

640.0

614.1

Source: ACARA school data Note: only high schools offering a twelfth-grade programme are included in the analysis

585.8

148

6  Resource Concentration, Social Segregation and Academic Power in IB Diploma…

proportion of twelfth grade students in the school to reflect as faithfully as possible the academic standing of school categories in the high school certification market. Across all five forms of academic competence, IB Diploma schools systematically outperform high schools in general by as much as 1.01 standard deviations on average across the five NAPLAN domains. Gaps between IB Diploma and all high schools are largest for students’ numeracy skills (0.95 standard deviations) and lowest but still high for students’ spelling abilities (0.77 standard deviations). Mean achievement levels are also significantly higher in IB Diploma schools compared to non-IB schools in the same suburbs, by 37% of a standard deviation on average across NAPLAN domains. The IB Diploma is retailed in schools capable of generating high levels of academic achievement by grade 9, i.e. before students engage in one or another of the high school certificates. In other words, the student population from which IB Diploma students are selected is typically a high-achieving population, which represents a constitutive property of the IB Diploma market segment. Academic excellence pre-exists IB Diploma enrolment in IB Diploma schools, with the logical implication that the value of the IB Diploma cannot be attributed solely or even primarily to the teaching and learning taking place in the final two years of credential acquisition preparation in IB Diploma schools. A complementary way of grasping the relative academic pedigree (and thus market position) of IB Diploma schools is to examine the proportion of students in the highest achievement bands (bands 9 and 10 in NAPLAN grade 9) and compare it to the proportion observed in high schools in general. The distribution of percentages of students in the top two bands across the populations of IB Diploma and other high schools can be grouped into four categories, ranging from schools with less than 15% of students in the top two bands in NAPLAN grade 9 to those with more than half (50%) of their students in the top two bands. Grammar and numeracy can be used as examples to reveal differences between IB Diploma schools, schools not offering IB in suburbs with IB Diploma schools, and high schools in general (Figs. 6.7 and 6.8). No IB Diploma school has fewer than 15% of students achieving in the top two bands in NAPLAN grade 9 grammar. In other words, all IB Diploma schools have at least a significant group of high-achieving students in grade 9, i.e. students with accumulated academic capital. This compares to 30.9% of high schools with less than 15% of students in the top two bands. Only 5.6% of high schools have half or more of their students in the top two bands of NAPLAN grade 9 grammar, while every fourth IB Diploma school (27.3% of them) does. If the focus is on schools with at least a quarter of their students as top achievers, one finds 96.4% of IB Diploma schools in this category, whereas only four in 10 high schools (40.1%) meet this criterion. In the vast majority of IB Diploma schools, one finds a significant cohort of high achievers (at least a quarter of students) in NAPLAN grade 9 grammar. The academic profile of enrolment into the IB Diploma programme is thus likely to draw extensively from a pool of academically successful students. Even if no academic differentiation existed between the IB Diploma and state credentials within IB Diploma schools, one in four families investing in the IB Diploma could still be expected to be families of the highest-achieving students.

Schools’ Academic Power and the IB Diploma Fewer than 15% 100%

80%

15% to