Richard La Valley, a Fairfax County parent and statistician, presented a survey he conducted to FCPS Coordinators on April 16 and has given IB-MA permission to share it with its members. Please look at the PDF of the presentation in the link below. His conclusions are not surprising, but it offers concrete data to support what we had known anecdotally for years!
The release of his study to us anticipates its formal release from U Penn. Here are his qualifications in his own words:
I am a professional statistician with over 30 years industry and government experience. I worked for the US Census Bureau for 6 years and specifically on the 1980 Census on the undercounting of minorities in urban area. I worked for many years as a statistician in the telecommunication industry and currently am a statistician in the government consulting basis. I have published multiple papers. I have a masters degree from Penn State in Statistics and undergrad in Applied Math from St. John’s University in Minnesota. As far as IB is concerned, I have been an IB parent for almost 14 years. I have had one daughter graduate from an IB school with an IB Diploma and college. I have two daughters in an IB diploma program and one daughter in an MYP certificate program. The three girls still in school have progressed from PYP to MYP to DP. I have spent almost a year research the topic of IB education in support of our local IB program and I have built up a library of over 100 pertinent articles.