Chapter 8: The International Baccalaureate and its “Second Era” of Ambitious Rhetoric: Wider Access and Greater Impact

The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) celebrated its fortieth anniversary as a Geneva-registered entity in October 2008. At that point in time there were 650,000 children, in 2,500 schools in 132 countries, undertaking one of three IB programs. The initial International Baccalaureate diploma program (IBDP) had appeared in an embryonic form 46 years earlier, at the very peak of the Cold War. It had been joined by the primary years program (PYP) in 1994 and by the middle years program (MYP) in 1997, to form what the IBO was ambitiously marketing five years later as a “continuum of international education” (IBO, 2002).