John Locke, one of the characters in one of the first bingeable television series (Lost) in the 1990s, said famously, “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly how I’ve felt as an IB/DP parent.

When as a parent you think back on all of the educational experiences of your child, encouraging them to explore the world from pressing leaves in wax paper to acting in a play for the first time, to writing an essay or figuring out the volume of a pyramid, you probably don’t imagine them crying uncontrollably because their future is going to be ruined if they can’t solve a chemistry problem on solubility or entropy in a subject they will certainly never study again. How did it come to this?

I didn’t have the courage to tell anyone, let alone my daughter, what she could not do.

As a school administrator, one of my least favorite rituals over the past 16 years has been the annual release of I.B. D.P. exam scores in early July. It’s several weeks after the joyful exultations of graduation, the summer vibe starting to kick in, the stress high stakes exams finally dissipating.

Then WHAM. July 5. The ice bucket challenge.

We review the numbers and they are ruthless. You either meet your conditional number or you don’t. (For those not familiar with the I.B. students are predicted in advance to achieve a certain score on their exams and must attain this score to get admitted to university).

The achievers achieve, the middle of the roaders middle road and the strugglers struggle. I have yet to see one of these scores tell me something I didn’t know already, something that seems truly contrary to what was already expected and demonstrated that the child could overcome odds. Yes, there is clearing and backup schools and so on, but we all know that young people set their hearts on something that they are praying by some alignment of stars in the universe they achieve so their lives can be complete.

As long as I’ve been doing this, I’ve cared deeply about the achievers and moreso the strugglers. But for this year it was personal. I was not just the Principal. I was a parent. And it made me really angry that this test was repeatedly telling her what she could not do.

We all know the I.B. Learner Profiles. The profile aims to develop learners who are:

Inquirers
Knowledgeable
Thinkers
Communicators
Principled
Open-minded
Caring
Risk-takers
Balanced
Reflective.

I cannot remember at any point where any of these were enforced or practiced over two years. Thinker, maybe? Knowledgeable?

Here’s my list of the I.B. Parent Profile. The profile is derived from parents that exhibit:

Angst, regret, guilt, helplessness, anger, sorrow, remorse, fear, panic, madness, vertigo

I know that it’s my job to be a much better parent than what the above describes, but when you listen to months (not days or weeks) but months of a young person sobbing that they cannot figure out complex problems no matter how much help they get or how much they study, you start to lose the plot and become very concerned about socio-emotional wellness. After all, the number is always looming.

We raised an empathetic, emotionally intelligent, creative, communicative, mature, thoughtful person. We weren’t perfect but we did our best. Then we enrolled her in a program (that she agreed to because it’s just what you do) that exposed everything she was bad at and as a bonus made it a requirement for her to access her future.

I completely get that the world is a tough, competitive place. I am not expecting that students get to the next stage of their life without disappointment or struggle. I think people should be uncomfortable at times to learn and push themselves to explore new things. I do agree with the principles of the book The Comfort Crisis and am not asking for an easy world that snowplow parents create for our children.

What I am arguing is that it doesn’t have to be through a gauntlet that forces people to do extremely hard (not rigorous, hard) things they are really bad at and probably won’t ever use again. Most kids aren’t going pre-med. Life is, after all, short. A month of grueling, high stakes sit down exams that determine your fate should no longer be the future of demonstrating what it means to be educated for every learner.

It doesn’t have to be like this. The I.B. proved during the pandemic that it didn’t need a month of sit down high stakes exams to make a faithful assessment of student achievement and worth. Using internal assessments and a range of other more creative tools, there were ample means by which students could be crunched into the sorting algorhythm to determine who was eligible for the gold star and who was not. There are thoughtful ways to get the most out of young people, enabling them to shine and make a difference in the world, being capable of some things they are bad at but not having the biologists, chemists, writers and singers all mixed in the same clunky pot of standardized “achievement.”

My experience as an I.B. parent was the worst I’ve ever had over the course of my daughter’s young life. Barbeques, family travel and relaxation were all eclipsed by the big day, the fateful day, the only day that mattered in 13 years of education.

I don’t know if the I.B. gives students the skills to make the world a better place. I know that most of them think it’s good preparation for the grueling demands of university which I guess is a win. In this business we say lots of things about the excitement and thrill of discovery and learning new things and making connections, but that is contrary to the experience at the end of a program designed to sort young people into categories ranging from the can to the cannot.

In the end, she achieved her number. Several of her friends did not. She worked really hard for it. We all cried at the airport in between flights when it came through, people glancing over at us like we just got the results back on Dad’s CAT scan.

I’m not against asking students to climb Everest whether or not they are prepared so that they can say they did it. I am asking that we do a much better job at designing something that doesn’t repeatedly tell people what they cannot do.