World Public Charter School
Mission Statement

In the knowledge that the families of the District of Columbia are hungry for safe, solid, academic education for their children, Friends of International Education proposes to do something about it by nurturing a new charter school with six campuses: four at the elementary level (ages four to ten), one at the middle school/junior high level (ages eleven to fifteen) and one for the upper secondary (ages sixteen to eighteen). The school will work toward the International Baccalaureate which gives entrance to most major universities world-wide and sophomore standing in most American colleges. The school will show that children of average ability, when well-motivated, can and do respond to a rigorous curriculum, and can become high achievers. For the first time in the District since the demise of old Dunbar, our campuses will teach all children to “world-class standards” in the sciences and the humanities and will aim to surpass what is being taught and achieved elsewhere in the world in mathematics and the sciences. We believe that the responsibility of grownups is to transmit to our young as much as possible of the whole human heritage.

Our academic goals are to teach each child just as efficiently, rigorously and joyously as possible the primary school skills of reading, writing and arithmetic and this through two vehicular languages: English/Arabic, English/Chinese, English/Japanese or English/Russian; and to teach the secondary school subjects , that is, the main academic disciplines as scholars have come to organize them over the last five hundred years: languages and their literatures, history, geography, mathematics and the experimental sciences - biology, chemistry, physics. As Thomas Arnold was wont to say, children must learn about things and their forces, and about men and their ways. School and student performance will be held to the highest standards by employing teachers who are highly educated personally (“...we teach as we were taught”) and who have extensive experience teaching the relevant age level. Many will be expatriates already living in this metropolitan community. Children will be tested internally and frequently in each subject and examined from the beginning of the secondary with formal essay examinations at the end of each term. We will not use multiple-choice examinations except when required by law, and in preparation for US college entrance. In the final analysis, the external examinations of the International Baccalaureate, devised chiefly by university and school scholars and administered internationally, will show that our students measure up to world-class standards. Hundreds of examples in North America demonstrate that the introduction of an IB program at any high school has a miraculously uplifting effect on its feeder schools. The curriculum of the World School of Washington will follow the original pattern of the Washington International School - implemented through “crucial” world languages as well as, of course, English.

The President of Friends of International Education is Dorothy Goodman (A.B. Bryn Mawr, Ph.D. London, in history), who founded the Washington International School and was for many years its director. Other models for the World Public Charter School are the United Nations International School (NY), the International School of Geneva, and indeed all IB schools world-wide - 200 of which are in North America, most of them in public systems.

Friends of International Education (FIE), a 501(C)(3) organization, was founded in 1985 and has been working ever since to establish schools, and programs within schools, teaching through Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian. In its Mountbatten World Textbook Library, FIE has extensive school resources in these languages, as well as in history, geography, the sciences and mathematics - resources that have been collected over many years with the help of the [US] National Endowment for the Humanities, [US] Department of Defense, World Bank, UNESCO and UNICEF

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