Ungraded Primary

The Edmonds school district north of Seattle is a once rural area that in ten years of suburban spread has acquired almost 22,000 schoolchildren. With such pressure, its schools might well be awful. But so appealing is its remarkable Maple Park Elementary School that people living outside its area have been known to smuggle in their kids by parking them with legal residents. The lure at Maple Park, first public school of its kind in the Pacific Northwest, is the "ungraded primary"--a new way of organizing grade schools that may soon become standard across the U.S.

Gone at Maple Park (776 pupils) is the old grade unit of 30 or so children, all given the same assignments and expected to cover the same ground at the same pace. Good teachers know how unrealistic this is. In mental development, children of the same age may be as much as four years apart. To treat them all alike is to bore the bright or daunt the dull without doing enough for the average either.

Room for Bloom. The new way, geared to individual differences, is to banish formal grades and group children according to performance. Instead of grades one to six. Maple Park confronts a child with a ig-rung ladder--19 "levels"' of scholastic achievement. The object is to let the child climb at his own pace, moving from one level to the next not by a fixed calendar but according to his achievement. He is always in a homogeneous class of the same general ability, even though the other children may be younger or older.

Moving up is determined by the teacher's judgment, based on a formal check list. At level-seven arithmetic, for example, the child must know simple fractions and Roman numerals. If he has trouble mastering them, he is neither given a phony promotion nor faced with the disgrace and inefficiency of taking a whole year over; he simply works at his level until ready to move up.

Freed of cowing competition, "late bloomers'" may take off suddenly, whisking through a year's work in a few weeks. For the bright but immature child, who may do three years' work in iJ, years, level eight is followed by an intellectual furlough: level nine for "enrichment'' reading and growing while glands catch up with brains. Levels ten to 18 cover the usual grades three to six; level 19 is another pause for extra-brights. Maple Park kids then go on to junior high school, some after only five years of school, some after seven.

Teaching Is a Pleasure. Most parents are wildly enthusiastic, and Maple Park has research to prove that children in graded schools are, age for age, behind on almost every count, notably in reading and arithmetic. Teachers give the system all the credit. "The best recommendation is that we all bring our own children here," says one. Class loads are confusing; a teacher may have 35 pupils one week, and then, after some level shifting, 20 the next. But each group is so harmonious that teaching is a pleasure. One teacher calls it "an inspiration to teach in a school that meets each child's needs without frustrating him." The few complaints are mostly from parents whose kids seem to be moving slowly. "The plan makes a wonderful scapegoat if the school can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," says Principal Miriam Burton.

The pent-up bully is almost unknown at Maple Park, and children disturbed by sickness, divorce of parents, newborn brothers or sisters, or a death in the family, get a break. While facing up to the problem, they can slow down at school, thus heal emotions faster. Scott Warren, now eleven, was once so ill that he missed more than half a year of first-grade fundamentals. In a graded school, says his teacher mother, he might never have caught up. "In the ungraded plan, he missed absolutely nothing, going along very slowly until he was able to step up with the fast group."

One child sums up the benefits of the ungraded primary with a simple and heartfelt judgment. "You know where you are here." he says.

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