Success at Maple Elementary: A tree grows in Seattle

December 12, 2005

We're always on the lookout for success stories, especially urban schools serving traditionally "at risk" students. Deborah Bach reports this week in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about one such school: Maple Elementary. Two of every five students is classified as "Transitional Bilingual" and three of five qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, yet the school outperforms many other Seattle schools, and has been recognized at the state level for academic excellence.

So how do they do it?

It starts with a gifted principal, Pat Hunter, who modestly gives credit for the school's success to her faculty and staff. But she shouldn't hide her light under a bushel, for rare is the school which has capable teachers with no leader to guide them. The teachers teach, but the principal must lead.

Next is a rigorous focus on academics. Bach writes:

Maple's success is no happy accident, of course, but the result of consistent focus and a deliberate academic approach whose foundation, Hunter said, is "writing, writing, writing."

And practice makes perfect. While we were initially concerned to see reference to "best-guess spelling" (one of the danger signs of an English program that has lowered its standards) it turns out that at Maple Elementary, they get their Kindergarden students to write! This is fantastic (and yes, spelling can come soon enough).

Another reason for Maple's success: data. Not just any old numbers, but measurements of students' performance, skills, and weaknesses, which are used to target instruction. Intervention is so very important when serving children who don't come to school with all the preparation we'd like as teachers. There will be many children who can easily slip through the cracks, if it weren't for eagle-eyed faculty and administrators actually looking at data.

The best schools know that standardized tests aren't the enemy, rather they are a tool to be used to help kids learn.

There is much more to this school's story. But Maple Elementary confirms many of our ideas about what makes a school--any school "despite the odds"--great. Any school, especially any urban school serving high-poverty minority students, can learn from their example.

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Update: Principal Hunter kindly emailed us her 2003 article "Structuring for Students' Success" which goes into greater detail about Maple Elementary's march toward success. A few tenets of their program are decidedly progressive, but that doesn't bother us a bit when we know their school is academically rigorous. (See our article: "Are Progressive Educators All Bad?")