Schools: 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...