UPlace schools shatter socioeconomic barrier

From its beginning, University Place has been a city with the heart of a classroom. The community – once very affluent and very white – revolves around its exceptional school district.

The district is no longer as affluent as it was 20 or 30 years ago, but its heartbeat is stronger than ever. Many of Washington’s school districts would do well to study its achievements.

Leadership is everything. Much of the credit goes to Superintendent Patti Banks and the strong school boards she has worked for. The Washington Association of School Administrators recently honored Banks as the state’s Superintendent of the Year. That’s a considerable distinction, considering that there are 295 school districts in the state.

The honor is justified by what University Place has accomplished on her watch.

Americans have been wringing their hands for decades over the achievement gap between white and Asian students on one side, and black and Latino students on the other.

A close look at the numbers shows that in many communities, this gap boils down to a socioeconomic divide – middle class students routinely outperform poor students. Too many kids – by accident of birth – start life with the odds against them, and too many schools don’t do much to improve those odds.

Over the last 12 years, University Place has shattered that paradigm.

Since 1999, the suburban school district has lost any lingering semblance of a privileged enclave. The rate of University Place students eligible for subsidized lunches – a standard indicator of poverty – has doubled, from 18 percent to 36 percent.

You would expect the district’s performance to slump. Instead, it has shone. Despite that spiking poverty rate, it has been outperforming the state as a whole, sometimes impressively. Its schools have been narrowing the socioeconomic achievement gap even as they’ve grappled with greater numbers of disadvantaged kids.

Students who’ve gone to school in University Place at least a few years tend to flourish. Of the tenth-graders who’ve had this advantage, for example, 93 percent met or exceeded the state’s reading standards this year – 10 percent higher than the statewide average.

University Place is a gap-buster. In the middle grades, the district’s low-income students match those of more affluent students across the state.

Banks is death on educational fads, which sweep across the nation’s K-12 system on a regular basis. She, the board and the district’s administrators and teachers have succeeded by relentlessly applying research-based best practices at every level, with a ferociously intense focus on what happens in the classroom.

University Place has demonstrated that public education can succeed in the face of daunting socioeconomics. Other struggling districts can take that hopeful lesson to heart.