Like most 13-year-olds, Brian Wennerstrum loves video games and his mom--and isn't all that crazy about school. An eighth-grader at Callanan Middle School in Des Moines, Iowa, he is quiet and well-mannered, a little unfocused at times, and popular with classmates and teachers. He diligently attempts all the work assigned to him in class, doesn't raise his hand much and almost never speaks up unless he's called upon. Brian's favorite subject? Without hesitation: it's "P.E."
Brian's mother Mary describes her son as "just your average, basic kid." And these days, that means he's just the kind of student who can be overlooked. As a fourth-grader, Brian was placed in a cramped class of 34 students; midway through the school year, the teacher left, and a succession of substitutes took over. By the time Brian started fifth grade, his reading skills were a full year below grade level. "Basically," his mother says, "he got ignored for an entire year."
With the help of a teacher who tutored him after school, Brian has made up most of the lost ground, but he still struggles in reading and admits it's his most dreaded subject. And while he's not qualified for more advanced, enriching work, he does not score poorly enough to receive the special assistance provided kids with learning disabilities. "If I could give him a label, I know there would be all sorts of extra help for him," sighs Mary. Brian is mired in the middle, and even his teachers admit that's a bad place to be. "The high end and the low end of the class can take up all your energies," says Lori Milligan, his seventh-grade science teacher. Casting an eye toward Brian, she adds, "Then there are the rest--the quiet kids who aren't disruptive, who don't need your undivided attention. Where do they fit in?"
The answer, more often than not, is nowhere. Across the U.S., average students like Brian Wennerstrum--a group researchers call "woodwork children" because of their tendency to fade into the classroom background--are suffering from an unofficial policy of neglect as public schools overlook students in the middle in favor of the bright stars or the learning disabled. The share of public-school budgets devoted to "regular education"--which almost two-thirds of students receive--plummeted from 80% in 1967 to less than 59% in 1996, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The trend has accelerated in the past decade. From 1991 to 1996, regular ed accounted for just 23% of total spending on new school programs. Average students have become casualties of a spoils system in which every morsel of every school district's budget has a different interest group staking a claim to it. "If you don't have someone representing you, your needs get lost," says William Purkey, an education professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "The average child slips through the cracks. There's no strong voice on their behalf."