Stuck in the Middle

On a scorching Monday in June, Meliza Prieto finished her Spanish and physics exams - the last hurdles of her junior year at Randolph High School. But while friends prepared for summer jobs, Meliza was going right back to the classroom. The next morning, the 17-year-old and her father would drive 40 miles north to Phillips Academy in Andover, where, for the next five weeks, she planned to study English and law at the prestigious boarding school, perhaps best known for educating the president of the United States.

Meliza will have something besides Andover in common with President Bush, a famously mediocre student. Meliza's high school transcript contains mostly B's, sandwiched between occasional A's and C's and accompanied by two D's and one F. Though her teachers praise her work habits, her manners, and her leadership abilities, they're more measured when discussing her academic abilities. In person, she's articulate and engaging. But on paper, Meliza Prieto is an average student at an average school - she's slightly above the middle of her class at Randolph High, where students' scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam place it among the most average high schools in the state.

Even Meliza agrees that her transcript is unimpressive. But she attributes that to the disappointing grades she earned as a freshman and sophomore. "If you were to judge me now, I'm above average," she says. Indeed, her grades improved as a junior. Now, as she approaches her final year of high school and looks ahead to college, what will happen to Meliza? If she were a marathon runner, she'd be stuck in the middle of the pack heading up Heartbreak Hill. But she's gaining strength, she believes, and expects to finish strong.

While Meliza's story is uniquely her own, the issues she faces are similar to those confronted by middle-of-the-road students at any high school. She's had trouble finding the level of course work that matches her abilities. She's had to challenge herself to get noticed by counselors. And, until recently, she seemed headed toward a college that might prove beneath her potential.

Just as economists look at middle-class families when judging the impact of tax cuts or shifting labor markets, some educators are taking a special interest in the fate of students like Meliza. They are asking how the current wave of education policies - which include the MCAS exams and federal No Child Left Behind Act - is affecting middle achievers. They worry that reform efforts force schools to shift resources toward the poorest-performing students. Meanwhile, schools are naturally prone to focus on top students, because working with them is rewarding for teachers and because their achievements - National Merit Scholarships or Ivy League admissions - reflect well on their schools. Some worry that, like the middle child in a large family, average students are shortchanged.

"The middle kids are the ones who are lost - they tend to be forgotten by federal policy," says New York University professor Diane Ravitch, who studies education issues. She and other experts say concern about middling students is a decades-old phenomenon, but that recent education legislation has exacerbated the worry. "The mediocrity of which everyone complains is what [middle students] are most likely to suffer from, and without the push and the prod to achieve, they won't make it."

But with hard work, supportive parents, and a little luck, Meliza will prove an exception.

Meliza was born in Boston in 1987. Her parents, Miguel and Elizabeth, grew up in Puerto Rico and graduated from its national university before moving to Massachusetts. The family, which includes Meliza's sister, Clariza, 14, speaks Spanish at home. The parents are well-educated: Miguel earned a graduate degree at Lesley University, and Elizabeth is a candidate for a master's degree from Northeastern University. Both have worked for the Boston Public Schools for a quarter-century. Elizabeth teaches math to Spanish-speaking middle-school students in Jamaica Plain, and Miguel is an administrator at Brighton High School. So when it came time to send Meliza and Clariza to school, the Prietos took a particularly active interest in their educations.

Meliza began her schooling at St. Mary's, a Catholic school in Brookline. After sixth grade, the family moved from Boston to Randolph, where they could afford a new white Colonial on a nice-size lot. Meliza found the public middle school larger and less disciplined than her parochial school, but she soon settled in. As high school approached, her parents planned to send her to private school. But Meliza preferred to stay with her new public-school friends, so they decided to try Randolph High. As a freshman, Meliza seemed happy, and her parents were impressed by her teachers at back-to-school night.

Then her report cards began coming home. Her parents had a simple request: Earn B's or better. Meliza didn't. Math has always been a struggle for her, but her other grades were disappointing, too. She admits that, as a freshman, hanging out with friends sometimes took precedence over homework. In her honors English class, "the pace seemed to be a little fast for her, but I could tell she was still very intelligent," says her former teacher, Susan McNitt, who recalls a series of overdue projects. By late freshman year, Miguel Prieto had met with his daughter's teachers and arranged for weekly progress reports. Her work improved. But as she moved from freshman to sophomore year, Meliza was dropped from honors English to Level II, a less challenging track.

It would be a recurring theme in her high school years. Like a baseball player who's too good for the minor leagues but not quite ready for the majors, Meliza has alternated between lagging in honors courses or going largely unchallenged in Level II. Randolph teachers say students like Meliza suffer because Level II classes - the track designed for average students - have become home to those with a wide range of abilities, from strivers like Meliza to teenagers with behavioral problems who'd prefer not to be in class. Teachers say the time they spend dealing with the problem students detracts from their ability to work with everyone else. And as budgets have been cut, some classes have become more crowded. "It tends to be frustrating for students and teachers alike," says McNitt. In Level II, "you never know what you're going to get."

As a senior this fall, Meliza will take Level II classes in history and calculus, along with advanced placement English, biology, and Spanish. The demanding schedule pleases her father. "My wife would rather not see the girls stress, but I don't have a problem with that," says Miguel. "I think they can achieve, and they shouldn't be able to see themselves as average." Michelle Scoza McBride, who taught Meliza in honors English as a junior, says Meliza's writing isn't as strong as the top students', but she hopes Meliza will make up for it with her work ethic. Regardless, Scoza McBride is certain Meliza will learn more in a top class than she would among middling students. "I don't like to say this, but [Level II] sort of becomes a dumping ground," Scoza McBride says. "There are more disciplinary problems, and I don't think it's really a college-prep level anymore."

In conversation, Meliza's teachers give her high marks in areas not measured by grades. They describe her as personable and take-charge. When the class is rowdy, Meliza sometimes tells classmates to settle down. She's unfailingly polite. Guidance counselor Carlos Jalowayski says she's so driven that he wouldn't be surprised if she wound up running her own company. But first comes college.

Ninety percent of this year's graduating class at Randolph High is going on to higher education; for graduates statewide, the figure is about 77 percent. Ordinarily, a student like Meliza might be nudged toward a University of Massachusetts school, a smaller state college like Bridgewater or Salem, or a less competitive private school such as Suffolk University or Stonehill College. It's only through an act of divine intervention that she's now raised her sights.

Meliza, who is Baptist, wears a gold cross around her neck. She attends the Congregacion Leon de Juda in Roxbury. Late in her sophomore year, she went to a college fair in the church basement and discovered the Boston Higher Education Resource Center, a faith-based group that helps disadvantaged youths go to college. And as a junior, she traveled more than an hour by bus after school each Tuesday to attend the Passport program, a college counseling course run by the group and held at her church. "I call myself a super-guidance counselor," says Jin Min Lee, the program coordinator. This June, Passport graduated its first group of 10 students, most from poor families. All 10 were accepted to four-year colleges, with half earning full scholarships. One will attend Brown.

Meliza is an anomaly in the program: She comes from a two-parent home headed by well-educated professionals who can pay for college. However, Lee says the Prietos' success in building a great life with degrees from non-elite schools may have led Meliza to set her sights too low. "She was thinking along the lines of third-tier schools," Lee says, "and I don't think they realized what the possibilities really were." After extensive SAT coaching, Meliza in May earned a 1,580 on the new 2,400-point SAT, a score that came as a pleasant surprise to her counselors and parents. And Lee pointed her toward the summer program at Andover, which admits fewer than half of the applicants to the five-week, $5,200 summer session. "Meliza's got a lot of raw potential that just needs to be refined and processed," Lee says.

Meliza's counselors hope her Andover studies, her solid SAT scores, and her minority status will help counter her less-than-sparkling freshman and sophomore grades. They believe she'll be a competitive applicant to schools such as Boston University or Northeastern. Meliza says she'd prefer a suburban campus, and Lee has also encouraged her to apply to Brown, which Meliza mentions frequently. "I think it's probably a stretch, but . . . I'd rather have Meliza be a little disappointed when she doesn't get into Brown," Lee says, "but still gets into a lot of second-tier schools."

Whether attending an elite school really matters is the subject of conflicting research. Lately, observers such as Gregg Easterbrook, who wrote an influential essay titled "Who Needs Harvard?" in The Atlantic Monthly last fall, have argued that the less-prestigious colleges have improved so dramatically that a motivated student can acquire a good education at a wider range of schools. For Meliza, though, there's a reason to be concerned about a college's brand name: She may want to apply to law school, where admissions officers will weigh the status of her undergraduate institution.

As more students have aspired to attend elite colleges, admissions professionals say middle-of-the-road students have been squeezed. Sally Rubenstone, a Northampton-based counselor for the website College Confidential.com, describes the phenomenon as the "trickle-down theory." "The kids who would have gone to Yale 30 years ago are going to Middlebury, the kids who would have gone to Middlebury are going to Hamilton," she says, quoting a colleague who likes to say, " 'Yesterday's safety schools are today's competitive colleges.'"

There's no question Meliza's college search will be dramatically altered by the Passport program, which she found on her own. It's an example, Meliza says, of how average students need to be proactive in finding opportunities that counselors might hand-deliver to top students. "If you're average in Randolph High School, you're going . . . either to a community college or a four-year college that isn't that well known," she says. "If you want to better yourself, you have to go out there by yourself and do it."

Robert Johnson, the principal of Randolph High School, agrees that students like Meliza have to be aggressive to avoid being invisible to counselors. "There's a certain element of truth to it being easy to get under the radar if you fall in the middle," he says. "You don't get into trouble, you're not failing, there's nothing outstanding going on in your life that attracts anybody." However, Johnson says he keeps students with Meliza's abilities in mind when choosing which courses to offer each year, trying to ensure that Level II students have plenty of options. And when three guidance counselors retired or left recently, he replaced them with dynamic hires whom he expects to have a better rapport with students in the middle.

In Massachusetts, there are critics who say the reform regimen that includes MCAS has made life in the middle more perilous. "If money is focused more on helping low achievers get over the bar, [and] if money in general is fl at or shrinking, it comes from somewhere," says Monty Neill, co-executive director of Cambridge-based FairTest, which opposes high-stakes standardized exams. "Where it seems to come from is the richness of the program available to all students." He concedes, however, that he knows of no research that attempts to prove the reform efforts have penalized middle achievers.

Massachusetts Commissioner of Education David Driscoll counters that the cries of "woe-is-me-in-the-middle" date at least to the 1970s, when schools began spending heavily on programs for students with special needs. Driscoll denies the state's school reform plan has penalized average students, saying: "My simple answer is that for every kid, [the MCAS] is a tool that says where you are."

As she looks ahead to graduation next June, Meliza knows she won't be wearing the yellow cord denoting membership in the National Honor Society. She will not have a string of asterisks by her name, signifying her academic achievements. "Of course, you'll feel a little angry that you're not up there on the stage," Meliza says. When that day comes, she will "wish that maybe I should have worked a little harder. . . . If those kids could make it up there, I could have, too."

Her parents, though, have a healthy perspective on their daughter's standing. After decades spent watching students develop in their own classrooms, they believe life isn't measured by college acceptances, nor is one's trajectory at age 17 predictive of where one ends up.

"I've seen kids I don't think will amount to anything in life - troubled kids - I see them 10 or 15 years later, and they're college graduates with a family," says Elizabeth. "I've also seen extremely gifted and talented kids in jail." Asked to reflect on the quality of her daughter's education, Meliza's mother replies: "Ask me in five years. What happens in college, then we'll know how well trained, how prepared she is." By then, her family believes, Meliza Prieto's days as Miss Average will be far behind her.

Daniel McGinn is a national correspondent for Newsweek based in Boston. E-mail him at mcginndan@aol.com.