TV REVIEW : A Scary Look at the System

“Before It’s Too Late” is both a warning and a pep talk for parents and teachers. The half-hour documentary--at 8 p.m. today on KPBS-TV (Channel 15)--examines the rapidly increasing rate of high school dropouts. It is followed by a panel discussion among San Diego education leaders.

The program makes it very clear that this isn’t just a problem for teachers and parents. It is society’s problem. Finding solutions--ways to stem the tide--is the great challenge presented by the program.

The show’s first part should scare people. According to San Diego Unified School District Supt. Tom Payzant, who provides an introduction to the show, 27% of city students drop out before finishing high school, with an even higher rate in some minority communities.

Without much hoopla, the KPBS-produced program vividly illustrates the problem, using the words of 12 young people who landed outside the mainstream educational system. Each seems bright and articulate. Yet the system, in one way or another, failed them.

“Before It’s Too Late” basically splits up the primary causes for the dropout rate into three areas. One group of young men, speaking from prison, tell how crimes and drugs led them away from an “uncaring” school system.

“School didn’t give you no money,” says Mario Hernandez, who is in prison for a gang-related manslaughter. “I was sitting there (in class) wondering, what am I doing this for?”

The second segment features testimonials from teen-age mothers, who were forced to choose between school and their babies. Child birth is the No. 1 one reason young girls leave school, narrator and associate producer Leslie Peters says. Only a flexible child-care program provided through Garfield High School allows the girls interviewed for the program to continue their education.

The third dramatic problem leading kids away from school and, in many cases, into the streets, is abuse, usually by parents. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that each year 500,000 children are either thrown out of or run away from troubled homes, Peters tells viewers.

On the streets, they enter a different world.

“You assume everybody is bad and everybody wants to take advantage of you,” says one young black man who had spent time living on the streets.

Many of the dropouts end up as criminals. Others become a financial burden to society, either on welfare rolls or in prison cells.

Each of the young dropouts interviewed for the program tells tales of uncaring teachers or ambivalent parents. Nobody cared about their school performances, and, eventually, they didn’t care, either.

There was nothing in school or at home to interest them.

The post-special forum, featuring six panelists, attempts to focus on ways to solve the problem, to restore that interest in young people.

“Before It’s Too Late” makes it clear that some things work: Alternative programs with personalized instruction and flexible hours allow students to hold down jobs and study at the same time. Some teachers are able to make school relevant by showing the long-term value of an education to students who might otherwise turn to selling drugs to make money.

Parents and teachers may be inspired by seeing such vivid examples of the system both failing and working.

Despite Peters’ best attempts to focus the discussion, the forum does a better job of reiterating the problems than weighing solutions.

The lack of adequate funding is decried. And it is devastatingly clear from the discussion that a clearer national emphasis on education is desperately needed. There is much talk about building self-esteem and “accessing” the system. But there is little debate over which programs work and which don’t.

Much of the conversation focuses on the problems facing minorities. The system is “culturally antagonistic” to minorities, Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Napoleon Jones says.

While certainly valid, It took Dawn Rose--a 15-year-old white who dropped out but returned to Mar Vista High School--to remind several of the panelists that this isn’t a problem confined to minority communities.

Several of the panel’s comments, either directly or indirectly, put the onus on parents, who were encouraged to take more of an active role in their children’s education.

“I wouldn’t trust my child to the system, and I would say that to every single parent,” says Susan Chavez, an educational consultant at San Diego State University.

Maybe that’s the program’s most important message.