U.S. Education Has Its Day in Court on PBS

The scene is familiar to generations of television viewers: in the courtroom where TV’s “Perry Mason” movies are filmed, two lawyers pace, tossing questions at witnesses and defending their cross-examination techniques to a sometimes testy judge.

But this is no prime time drama. It’s not even “The People’s Court.” This is a public-television program about education in the United States.

Called “Learning in America: Education on Trial” and scheduled to premiere Monday at 10 p.m. on KCET, the three-part series examines the nation’s educational woes in the setting of a courtroom.

Each episode is set up like a trial. The “lawyers,” played by real attorneys, cross-examine “witnesses” who are really national experts on education.

At the end of each program, the audience, who serve as the jury, are asked to call in on special phone lines provided by USA Today and vote for a winner.

Sound hokey?

Al Vecchione, president of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, which produced the series, said he was a little worried about that: “I hope that isn’t the way people perceive it. It is not a work of gimmickry.”

Instead, he said, the setting is a way to use a proven audience-getter--the courtroom--to make what otherwise would have been a dull debate on issues more exciting.

“My hope is that by putting a little sugar-coating around the pill, ( viewers ) will swallow the pill a little better,” Vecchione said.

Indeed, from “Perry Mason” to “L.A. Law” and beyond, courtroom drama has brought big audiences (and big bucks) to networks and syndicators.

And Vecchione, whose original intent was to televise a series of debates on issues in education, said that once he and second episode producer Bob Chandler hit on the idea of setting the debates in a courtroom, corporate funding was suddenly available, and PBS became very interested in distributing the shows.

For one thing, he said, the courtroom setting made the programs relatively cheap to produce.

“A documentary these days runs anywhere from $400,000 to $500,000 per program, and this was less than $300,000 per program,” Vecchione said. The entire series was funded by the Chrysler Corp. for $900,000.

Part of the cost went toward paying the two attorneys, Harvard Law School Prof. Christopher Edley Jr., and John E. Coons of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall law school. The two men divvied up the issues to be discussed by tossing a coin, with each lawyer taking the opposite side of the argument at hand.

Edley and Coons researched their arguments with the aid of Vecchione’s team, and prepared actual briefs. The programs were shot live during a 10-day period.

“When the producers first approached me, I was a bit skeptical about the format,” said Edley. “But it quickly became clear that this format allows you to pack an enormous amount of substance very densely, and with a bit of drama. It struck me as very educational and not at all hokey.”

In the first episode, called “Do We Need a National Report Card?” Edley and Coons argue over whether the United States should establish national standards for education and require a series of nationally approved tests which students would have to pass before moving, being graduated or promoted to higher grade levels.

The second episode, “Are Our Public Schools Beyond Repair?” pits the argument that “an entrenched educational bureaucracy” and special interest groups are preventing school reform, against the contention that “educators are making progress, though hampered by debilitating criticism and inadequate funding.”

Part three, “Are We Shortchanging Our Schools?” includes arguments for and against the notion that we are not spending enough money on education. One side agrees, and the other blames schools and teachers for wasting money and perpetuating a monopoly.

“Witnesses” included Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, who is co-chairman of the National Council on Education Standards and Testing; California Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig, two teachers and the former president of the national PTA.

Denver District Court Judge Connie L. Peterson, who plays the judge on the program, took vacation time from her duties on the bench to participate. Richard Dyskart, who plays Leland MacKenzie on “L.A. Law,” is the program’s host.

According to Edley, some of the witnesses were very wary about appearing on the program in the beginning.

But, he said, their appearances on the witness stand turned out to be much longer in duration than their sound bites would have been in a typical documentary. Even on an interview-style show, he said, experts would have had to share the spotlight with a number of others, and probably would only have been allowed to talk for five to seven minutes. In “Learning in America,” experts are on the stand for 15 minutes or more.

“The interesting thing to me about (the series) was that, in contrast to the usual talking-heads format of public affairs programming, the questions are being asked of the experts not from the neutral perspective of a journalist, but from two distinct points of view,” Edley said.

Vecchione insists that the result is journalism.

“The legal process and the journalistic process parallel each other in the sense that they both are a search for truth,” Vecchione said. “Fairness and balance are imposed in a courtroom, in a way more than they are in journalism.”

There were some snags along the way, Vecchione admitted: Some of the participants didn’t really warm up until the second episode, he said, and the middle of the first episode drags a little.

But the veteran producer said he’d use the format again to discuss other issues if audiences respond to it.

“I don’t know whether people are going to find it good, bad or indifferent,” Vecchione said. “I know that in each of the three programs, we got a hell of a lot of information out on the table in the course of an hour. I feel very comfortable that in the end what we did was journalistically responsible--and revealing.”