‘Children’ Examines Dilemma of Public School Financing

The educational inequities that are the focus of the enlightening documentary “Children in America’s Schools” can be encapsulated in a single set of juxtaposed images and scenes.

The principal of Perry High School, in a suburb of Toledo, Ohio, says matter-of-factly that his school has more than 600 computers, “virtually . . . a computer for each student.” And at a well-equipped elementary school, we see children so young they have to stretch to see the screen absorbed in their mouses and keyboards.

Then, however, a high school teacher in Cincinnati describes a wildly different educational reality. “We have 12 computers for 1,800 students,” he says. And a student about to graduate from a rural school disconsolately admits he has never operated a computer.

Without a word from a narrator, the point is made. The students in the high-tech schools have a leg up. They can, as they do here, count on pursuing careers in biomechanics or math or medicine. The students in the other schools started out behind when they entered first grade--either because they were poor or lacked the stability of two parents. And rather than close the gap, the schools caused it to widen.

Hammering at that point by constantly shifting from crumbling urban schools to gleaming new suburban ones--following a Cleveland student who reports that budget cuts have wiped out all sports at his school, for example, with scenes from a suburban school of swimming, tennis, track and baseball--this film is polemical without being preachy.

The only time that it comes close to that territory is when it lets author Jonathan Kozol, whose book “Savage Inequalities” provides the basis for the film, offer a simplistic solution to the problem.

Kozol seems to be calling on the federal government to ride to the rescue when he says, “What government can do . . . is guarantee that the public schools we compel every child in America to attend are so good that it will to a considerable degree compensate for whatever things are missing in a child’s life.”

But that is at best wishful thinking. Schools have always been a local responsibility although in California most of the decisions about school financing have been ceded to the state.

Lawsuits in numerous states, including California, have challenged the reliance on property taxes to pay for education that has contributed to the disparities that this piece so compellingly illustrates. And the settlements of such litigation have succeeded in narrowing the gap in some places.

But troubling differences remain.

And it is easy to see how the students in poor urban and rural areas would conclude that, for no fault of their own, society places a lesser value on them than on their suburban counterparts.

* “Children in America’s Schools” will be shown at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28. The documentary will be followed at 10 p.m. by a town-hall discussion of the issues it raises, hosted by Bill Moyers.