Documentaries About U.S. Schools Do Their Homework

As a primer on education, “Boston Public” has a few lessons to learn.

In one episode of the Fox drama last season, an English teacher had sex with a senior in the Winslow High boiler room, only to be discovered by the football coach and a police officer during a search of the school for a robbery suspect, who later took a social studies teacher hostage at gunpoint in her classroom and resisted the principal’s pleas to give up before being wrestled to the ground by a geology teacher.

Then after lunch....

Not that public schools necessarily lack angst and adventure in this markedly scary age (Can you spell C-O-L-U-M-B-I-N-E?). Or that “Boston Public’s” apples belong with the oranges of more thoughtful agendas. Yet it is useful to contrast the fantasy classrooms of TV entertainment with this week’s pair of highly worthy new PBS documentaries.

One is two-part “School: The Story of American Public Education,” an impressive, informative sprawl from 1770 to George W. Bush of mixed-message fame: The president is shown here being bearish on education, yet was on TV last month touting his own average marks as an example to a classroom of little tykes that they can go far without good grades.

The other documentary is “First Year,” a revealing, achingly poignant chronicle of five beginning teachers in Los Angeles who won’t remind you of anyone on “Boston Public” but whose experiences are deeply affecting to the bone and drawn from the theater of reality.

Compare prime time’s fiction, too, even with “Freshman Year,” HBO Family’s just-underway lesser documentary series eavesdropping on Chatsworth High, and especially with “High School,” which was made at a time when American values and priorities were even more under scrutiny than now.

Rerun just recently on PBS, “High School” is Frederick Wiseman’s masterful 1968 film intimately capturing, in black and white, America’s high school culture during the Vietnam era, from typing class and squelched individuality to an English teacher playing Simon & Garfunkel (“the borders of our lives ... “) for her students.

“High School” ends hauntingly, if not darkly, with the principal reading aloud a letter an alumnus wrote just before heading into battle in Vietnam, his ultimate fate unknown.

The differences between then and now are striking, as in “High School” including a lecture to boys on safe sex by a male gynecologist who crudely boasts with a chuckle that he gets paid to touch female genitals. Today he’d be the lead story on “Eyewitness News.”

Just as notable, though, are common denominators, many relating to discipline and rules, shared traits that narrow to about three seconds the three-plus decades separating these generations.

In “High School,” a vice principal marches through halls demanding passes from stragglers who should be in class, not unlike his bellowing counterpart patrolling the campus in the contemporary “Freshman Year.” In the Wiseman film, too, a student is called on the carpet because her prom dress is too short, just as a girl in a coming “Freshman Year” episode is informed her skirt length is “really borderline.”

“High School,” “Freshman Year” and “First Year” are the fine print of big-picture survey “School,” a KCET-presented, Meryl Streep-narrated, fine-looking work that carries meat on its handsome bones while affirming the Los Angeles station’s exhumation as a PBS programming source.

Some of the history it recalls now resonates humorously. “If you fell off the hay cart and hit your head too many times, you might have turned out to be the person who was teaching older kids in the village school,” says historian Nancy Hoffman. Yet mentioned early here is a Jeffersonian plan for meritocracy in education--limited schooling for females, none for slaves--that symbolically foreshadows years of great pain along with accomplishment.

Co-producers Sarah Mondale and Sarah Patton have “Schools” straddling parts of four centuries while emptying an atticful of memories, some as quaint as wooden desks with inkwells, others intersecting the profound social movements and issues that have tested America and its public education.

These range from race, gender, language and child-labor combat to the Cold War paranoia that invaded classrooms and textbooks during the last half of the 20th century. Deploying stunning antique footage and sound bites from historians and others, “School” spans I.Q. and back-to-basics disputes as well as those bitter political spats regarding the “V” word (vouchers). Asked, finally, is the fundamental question that probably won’t be answered before the 47.8 million enrollees in the nation’s public schools are released to America’s mean streets:

Should the primary purpose of education be enlightenment or career training?

When it comes to the size of “School”--hardly wide-bodied by PBS standards--here’s an irony for you. Funding was found for 18 hours of “Baseball” from Ken Burns, and almost as many for Ric Burns’ thick essay on New York, but “School” must tell the story of public education in just four.

Which may be why, when touching on the many crises facing modern education, it fails to say much at all about, of all people, teachers.

The five earnest and committed ones chosen for Davis Guggenheim’s “The First Year” experience tremors of joy and maddening heartache. They clearly touch many students and are touched by them in this film.

Georgene Acosta teaches English and ESL at Santa Monica High. Joy Kraft teaches U.S. history and life skills at Venice High. Nate Monley, a fourth-generation teacher, is with fifth-graders at Ford Boulevard Elementary in East Los Angeles. And in South-Central Los Angeles, Genevieve DeBose teaches sixth-graders at Samuel Gompers Middle School, and Maurice Rabb kindergartners at 99th Street Accelerated School.

Even while altering reality on some level, Guggenheim’s close-ups deliver remarkable candor while monitoring the unsteady toddler steps of these young people during their first year as teachers.

Monley worries about a boy who has written a poem saying his father hits him, he is bored and “I am dumb at everything.”

A 22-year-old looking almost as young as her students, DeBose is stumped and tormented by a disruptive boy. A conference with the troubled student’s family appears promising. Then unexpectedly, his grandmother withdraws him from Gompers.

“The First Year” is especially heartbreaking when capturing Rabb’s patience and tenderness with a student who can’t speak clearly, then his frustration and anger when failing to get help for the little guy from a school-assigned speech therapist (Won’t she be pleased to see this?). It’s obvious Rabb cares much more about him than does the school system that pays the teacher his pittance (he takes home just $1,871 a month) of a salary.

You admire and embrace Rabb and the others for embarking on this critical work for rewards that transcend dollars yet wonder how long they will stick it out. For a year, at least, these were the borders of their lives.

*

“School: The Story of American Public Education” can be seen tonight at 9 on KCET. “First Year” can be seen Thursday night at 9 on KCET. The network has rated both TV-G (suitable for all ages). The remaining 13 episodes of the 14-part documentary “Freshman Year” can be seen consecutive Fridays at 7:30 p.m. on HBO Family. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).