A Failing Teen and School Reform

It’s early in the morning, but 17-year-old Anner Alfaro rides the bus to Venice High School with a broad smile. As he explains to the camera, a rich array of experiences awaits him.

“You go to class to trip out,” he says. “To sleep ... to try to bring your high down ... to get caught up with your girlfriend ... to listen to your Walkman.”

“Basically, you go to class to do everything but learn,” he concludes cheerfully.

Which helps explain why although the teenager, who goes by his street nickname “Creek,” should be enjoying campus life as a soon-to-graduate senior, his school credits brand him a mid-term sophomore, and a failing one at that.

In “A.K.A. Creek: Educating a Big City Schoolboy” (tonight at 10 on KCET), Alfaro serves as the star of his own horror story. And when he’s later given a video camera to record his thoughts and activities, he becomes its director and producer as well.

But the documentary’s larger purpose is to take America’s sprawling urban educational systems to task for allegedly institutionalizing mediocrity while ignoring innovations that might save them, most prominently voucher programs that would bring school choice.

Although early on he appears to be beyond the help of any learning system, Alfaro is gradually revealed to be a young man of unsparing insight, uncommon intelligence and aching sensitivity, which make his plight all the more heartbreaking.

The eldest of four children in a household fronted by a widowed mother who became pregnant with him at 14, you can hear Alfaro’s street-tough patois fall away as he sternly lectures his siblings about their own life paths.

And then you wonder what might have been, and what the future might hold for a boy called Creek.