"Report Card" offers gloomy vision of a high school in crisis

 “Hard Times at Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card” is, despite that subtitle, a draw-your-own-conclusions sort of documentary. The film, which has its premiere tonight, Monday, June 23, 2008, on HBO, observes the 2005 school year at Frederick Douglass High in Baltimore, a troubled institution that has not fared well in meeting the benchmarks established by No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s education initiative. (Broadcasting at 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific times; 8 p.m. Central)

But No Child Left Behind occupies relatively little of the two-hour film, which is by veteran documentarians Alan and Susan Raymond. And the standard complaints about the law—for instance that it forces schools to be preoccupied with test taking at the expense of more enriching types of education—don’t seem to interest the Raymonds.

Instead they take lingering looks at Douglass’s teachers and administrators as they work and at its students as they, more often than not, don’t work. Though eventually the Raymonds (just barely) take sides—they seem not to be fans of Mr. Bush’s program—their dismaying film isn’t really asking whether No Child Left Behind can help Douglass. It’s asking whether anything can. Read more of this review in The New York Times online.