CNN Documentary Takes Aim at Ed System

CNN is taking a hard look at how America’s schools are preparing students for 21^stcentury jobs in tech and science.

“Don’t Fail Me: Education in America,” which premieres May 15 at 8 pm ET and PT, considers the impact on the country if student proficiency in math and science do not improve. The most recent international tests of high school students in 34 industrial countries ranked U.S. children 17^thin science and 25^thin math. Eighty percent of American high school seniors aren’t considered proficient in science knowledge.  

Don’t Fail Me follows a group of high school students in a national robotics competition called FIRST Robotics.

CNN quotes the event’s creator Dean Kamen as saying, “If we don’t generate the next group of innovators, scientists, engineers, our standard of living, our quality of life, our security will plummet.”

During the competition, 2,000 teams of about 30 kids each have six weeks to build fully-functional, agile robots that zoom across playing fields to score points. Rich, poor, good and failing schools compete all over the country, culminating at one event during the last weekend in April where the best vie for the championship. The special profiles three students from disparate backgrounds: Maria Castro from an inner-city, predominantly poor, mostly Latino high school in Phoenix; Skillman, New Jersey’s Shaan Patel, a sophomore of Indian descent who attends a state-of-the-art school in one of the wealthiest districts in the nation; and Bryan Whited, son of a widowed mother and senior at a high school in Seymour, Tennessee.

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