Venice High School in LA featured in the hit movie Grease as John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John battled with their raging hormones.

But in Creek the school is the backdrop for a battle over conflicting educational philosophies in this thought-provoking documentary which centres around Creek, a bright but failing Latino teenager.

Life is far too easy at Venice High Creek admits as he fills in his own absence note on the school bus and gets re-admitted without a word after an unexplained absence of one and a half months.

He says: "It's weird how people get around it. Nobody seems to give a damn."

Lessons, if you can call them that, consist of being sat in front of a TV watching "I Love Lucy" or making Valentines Cards - this for a youth in his last year in high school.

Dad is dead while mum spends her time veering between bouts of self improvement in the gym and at adult school and alcoholic binges while Creek wanders the streets until the early hours.

Thus the scene is set for educationalists of left and right to state what needs to be done for America's 40 million state educated children.

We meet a liberal teacher who calls for an end to exams because they are culturally biased while right-winger Chester Finn says this would deny kids the chance to get ahead.

Instead he advocates vouchers to empower parents and smash up a failing educational bureaucracy.

While liberals label vouchers as a stance of the white elite the documentary moves to Detroit where black Reverend Ellis Smith is making a success of the voucher system running a disciplined school for his deprived community.

He asks what is the alternative to exams? Throwing the kids out without even a chance of finding employment?

Finn leaves his ivory tower to spend some quality time with Creek but sticks to his views for a radical overhaul.

While this all acts as food for thought the problem with this documentary is that each voice is taken mainly in isolation and, save from an interesting exchange between Finn and a liberal teacher at a conference, people are never challenged on their views.

You are itching to put Creek, Finn, the Reverend and the politically correct teacher in a room and get them to sort it out. I want to ask the liberal teacher that if exams are culturally biased why can't they be tailored to fit different ethnic groups? Why throw the baby out with the bathwater?

And I want to ask Finn how you get teenagers on the right track when their home life is so disturbed?

This documentary works as a piece of polemic and neat camera work and incidental music give it a cinematic touch rare in documentaries.

But at 85 minutes it covers too little ground and could have been cut in half without serious loss of content but it is worth watching nonetheless.

Supporting short: Tempo (USA) This delightfully human documentary covers a New York messenger service which employs disabled people who find self respect through their work. Shame about the unhappy prologue.

Times: April 13, 9 p.m., Liberty

April 16, 4 p.m., Little Theatre

Matthew Taylor