Filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz will film documentaries in English and Spanish examining the issues surrounding Latino high school dropout rates. (Photo/courtesy of Bernardo Ruiz).

Filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz is tackling a national topic with no easy answers - the high rate of Latino high school dropouts.

“My whole life has been about examining Latino stories and trying to get at complexity,” says acclaimed Mexican-American documentary maker.

"We can have a debate about the dropout rate and accomplish nothing,“ says Ruiz, who was raised in Brooklyn, New York. "But political battles don’t reflect how nuanced things are. I am going to drill much deeper.”

Ruiz, whose documentaries on baseball great Roberto Clemente and the persecution of Mexican journalists by criminal gangs (Reportero) have garnered high praise, will create two one-hour documentaries in English and two in Spanish for the PBS show “Independent Lens” on the high dropout rate among U.S. Hispanics.

Four out of ten Latinos over 20 do not graduate from high school, the highest dropout rate of any group in the country. This not only limits a young Latino’s career and earning potential; it also limits the success of the American workforce, since Hispanic children are the fastest-growing demographic in the country. A recent report found Latinos will have to earn 5.5 million college degrees by 2020 if the U.S. wants to regain its status as the country with the most educated workforce.

Ruiz says many documentaries on the nation’s education system have taken a “bird’s eye view” of the issue of schools and achievement, painting it with broad strokes or a certain point of view.

This is too limiting, in the Latino filmmaker’s opinion. He is taking a different approach.

“My focus is on individuals, but I will show them in their ecosystem,” explains Ruiz. "A child does not exist in a vacuum - we have to look at his relationship with his family, his middle school, his neighborhood,“ he adds.

"You know the show The Wire,?” Ruiz asks. "It’s that kind of look at the perspective of people’s hard choices. We might not agree with them, but you can see where they are coming from.“

Ruiz, who was born in Mexico but raised with many Caribbean Latinos and other ethnic groups in his Brooklyn neighborhood, says in a way this is his most "personal” project. "My mother is a teacher,“ he explains, "and I was educated in this country, in American schools. It’s not like I can ‘walk away’ from the issue when I am done filming,” Ruiz says.

Yet the highly-regarded documentary producer says his American Graduate Latino documentaries are not about trying to prove a point or come to a conclusion.

“My job is to show. Through human stories we get to issues of individual responsibility, or structural inequality."

These factors, he says, are part of the larger question of why so many Latino high school students are not graduating.

Ruiz and his team, who are currently working on a part of the documentary in San Diego, will film in several cities around the country. The documentaries will highlight different regional realities, yet hopefully also show "shared challenges."

The documentaries, which will air on PBS next year, are part of a collaboration between the Independent Television Service (ITVS), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Latino Public Broadcasting. And while these pieces will focus on Latino students, Ruiz says the story is about much more than U.S. Latino students.

"It will be an honest discussion of where we are, as a nation, in 2012."