Quiet Coach Works Magic on Scholars From Taft

Arthur Berchin’s UCLA colleagues told him he was out of his mind to abandon his career as a university administrator for a job as a high school English teacher.

Nevertheless, on Jan. 30, 1984, Berchin walked onto the Woodland Hills campus of Taft High School and headed for the classroom.

“After seven years in higher education, I was ready to do something else,” he said. “I realized that this country has the finest collegiate system in the world. We do not have the finest pre-collegiate system. I knew that’s where the real challenge was.”

Since switching careers, Berchin has taught everything from remedial English to honors American literature at Taft High School. He has experienced the indignities of being “just a teacher,” and he has felt the jubilation of coaching the school’s academic decathlon team to victory as the state champion.

Now, as he prepares the team for national finals in San Antonio later this week, Berchin is reluctant to take much of the credit for its success. If pressed, he will say the secret to coaching a winning team is to have “a little bit of luck” and a “well-balanced team.”

Puts Life on Hold

But other educators know better. They say a winning academic decathlon coach must be an excellent teacher, a superior motivator and someone who is willing to put his or her life on hold while pursuing the goal of being No. 1.

Dorsey High School academic decathlon coach Dan Spetner, considered by many to be the dean of such coaches in Los Angeles, states it more simply: “A good decathlon coach must be obsessed.”

Berchin is a reserved, soft-spoken teacher with boyish good looks and graying hair. Single and a resident of Encino, he has a subtle sense of humor and an air of casual formality. He prefers that decathlon team members call him “Dr. Berchin” or “Doc” instead of using his first name.

He is a private person who, according to team member David Raikow, “will do almost anything to direct attention away from himself.”

Berchin was not enthusiastic about granting media requests for interviews. When he finally consented, he focused all discussion on the decathlon and refused to disclose his age. “Kids get kind of strange when they know a teacher’s age,” he said.

Berchin is no milquetoast. He has a reputation among decathlon team members as a tough, even-handed taskmaster. When he sets a rule, he expects everyone to abide by it, they said.

“He’s very intense and will not tolerate sloughing off,” said Taft Principal Ronald Berz.

Because of his quiet demeanor, Berchin remains a mystery to some of the more well-known decathlon coaches in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“Most of the coaches are very emotional, outspoken and, some would say, eccentric,” said Spetner. “Arthur goes against the stereotype. He’s pretty mild-mannered. On the surface, he seems to have everything under control.

“But he’s got to be obsessed,” Spetner continued. “You have to be obsessed to get your team through the L.A. district competition, through state and on to national.”

For his part, Berchin said: “I think you have to be willing to commit a major amount of time to this in order to be successful. If that means being obsessed, well, . . .” he said, his voice trailing off.

“Some people by their very nature have more of a commitment to work,” he added quickly. “They are going to be more serious about it than others.”

In three years as Taft’s academic decathlon coach, Arthur Berchin has acquired an enviable record.

His Woodland Hills teams have never finished lower than fifth in the highly competitive, 53-team city tournament. In 1986, his second year of coaching, his team finished second in the city and one of his students scored more points than anyone else in the contest.

Late last year, Taft became the first San Fernando Valley school to capture the city Academic Decathlon title, winning six out of 10 events and placing three students among the top five individual scorers.

Then, in March, the team won the state crown in a victory that tournament directors attributed to the team’s ability to place several members consistently in the top 10 of every event.

This week, Berchin and the six-member squad will travel to San Antonio to compete in the national Academic Decathlon competition. Taft will attempt to win the national crown that Marshall High School of the Silver Lake area won last year.

A product of Burbank public schools, Berchin attended UCLA, where he received undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and a Ph.D in education administration. His goal was to become superintendent of a school district “somewhat smaller than Los Angeles.”

But opportunities in higher education led Berchin away from public schools. For two years he served as an administrator with Miami-Dade County Community College, the nation’s largest two-year institution with 43,000 students.

College Experience

In 1977, he returned to UCLA to become a special assistant to the dean of the Graduate School of Education. During the following years, he served as the graduate education school’s assistant dean for student affairs and assistant dean for public affairs.

When Berchin announced his intention to leave the ivory towers of academia for the linoleum hallways of high school, his university colleagues warned that the change might entail financial sacrifice. Berchin, however, apparently has not had to withstand a cut in pay. Assistant deans in UCLA graduate schools earn between $30,000 to $40,000 a year, according to school officials. A teacher with Berchin’s academic background can earn about $41,000 in the Los Angeles Unified School District, according to administrators.

But other differences between the two worlds were immediately apparent to the novice teacher. They did not have to do with students, but with the ways high school and university instructors are treated and regarded.

For example, high school teachers lack the support services--personal offices, telephones and access to secretarial services and research facilities--that professors use to improve their classroom presentations.

“These are important amenities. They are not to be dismissed,” Berchin said.

Sees System’s Faults

Berchin also is troubled by the relationship between teachers and school administrators.

“I forgot that this is a hierarchal model where administration serves as manager of the school plant,” Berchin continued. “If they are not skillful, they can be very abusive.”

Teachers have “accepted the hierarchal model and built in a union component to negotiate certain rights. As long as we retain this kind of model, we will never be a profession,” he said.

When he embarked on his classroom career, Berchin believed that, with his background and familiarity with research, he could show those in the field of education how teaching should be done.

His plans did not exactly work out.

“I thought that I should be able to solve all of the problems, but I couldn’t, “ he said. “That doesn’t mean that I’m disillusioned. I’m not. But I don’t know how long I want to stay in the classroom.”

Berchin was introduced to the Academic Decathlon in October, 1984, when he watched the city meet that was held at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills. He had turned down an offer to coach the Taft team, but wanted to see for himself what the competition was all about.

“I didn’t get a lot of it. I mean, it was just a lot of kids taking tests. I didn’t even stay for the Super Quiz,” he said.

The Academic Decathlon, founded in 1968, pits some of the brightest high school scholars against each other in a series of 10 events. The competition includes written examinations in economics, mathematics, science, fine arts, social science and literature, as well as an oral interview, a speech and an essay.

Capping the contest is the so-called Super Quiz, which tests teamwork and quick mental recall. It is considered the premier event of the competition and is the only part of the meet open to the public.

In addition to bragging rights, students involved in the national competition vie for $30,000 in scholarships.

Interest Was Kindled

Once Berchin understood the opportunities involved with coaching an academic decathlon team, such as working with highly motivated students and those who had never reached full potential, he found he was interested after all.

The next year, a new principal was assigned to Taft. He, too, asked Berchin to coach the decathlon team. This time, Berchin said yes.

What happened next has become legend among decathlon coaches.

While other teams spent several months practicing for the city competition, Berchin’s first team prepared only eight weeks. It finished in fifth place.

“When they called our name as the winner of fifth place, we were happy to accept the award,” Berchin recounted. “But our objective was to come in first. With eight weeks’ work, that may have been presumptuous.”

The closely knit decathlon coaching community was impressed that this quiet man from Taft had guided an unheralded team to the top ranks of the city.

The coaches were especially curious about Berchin’s motivational techniques. Some figured that bright students from comfortable backgrounds, such as the Taft team members, are not always willing to make the sacrifices necessary to win state and national titles.

Moreover, coaches said, these students often aren’t influenced by some of their favorite motivational techniques.

For instance, Dorsey coach Spetner tells his mostly black teams that winning is a way to prove that minority kids from an inner-city school are just as smart as white kids from suburban schools. Dorsey has won more Los Angeles Super Quiz championships than any other district school.

David Tofosky, who coached the 1987 national championship Marshall team, urged his squad on by telling them the “education bureaucracy” was trying to prevent them from winning.

“Every time we won, we were proving the bureaucracy was wrong,” Tofosky said.

Berchin said he does not use such devices. His motivational message is simple: “Winning is everything.”

“I don’t know if that is what does it, but that is what the program is all about,” he said. “I believe in the program and I can sell it to them. I’m not conning them, and they can tell it.”

“He’s intensely devoted, not only to winning but to each of the students,” said team member Jeremy Singer. “He wants each one of us to do our best and win as much scholarship money as possible.”

In addition to his decathlon duties, Berchin shoulders a full teaching load. Typically, he rises at 5:45 a.m. and arrives at Taft at 7:45. His first class is at 8.

During a 20-minute morning nutrition break, Berchin stays in his classroom correcting papers or entering grades into a desk-top computer. At lunch, he usually carries a tray of food from the faculty cafeteria to his classroom.

“I eat for 10 to 12 minutes, and I don’t work while I eat,” he said.

He works through the remainder of the lunch period and through his conference period.

Berchin’s last class of the day is the academic decathlon class. This spring he has had to handle two sections of the course--one for the team preparing for the national competition and one for potential team members.

He does this by breaking the group into two parts: holding class for potential decathletes in his room and meeting with current team members in another room.

From 3 to 6 p.m., Berchin and the team continue preparing for the championship meet. They take an hour off for dinner and return to campus at 7 p.m. for three more hours of study. The team also studies on Saturdays and Sundays.

“He’s got to work just as hard as the kids and be just as tired as they are,” said Tofosky, who, through his experience with the Marshall High School decathlon team, understands pressures on a teacher preparing students for the nationals.

It is difficult to find anyone who will say anything disparaging about Berchin as an educator or a person. One Taft colleague jokingly said: “He’s the kind of guy who eats candy bars secretly behind the garage.”

Tofosky frets that Berchin “hasn’t raised any social or educational issues since he’s been in the limelight.” Tofosky used media attention on Marshall’s decathlon victory to discuss the plight of the underpaid and overworked young teacher.

But that is Arthur Berchin. He hates to be in the spotlight.

“I’m definitely not in this for me. I keep asking myself, ‘What am I learning from this experience?’ I just haven’t been able to synthesize all that yet,” he said.

“At the very least, I’ve learned that personal attention to the learning process produces positive results.”