The Music Man : Education: Los Angeles’ youngest principal has transformed Hamilton High with energy, hustle and a knack for getting private business to play his tune.

Six years ago, thanks to the baby bust, the growing use of private schools and high Westside real estate prices that were beyond the reach of many families with children, Alexander Hamilton High School’s enrollment had fallen to less than half of what it had been in the 1960s.

There were just 1,447 students, and administrators in the Los Angeles Unified School District were talking about closing the school on Robertson Boulevard altogether. Then, along came a brash young man with big ideas and boundless energy.

Today, James Goodman Berk is the principal of Hamilton High at age 31, the youngest principal in school district officials’ memory. But what really sets him apart from many of his older colleagues is his approach. He runs the school the way a chief executive officer manages a corporation--with slick networking, hard-nosed business sense and lots of hustle.

One recent morning, Berk did the following in about 20 minutes: phoned an art teacher to talk about a kiln that had been assembled backward, disciplined a student, took another student with a sprained wrist to the nurse, chatted with a teacher about real estate, dashed off a thank-you note to Barry Diller for the help Fox Television Network had given the school, scraped stickers off a student locker, picked up a squashed bologna sandwich from the hallway floor, strode through the halls and shooed two tardy students to class, discussed the school’s budget and the sorry finances of public education in general with a visitor, and dialed his pregnant wife, Jane, to tell her to hang in there--he loved her.

The whole time, he never stopped moving. Even when he was at his desk on the phone with his wife, he was wiggling around, waving at his secretary to get Diller’s letter in the mail and looking for budget sheets to give a visitor.

After observing such a session, one begins to understand how Berk has transformed what was a struggling school with an uncertain future into a bustling complex of three different high school programs--including the Hamilton High School Academy of Music, one of the most successful magnet schools in the city.

And it is also easy to see why people both respect him and resent him. Even Carol Turley, a parent and volunteer who adores him, confesses that his energy used to get her so nervous that she developed a tic in her eye when she was around him. “I can be pretty obnoxious,” Berk said with a sigh. “I go into a room and start cleaning it.”

That, supporters say, is exactly what Hamilton needed. “Normally, I hate administrators. Most of them are jerks. But I like this guy,” said Wayne Johnson, a former president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, the teachers union. Johnson now teaches at Hamilton. “He doesn’t give a damn whose toes he steps on. He’s a breath of fresh air.”

The metamorphosis of Hamilton High began one morning in 1986, when then-Principal Betty Maltby marched Berk into Deputy Supt. Sid Thompson’s office. At the time, Berk was a 25-year-old music teacher from Carson High School. He told Thompson that he could turn Hamilton around and restore its lopsided ethnic balance by starting a music magnet school there. But to do that, Berk said, he needed money, flexibility to hire teachers, a promotion and an administrative position for himself.

And there was one more thing: Berk handed Thompson a list of the instruments he wanted, ranging from a piccolo trumpet to an E-flat clarinet.

“He was downright aggressive,” Thompson recalled recently of his first encounter with Berk. “He said he needed a lot of support and some of the rules bent, but that he’d put together the best music program we ever saw.”

Berk got what he wanted. The district made him an assistant principal and coordinator of the music magnet program, and it gave him enough money to transform the school’s industrial shop rooms into music studios outfitted with top-flight equipment, including synthesizers, rows of electric pianos and television monitors. Berk hired the best music teachers he could find and bought instruments.

Today, the high school complex educates nearly 1,900 students. The ethnic mix is about 30% black, 30% Latino, 30% Anglo and 10% Asian. The three programs include the original high school with an enrollment of 1,026, a humanities magnet with 191 students, and the Academy of Music. The academy, which Berk calls his “baby,” offers 670 students more than 45 courses and ensembles, ranging from electronic music to the Madrigal Singers.

Students produce concerts and musicals nearly every week. Berk, who commutes 45 miles from his home in Irvine and arrives at school by 7 a.m., attends most of them. “This place is lit up like LAX at night,” he said proudly.

What the district couldn’t give him, Berk went out and got on his own. Norman Pattiz, an alumnus and chairman of Westwood One Radio Networks, has donated a Steinway piano to the school and a scholarship fund for music lessons. Pattiz also put $500,000 into refurbishing the auditorium, which is now called the Norman J. Pattiz Concert Hall.

Fox Television has given the school a film laboratory worth $300,000. The Beverly Hills Country Club has given students a computer lab. A total of $2.5 million has been donated to the school over the past four years. And Berk, who was appointed principal last fall when Maltby resigned, is still hustling for more.

Several times a week, students see their principal, walkie-talkie in hand, giving VIP visitors the tour. One recent morning, he was wooing four women he hoped would donate a $230,000 Nexis data system.

“This school is entering its golden age,” he told them as they listened to a chamber orchestra play a Bach concerto. He pointed to a violinist. “That kid’s going to Juilliard,” he said, proud as a corporate president showing off his top merchandise.

The “bottom line,” Berk assured his visitors, “is results. We need to train our students to be technically literate producers for the year 2000,” he said.

Such talk from a man who sports a suit, tasseled loafers and a fantastic tie with what appear to be ferns and beets on it is a far cry from the traditional worn-at-the elbows rhetoric of educators like Mr. Chips.

It is exactly the kind of pitch that makes corporate types happy. Excited, even. “Oh, you’re giving me tingles,” one of Berk’s visitors sighed after the tour. “This is perfect.”

Berk got the grant.

No doubt about it, he is one of the best hustlers around. He sells his school, he sells students--but mostly, skeptics complain, he sells himself.

“He struts around the school showing it to important people like it’s the James Berk school rather than the Hamilton High School,” said Jay Cohen, a sophomore who is leaving Hamilton for a private school because, he said, his classes and teachers were boring. “Everybody thinks he’s pompous. He’s more like King Berk than Mr. Berk.”

But, Cohen conceded, “he’s done a lot for the school.”

Some students and teachers at the original high school resent the time, money and attention poured into the music academy. Enrollment is still shrinking at the original campus, and the enrollment there is still largely minorities. The dropout rate at the regular high school is triple what it is at the music academy, test scores are substantially lower and classes are bigger.

Berk said he is struggling to more fully integrate the program into the two magnet schools. And he said the discrepancy of resources is a problem created by all of the city’s 90 magnets.

But most of the criticism seems directed at Berk’s youth and brash style. The average age of a high school principal in the district is 53.

“He hasn’t paid his dues,” said one longtime music teacher and administrator who asked to remain anonymous. “He’s able to do a lot of these things just because he’s not playing the game some of the older guys had to. . . . Is it the role of a high school principal to be an educator or a hustler?”

Hard economic times may dictate that answer. Dan Isaacs, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s assistant superintendent of senior high schools, says the district must cut $350 million from its budget this year.

To compensate, Isaacs said, more and more principals, including Berk, are turning to the private sector with hats in hand--asking for money, equipment and expertise. “It’s the new direction,” he said.

If this is the needed course, says school board member Mark Slavkin, then Berk is a good person for the job. “He has a lot of chutzpah, and these days that’s what principals need to have.”

Those who know Berk best say he has always had chutzpah. “I fell in love with him because he really knew what he wanted and he was going to get it,” said his wife, Jane.

Ray Wurfl, who taught band when Berk attended Birmingham High School in the San Fernando Valley, said Berk was an adequate trumpet player. But what he really loved was being drum major and organizing his troops. “He would have led a pack of roaches into the room if it were possible,” Wurfl said.

The young Berk was extremely competitive. Once, before a drill-team competition, Wurfl arrived early at the school to find Berk dressed in his uniform, twirling the baton out on the sidewalk. He was practicing his maneuvers. “Mr. Wurfl, I want to eat them up,” Berk said.

Berk went to college at UCLA and California Lutheran University. His first job, at age 20, was band director at Carson High School. He doubled the size of the school’s band, started an orchestra from scratch and set a district record by winning five drill team championships in a row.

Almost as remarkable, said Carson Principal Don Groth, was his organization--his students never lost an instrument, which, as any music director knows, is amazing.

Berk is a stickler for such details. Students were stunned last fall to see their normally dapper principal dressed in a grungy sweat shirt, going from classroom to classroom to fix the clocks. At home, Jane Berk says, he spends hours weeding the garden, and he refuses to allow anybody else to touch the fragile begonias.

As a high school student and then an instructor with the district’s all-city band, Berk showed a knack for meeting the right people. After performances, recalled former all-city director Frank Harris, “he always ended up in the press box.” Harris is now coordinator for performing arts for the senior high school division.

Few who know Berk think the public school system will be able to hang onto him for much longer. Already he has nearly left twice for jobs in the private sector in entertainment. “I’m in this because I have a blast and I care about kids,” he said. “I live by creating. And when I find a bigger challenge, sure, I’ll move on.”

And there is the issue of money, something that, ever since he was a kid, Berk has told friends he wants a lot of. As principal, he earns $81,965 a year--barely enough to support his wife and two little girls in comfort, he says.

Look at it this way, Berk said. He is in charge of an 18 1/2-acre plant with a $20-million budget. He must oversee 140 adult teachers and every year produce 2,500 products--”never mind how fragile they are.” Given the responsibilities, he concludes, such a low salary is “ridiculous.”

If he leaves, Berk said, he’ll miss the “high” of affecting thousands of youngsters every day, of moving and shaking a dusty bureaucracy, and of making what even critics concede is a difference. He’ll even miss stepping on toes--because if anything, he said, criticism proves that people are frustrated and want the things he has managed to wangle for Hamilton.

Administrators say that they will miss him, too. “I’d like to clone some Jim Berks,” his boss, Don Dustin, said recently. The district’s director of performing arts paused for a moment and laughed. “Not too many, though.”