Goodby, Mr. Berk : Education: Hamilton’s maverick principal takes a job with the recording industry. With imaginative decision-making and a refusal to accept the status quo, he turned the school around.

The Wunderkind of public education in Los Angeles is moving on. In a blur.

After less than three years as the youngest and one of the most dynamic principals in the city’s history, Hamilton High Schools Complex Principal Jim Berk has resigned to take a job in the entertainment industry as executive director of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Foundation, the nonprofit side of the organization that sponsors the Grammy Awards.

He said he finally got an offer he couldn’t refuse.

But last weekend, as he roamed the deserted halls of the school on South Robertson he pushed to national prominence, Berk sounded ambivalent and even bitter that there appears to be no place left for him in the city’s troubled school system.

“I’m leaving reluctantly and angrily in some ways,” he said. “My future in this district is nil. I’ve broken too many rules. The traditional job of principal is to administer district policy. My view is just the opposite: It’s to develop policy and implement change.”

Noting that he has turned down several job offers recently, he said this one “appealed to the side of me that loves to create, to take on a challenge, and for the first time afforded an opportunity for financial compensation equal to my ability to produce.” He said he will be deeply involved in arts education in his new role.

“You know what they said to me downtown (district headquarters) when I told them I was leaving? That I’d done ‘a nice job.’ Can you imagine that? ‘A nice job!’ ”

What would it have taken to keep him in the Los Angeles Unified School District?

“Bill Anton’s job,” he said, referring to the superintendent, chuckling at the thought of a 32-year-old heading the country’s second-largest school district without toiling for years in an assistant’s slot.

Westside school board member Mark Slavkin, a Hamilton graduate, said he was sorry to see Berk go: “This is a tremendous loss for the school . . . and sends a very sad signal to the larger community. Their hopes, our hopes, were raised, and now this energetic, bright young leader is moving on.”

But, he added: “A lot of what he’s built can and will, I hope, be sustained.

“There are many other good people, a lot of whom we are also going to lose because of the coming pay cuts. It’s getting harder to hold onto dynamic people.”

Although Berk--who might pass for one of his students--is criticized by some as a relentless self-promoter, it is hard to argue with his record at Hamilton during the last six years, first as an assistant principal who designed its Academy of Music Magnet and later as principal of a 2,400-student complex that includes music and humanities magnets as well as the original school.

A school with dropping enrollment and talk of closing when he arrived, it has nearly tripled in size (but maintains relatively small class sizes), with a waiting list of 1,000, and maintains an ethnic balance of 30% African-American, 30% Anglo, 30% Latino and 10% Asian.

Its test scores have soared, its overall attendance rate is nearly 90%, its dropout rate is less than 5%, and nearly 93% (99% in the humanities magnet) of its graduates go on to colleges and universities. The school is considered safe; it is spotless and unmarred by graffiti.

“And,” Berk said, “300 private school students have returned here in the past three years.” The school draws from Cheviot Hills, Palms, and the general area bounded by Pico, Sawtelle, Venice and La Cienega.

Under a restructuring plan slated to begin next fall, Hamilton will contain five smaller schools within its walls: the Center for Global Studies, Center for Communication Arts, Center for Math and Science, Humanities Magnet Center and Academy of Music.

Berk says Hamilton’s turnaround success holds lessons for other schools here.

He says it was made possible by imaginative local decision-making by teachers and parents, a disdain for cumbersome bureaucracy, and the refusal to accept the status quo, even if that means evading control by district officials.

“It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” he said with a laugh. So it is that all 17 of Hamilton’s new teachers were hand-picked by the existing faculty, that students who don’t pay for lost textbooks have their records withheld, that teachers are allowed to substitute teach during their free period, that men on welfare do maintenance work as part of their “workfare” requirements, that a private caterer provides faculty cafeteria services, that the school moves its own furniture, runs its own cable and computer lines, and hires its own painters, and that certain duplicate services and nonessential courses like driver’s education have been eliminated. Berk said he gets by with skipping principals’ meetings and ignoring the rules “because what we do works .”

Whatever is needed but not in the budget is paid for out of school activity revenues and corporate or other private grants. Berk said the school has received more than $2 million in outside grants during the last five years, including money for its refurbished auditorium, three Steinway grand pianos, and an electronic music laboratory, with an additional $1 million in the works.

“You have to . . . hustle,” he said. “That offends many of my colleagues, but that’s reality. We shouldn’t have to do it, but. . . . We are at a point where the realities are that schools have got to be competitive for money, kids, community and business support.”

Depending on the state or county for money is a pipe dream, he said, pointing out that even many educators vote down education bond issues “because we know that the system is outdated and totally can’t respond” to today’s needs.

He said that the very idea of schools being controlled by a large, centralized bureaucracy is outmoded, that so-called school based management is a joke because the district and unions still hold the reins, that the proposed voucher system would create a racially segregated system, and that reform should take the form of either smaller school districts or “charter schools” (a concept wending its way through the Legislature) that are directly accountable to the state, not the school district.

Under a consent decree that settled a recent lawsuit brought by a group of Latino parents and will be implemented over the next five years, city schools will receive equal allocations of money and decide locally how best to spend it, a change Berks welcomes.

“I have a problem with being forced to cut 10% here and there. We should put (all programs) out on the table and decide that we either do it right or we don’t do it at all. Faced with the realities of the budget situation, either you cut everything a bit so everything stinks or we say: ‘This is what we can no longer provide.’ ”

He wants on-site child care for school employees, the substitution of portfolio assessment for grades and more academic electives such as global science rather than wood shop.

Sounding a bit like a TV evangelist, Berk said the potential of the public school system is “mind-boggling . . . and it’s not too late.

“Kids who come out of the Los Angeles Unified School system have the tools to succeed anywhere. This is as real life as it gets. But it just shouldn’t be so hard.”

He suggests that parents could save money spent on private school tuition by providing $5,000 per child to their local public school--and taking an active role in determining how it is spent.

Berk, who recently moved to Cheviot Hills to be near the school, says his two young daughters will attend public schools.

“The older will enter Overland Avenue Elementary next year, and I intend to stay involved. I’ll be the Parent From Hell.”