WESTSIDE COVER STORY : Common Ground : Seeking to Improve Their Regular School, Hamilton High Officials Look to Campus’s Own Magnet Programs for Inspiration

At Alexander Hamilton High School one recent morning, ninth-grade humanities students listened in rapt attention to a teacher’s comments on Homer’s “Odyssey,” occasionally making thoughtful observations of their own.

The scene was different one building away. There, several members of a ninth-grade Spanish class nodded off as their teacher and another student squared off in a shouting match.

Such disparities abound at Hamilton, home to one of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s most highly regarded magnet programs--and to a regular high school curriculum that students and faculty call “the original school.”

Whether the measure is student enthusiasm or college admissions, student-teacher ratios or funding, Hamilton’s two magnets--the Music Academy and the Humanities Magnet--fare far better than the regular high school.

That has made for tension. Ardel Gladney, a senior in the regular high school, says that when he came to Hamilton two years ago, “I was made to feel less than, not as smart as the people in the magnets, based on comments that came from teachers and students.” He added: “I felt that I always had to defend being an original student, and I felt this resentment toward the magnet students.”

Some magnet students admit to looking down on students from the original school and say teachers occasionally perpetuate the negative perceptions.

“When we’re acting up in class, the teacher will say, ‘I expect this (misbehavior) from original school students, not from you,” said Melissa Schwartz, a senior in the humanities magnet.

Faced with this divide, Hamilton High administrators have embarked on an ambitious program to restructure the regular high school curriculum to give students more choices--and a greater stake in their schooling.

Last fall the school launched the Center for Global Studies, the first of three new academic tracks for regular high school students. The other two programs, expected to get under way this fall with help from a state grant, will be the Center for Communications Arts and the Center for Math and Science.

Unlike prospective magnet students, those interested in the three new academic tracks will not have to apply; they will simply choose the program that suits them.

“The philosophy is, if we make the school smaller and give kids a choice, they’ll do better,” said teacher Natalie Figueroa, who also serves as director for the global studies program.

Said Assistant Principal Evelyn Mahmud, former coordinator of the school’s humanities magnet: “The same push that makes education good, that exists in the magnets, should be there for all students.”

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Magnet programs in the Los Angeles area were created to encourage voluntary integration following the school busing controversies of the early 1970s. There are now 132 magnet programs in the Los Angeles Unified School District, accounting for 42,000 of the district’s 610,000 students. Minority students constitute 60% of the enrollment in the district’s magnets, which run the gamut from an agricultural science magnet at Canoga Park High School to a fashion careers program in Los Angeles.

Magnet programs have been a huge success, and Hamilton’s two magnet tracks--each of which has a waiting list of 400 students--are no exception. The school’s humanities magnet, founded in 1981, has been recognized by the California Department of Education as one of the state’s top 100 high schools. A liberal arts college-preparatory program, it emphasizes writing and research projects in a four-year curriculum serving 333 students.

Students study such classics as “The Iliad” and “Don Quixote de la Mancha,” the development of political institutions and 20th-Century philosophical movements. They take field trips to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and even occasionally to Greece. Recently, a group of students attended a seminar and spoke with the mayor of Jerusalem. Last year 52 of the humanities program’s 59 graduates were accepted by four-year colleges, including UC Berkeley, Brown, Northwestern and Sarah Lawrence.

“A kid who comes to the humanities magnet is usually a kid who is motivated to go to college or is being pushed at home, or both,” said Barry Smolin, a humanities teacher.

Hamilton’s Music Academy opened its doors in 1986, becoming the first comprehensive music and fine arts magnet in the district. Some credit the program with reversing a slide in the high school’s enrollment, which had dipped so low by 1985 that there was talk of closing the school.

Former Principal James G. Berk, now the executive director for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Foundation, hired new teachers, designed high-tech music education facilities and established partnerships with Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., A & M records, Westwood One Companies, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and UCLA.

“When I first got involved, the perception was that Hamilton was not desirable,” said parent Carol Turley, who has sent six children to Hamilton, two of whom are currently in the music academy. “A lot of the students were going to the Valley, giving false addresses and attending University High.”

But once the music academy began taking root, Turley said, families returned to Hamilton. “What the kids get here, educationally, is excellent,” she added. “I don’t think there’s an equal in the district, or in Southern California.”

Last fall, for the first time in the school’s history, Hamilton’s enrollment reached full capacity, forcing the school to send about 300 regular-school students to Palisades High and Fairfax High. The enrollment has rebounded from fewer than 900 in 1985 to 2,900 today. Of that, 1,700 attend the original high school, which added a ninth grade last fall.

The Music Academy, which has an enrollment of 900, trains students to perform, design and build sets and to light and choreograph productions--even though many of the students go on to such non-entertainment careers as law and medicine. Last year, 109 of the academy’s 181 graduates were accepted by four-year colleges--among them Boston Conservatory, Columbia, Oberlin and the University of Chicago.

Typical school-year activities include performances by the school’s jazz bands and vocal ensembles, concerts by its symphony orchestra and piano recitals, as well as musicals and dramas that draw audiences of 500 or more paying $11 to $14 per ticket. For this year’s spring drama, students will put on three performances of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” For the spring musical, they are planning seven performances of “Mame.”

The dedication of the students is clear. On a recent morning, for instance, 17-year-old Neema Pazargad of Encino was in the midst of one of his many rehearsals of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, trying to commit the complicated piano piece to memory for an evening concert.

“These kids are talented, intelligent, persevering,” said Jeff Kaufman, director of the music academy. “If these children are an indication of the future, we’ll be in great shape.”

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The success of Hamilton’s magnets has stood in increasingly stark contrast to the regular high school program, creating tension on campus.

Whereas the magnets maintain a ratio of about 32 students to each teacher, the original school typically has a ratio of 44 to 1, Assistant Principal Mahmud said.

The magnet programs also benefit from more abundant funding. Though school district spending on regular high school and magnet students is roughly comparable, district officials say, the magnet schools attract a great deal of extra funds and resources through donations and corporate partnerships.

Last year, for instance, the music academy received a $500,000 donation from a single patron to refurbish the high school’s concert hall, which is available to students throughout the school but is used primarily by the music magnet.

Mahmud says she was struck by the disparities at Hamilton two years ago, when the school district made cuts in funding for instructional materials.

“The magnet kids got books, but the kids from the original school didn’t,” said Mahmud, who has taught at Hamilton seven years and has a ninth-grade son in the humanities magnet. “Kids in the original school saw that all the money and high expectations went to the kids in the magnets. That’s not a good education . . . having a group of students who feel ‘less than.’ ”

Although some seniors in the regular high school were accepted into four-year colleges including Berkeley, Howard University, Syracuse University and USC, the overall acceptance rate was only 29%. That compares with 60% among music academy seniors and 88% among seniors in the humanities magnet. Other, subtler differences differentiate the regular high school from the magnet tracks, such as the generally higher level of motivation among magnet students and greater involvement by their parents.

Students who have attended both programs say magnet teachers are more attentive, more likely to get to know students on a first-name basis--and more demanding.

“The humanities teachers expect more out of me than the teachers in the original school,” said Ernie Crespo, who attended the original school as a ninth-grader and is now a 10th-grader in the humanities magnet. “I like that.”

Nicco Ardin, a senior in the original school who takes honors classes in the humanities magnet, says that--because she’s a student in the regular high school track--she is the first one dropped if a magnet class is overcrowded. Many courses in the original school, she says, seem to be at a remedial level.

“There was no challenge in the original school classes,” she said. There is also less camaraderie among students and staff, she said. When a student from the original school has a problem, like trying to change a class schedule, she says, “it’s a lot harder to get it taken care of, and more impersonal.”

Of the magnets, she said: “It’s a community, a place to go. I envy that.”

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Hamilton administrators expect such sentiment to dissipate as the original school restructures itself. Planning for that effort got under way five years ago with help from a $60,000 grant from the California Department of Education.

Like magnet programs themselves, the three new learning tracks for students at the regular high school will include such required courses as English, math and foreign languages. But they will also bring a new variety to the curriculum.

The global studies track, which has received a $20,000 donation from the German Consulate, features courses on foreign languages, literature, and cultural and physical geography. The offerings will also be diverse in the two tracks scheduled to open this fall.

Courses at the Center for Communication Arts, for instance, will include journalism, computer graphics and video editing. Some of the communication arts courses will be taught in a $100,000 studio set up at the school with help from Sony Pictures Corp.

And in the math and science program, electronics, drafting and technical math will be taught though a partnership with ITT Technical Institute, which has donated two engineering labs to the school.

Mahmud said it could take five years to fully develop the three new programs. Getting them under way has not been easy, she said. Ten teachers have left the school since the restructuring program began taking shape three years ago.

“It’s difficult to ask people to change,” Mahmud said. “We tried to make them understand this was good for the kids. Some just decided, ‘I’m not going with this’ and left the school.”

Since the three new academic tracks are being phased in starting at the ninth-grade level, few students currently at the regular high school will be able to take part in them.

Said Ardel Gladney: “A lot of the original school students just need a push to get them going. The new schools may give them the spark they need.”

For Richard Battaglia, the school district’s coordinator of magnet programs, Hamilton’s experience may serve as an example in the long-term effort to improve public schooling.

“(Successful magnets) have a lot to teach all of us in education,” he said. “If there is a success, why don’t we find ways to replicate that, perhaps even at the same campus, or at the school next door that doesn’t have a magnet?”