300 Students, Parents Say Many of School’s Teachers Are Racists

Chanting “No justice, no classes!” about 300 students and some parents staged a boisterous demonstration Friday at Hamilton High School to protest what they call an education system that favors whites over Latinos and African Americans and is rife with racist teachers.

Under the watchful eyes of Los Angeles police officers and school officials, the students skipped morning classes to march and wave placards that said, “This District Condones Racism.”

“Many of our teachers practice racism, and we’re fed up with it,” said 17-year-old Kwabena Haffar.

“We’re not talking to [the Los Angeles Unified School District] about anything, man,” Haffar said. “We want to talk to Gov. Davis and state Sen. Tom Hayden.”

In a telephone interview later, Hayden said, “I appreciate the issues the students are trying to bring up. I’ve invited some of them to testify in Sacramento this week on legislation addressing the lack of resources in inner-city schools.”

Throughout the demonstration, school officials, including Hamilton High Principal David Winter, watched from the sidelines.

In a prepared statement, Winter vowed that the students’ complaints would be “investigated by me and the district” and said that “appropriate action has been and will be taken. Since this is a personnel matter, I’m not at liberty to provide further information at this time.”

Relations have been strained for months between school authorities and African American parents who accuse Hamilton High of institutional racism, which they say is reflected in the generally poor grades and test scores of their children.

The latest flare-up was apparently sparked Tuesday by a white Hamilton High teacher who, according to students, lost his temper, threw a chair and barked that his students were “a bunch of . . . idiots.”

That teacher, journalism instructor Greg Beytin, conceded that he yelled at some of the students and ordered them out of the classroom. “I was out of line. I’ve apologized. It was a little incident, and it turned into a racial issue,” he said.

“But I’m beyond infuriated at David Winter,” he added. “He’s a jerk for giving these parents more attention than they deserve.”

Beytin was referring to members of the African American Parent Coalition. In November, group Chairman Wil C. Wade circulated a letter among Hamilton teachers accusing unidentified instructors of using “race as a criteria for determining the quality of education that they choose to provide their students.”

On Friday, Wade was urging students to keep up their chant. “Come on, now, come on,” he yelled while clapping his hands in a steady beat. “No justice. No classes.

“The basic complaint we have is about apartheid in the United States, which is what we have here,” he said. “Test scores are down for students because this school has two systems--one for whites and another for blacks and Latinos.”

The racial disparities at Hamilton are most evident in its magnet programs. Located on Robertson Boulevard just north of the Santa Monica Freeway, Hamilton is a complex of three schools. Besides the main community school, which is predominantly black and Latino, it includes highly regarded music and humanities magnet schools, each of which is about 40% white.

Wade has pressed school officials to explain a number of troubling discrepancies in test scores, both at the community school and the magnet schools.

Last year’s Stanford 9 test scores showed that black students in Hamilton’s community campus were 15 percentile points behind white students in reading, and 24 points behind them in mathematics. The gaps were larger at the magnet schools.

“The school sets us aside as though we’re different,” said Delanni Johnson, a senior in the community school. “We don’t need segregation.”