As Private as Public Can Be

Is it a lavish Los Angeles motel? A used Thunderbird lot? Or Steve Mc Queen's palatial pad? No, it is Beverly Hills High School, a pink stucco hacienda that boasts 1,750 over-achieving students, a producing oil well on the premises, a summer school in France and spotless academic credentials. Gloats one teacher: "It's the nearest thing to a private school that a public school can be."

Such is the lure of Beverly Hills High that it outdraws the beach even in July. This year 80% of its kids are shunning sunning for learning at fulltime summer school; a couple of dozen others are abroad in Nantes, toiling at art, literature and history taught in French. Hardly any of the summer students are flunkees trying to catch up. The extra work will not get them to college a minute sooner. They just like it. "It's the day of the egghead," chortles Chemistry Teacher Lawrence Lynch. A measure of the results is that last year Beverly Hills' school average on the national Iowa Tests of Educational Development was in the 99th percentile.

Ferment & Passion. Nourishing this flower of public education is one of the richest cities in the U.S. Beverly Hills (pop. 32,000) has families getting along on $10,000 or so. But much of it is a lotus land of rich brokers, industrialists, movie producers, and more psychiatrists per psyche than anywhere else in the country. Going for it is an assessed real-estate valuation of $239 million and the smallest ratio of schoolchildren to population (about 1 to 7) in California. As a result, it has the lowest school-tax rate of any sizable school district in the state, but the tax take is nonetheless so high that Beverly Hills spends almost twice as much per student as the average for Los Angeles County.

Predominantly Jewish, Beverly Hills is passionate for learning. "There is more intellectual ferment here than any place in the country," claims School Psychologist John J. Morgenstern. So advanced are the elementary schools that youngsters entering the high school from elsewhere get 20% lower grades than home-honed products. Dropouts are almost unthinkable, and of 1962's 376 graduates, at least 352 went on to college.

Culture at 7:30 a.m. Beverly Hills High gets relatively few children of Hollywood stars. Many are whisked off to boarding schools for "convenience." The result makes Beverly all the more stable. Psychologist Morgenstern finds delinquency almost unknown: "We don't have the acting-out kids, the shove-it-up kids, the violently self-assertive kids." Beverly's main problem is that such homogeneous isolation removes it a bit from the real world.

With classes averaging only 25 students, Beverly Hills' teachers exult in teen-agers who devour not only college calculus but European university texts. "Intellectual enrichment" is so big at Beverly that 100 kids show up at 7:30 every morning for noncredit seminars on such matters as "The Social Responsibility of the Scientist." The school has 60 clubs, a college-level literary magazine, first-rate music groups, theater workshops, and art classes that fill one wing of the building. Its team teaching system cuts some teachers' classloads to 15 hours a week, allowing research for thoughtful lectures to colleagues as well as students. Last fall the entire school district launched a twelve-year language sequence. The result, says Superintendent Kenneth L. Peters, will "enable a student to speak, read and write a foreign language at a level approaching his proficiency in English."

Topping all California junior colleges, Beverly Hills now offers incentive-plan teaching salaries of up to $14,000 a year. For five or ten job openings a year it gets as many as 2,000 applications. "Teachers, are not treated like children here," says Social Studies Instructor Herbert V. Dodge. "You feel like a real professional." Equally satisfying, the children refuse to be unequals. "There's no automatic respect given here," says Physiology Teacher Charles Herbst. "They expect you to challenge them. You can't be mediocre and stay."

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