Her 51-Year Career Is an Education : Retiring Teacher Fought Long Battle for Equal Schooling

Fifty-one years ago, an 18-year-old beginning music teacher named Lottie Hess walked into a segregated, all-black school in Douglas, Ariz., and got her first look at unequal education.

More than half a century later, on her retirement from active education last week, Hess was still fighting the battle for better education for all children as head of the San Diego City Schools integration support services department.

Over the years, Hess has successfully fought against regulations prohibiting female teachers from being married, from teaching when pregnant, and from returning to teach after having a child.

After moving to San Diego from Arizona in 1959, she taught at several junior high schools, worked as a special resource teacher for minority students, served as vice principal at Gompers Junior High, and oversaw special programs for the district’s magnet and voluntary busing integration efforts.

Quite a career for someone who trained to become a pianist.

A Practical Decision

“I had gotten a bachelor’s degree (at the University of Arizona) in piano as well as in music education,” Hess recalled during an interview during her last week as a district employee. The music education component was a practical decision, she said, since women had few options for careers in the early 1930s, particularly in light of the Great Depression.

Hess decided to give teaching a temporary try to raise money to continue her piano studies at the Juilliard Conservatory in New York. Her hometown of Douglas, hard on the U.S.-Mexico border, offered her a job as a roving music teacher, traveling from school to school to teach music appreciation as well as some basic band and orchestra techniques.

“I guess I fell in love with kids,” Hess explained when asked why she never left teaching.

Back then, the elementary schools in Douglas were segregated by race: white, Latino and black. Whites and Latinos attended high school together, but blacks continued in their own facilities.

“I remember being told that I had a choice of whether I wanted to go down (to the black school),” Hess said. “I went and my first look at so-called ‘separate but equal’ schools showed me that in terms of opportunities, they were anything but equal, lacking adequate shops, libraries, home economic areas, labs . . . they were bare bones.”

Yet the students were eager to learn, Hess said.

“I’ll never forget my first day of teaching, when all these children ran out to my car and helped me unload the (music) equipment,” Hess said, “especially the old portable crank Victrola.”

Variety of Strategies

Hess later taught general elementary school both in Douglas and then in Yuma, learning a variety of strategies to keep a single class of heterogeneous children--with intelligence levels that varied widely--moving forward.

“So today I don’t accept as a truism the idea that (children in a) class must be equal in ability or needs,” Hess said. “There is no such animal as a homogeneous group. You may narrow it so that kids have similar achievement skills based on a (standardized test) score but if you want them to learn, you have to deal with heterogeneity.

“Teaching a variety of kids at the same time is difficult, but it can be done . . . and it helps avoid the overt labeling that accompanies tracking. I don’t think my (students) ever had the feeling they were being classified into a dumb group, into a smart group, etc.

“Others will disagree with me, but I don’t believe that tracking has ever led to better education for lower-achieving students, but rather to the view that school is not a place where you (as a regular student) will do well.”

Not that Hess believes the goals of public schools can ever be met fully, if for no other reason than the breadth of the goals.

“The purpose of public schools is to teach all the children of all the people,” Hess said. “And (in terms of emphasis) we tend to swing like a pendulum, often swinging too far in one direction.

“Like with the emphasis now on basic skills, we then tend to forget about dealing with student dropouts. The statistics gradually catch up with you, so we then swing back the other way. I’m a militant middle-of-the-roader.”

Equal Access Always

But for Hess, the middle-of-the-road approach must include integration as well as academics. And for her, integration efforts can never be cyclical.

“Learning occurs in class, on the playground, in student activities, so if we are going to have public schooling for everyone, that means equal access to all aspects of public schooling.”

Hess said that the district’s integration plan, set up under court order in 1977, has worked for many children, “although things never go as fast as you would like . . . it’s unrealistic to expect all attitudes to change overnight. When we embarked on integration, we knew it is a job that will take quite a while and one where things must be reinforced and reaffirmed periodically over a long time to come.

“But I do see much freer, more open interaction among kids and adults than I saw prior to (the plan). I know there are more students with genuine friendships with students of different flavors than was the case prior to the big push.

“Even here at the education center, when you walk down the halls today, it is common to see people of all races in a variety of positions and levels, and that is accepted as normal, which was not the case when I first came here.”

Like many educators, Hess remains frustrated by the failure of achievement gains among minorities to parallel those made in integration areas. She suggests that more attention needs to be paid to preschool education, noting that the often-criticized Head Start preschool program of the late 1960s and 1970s eventually produced better-motivated schoolchildren.

“One of the best things we can do is to have a lot more day-care arrangements and preschool education to get kids turned on to academic learning.

“We have too many children at or near poverty levels, too many single-parent families where the drains on the parent in terms of just earning a living are enormous . . . without time for getting the children a lot of early education before the children ever come to school.

“I think that would be a major way to equalize learning.”