Marva Collins

Marva Collins is a star, an educational celebrity, if you will. She and her work have been the focus of two 60 Minutes programs, an award-winning film, The Marva Collins Story, featuring Cicely Tyson, and literally hundreds of magazine and newspaper stories. In the 1980s, she was asked by President Reagan to be Secretary of Education but refused in order to stay with the school she founded. She has been the recipient of the prestigious Jefferson Award for Great Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged. Forty-two universities have conferred honorary doctoral degrees on this one very passionate teacher.

Marva Knight was born in Monroeville, Ala., in 1936, in the days of school segregation. Her all-black school had few books and she, like other black children in her town, was not permitted to use the public library. Nevertheless, her father, a businessman, infused in Marva a strong desire for learning and a quest for personal excellence. She attended Clark College in Atlanta and after graduation returned to Alabama to teach. After two years, she moved to Chicago, obtained a teaching position in the city’s public schools, and married Clarence Collins.

The 1960s and 70s were troubled times in the Chicago Public Schools, but Marva earned the reputation of a hard-driving, no-nonsense teacher who "got results." She set high standards for her poor, largely black, inner-city classes and used what were considered unorthodox teaching methods. She insisted that her students read a great deal, often assigning challenging classic texts such as Shakespeare and Chaucer. Memorization was a methodological mainstay in her classes. She worked hard to make learning an adventure where the enthusiasm and hard work of both teacher and students paid off. But, most of all, she was adamant that her students would not and could not fail. Her motto was and still is, "Children do not fail. We, as a society, fail them."

After fourteen years, Marva grew discouraged with what she was able to do within the public school system. She was also unhappy with the education her daughter and son were receiving in a prestigious private school. In 1975, with the full support of her husband and $5,000 she withdrew from her teachers’ retirement fund, she opened her own school on the second floor of her home: The Westside Preparatory School (WPS). Her school began with her two children and four other neighborhood youngsters. One of these children was physically disabled and another was considered borderline retarded. At the end of their first year at WPS, each child scored at least five grades higher than he or she had the previous year.

Word spread throughout the community and the next September, WPS had twenty students, mostly students who had been failing in the public schools. What Marva Collins was able to do with these students and also get them to do soon caught the attention of parents and other educators. The school expanded and Marva trained new staff members. Her mix of phonics, classics, memorization, study of foreign languages, critical thinking, and reading aloud drew critics, but the students kept coming and the scores kept rising.

When visitors came to WPS to see how she did it, they found teachers without desks, continually on the move. Her theory is that a teacher in motion is there to help students when they make mistakes and to keep discipline problems from emerging. Teachers inspire students with the vision of their personal success. Perhaps reflecting her father’s business sense, Marva and her teachers tell students to make "daily deposits" into their personal accounts of knowledge and skills so that every child can become a winner and never have to go through life faced with "insufficient funds." Also, at the beginning of each year, both students and teachers take time to write out mission statements of what they commit to achieve during the year. These mission statements are living documents, consulted regularly.

Through her notoriety, writings and lecturing around the world, this energetic, passionate woman has enriched educational practice, brought success to thousands, and changed lives of hundreds of thousands. She has summed up her mission with this quote: "Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another."

Visit the following web sites for more information on Marva Collins:

Marva Collins biography

http://www.marvacollins.com/biography.html

This biography of Marva Collins, from the Marva Collins Seminars web site, adds some details to the biography in your textbook.

Marva Collins Interview

http://www.fullcontext.org/people/collins.htm

In this excerpt from a 1997 interview for Full Context magazine, Marva Collins describes her views on Montessori education, government funding of her schools, and more.

Hero of the Day

http://www.dailyobjectivist.com/Heroes/MarvaCollins.asp

This site, from an organization that embraces Ayn Rand’s teachings, praises Marva Collins’ accomplishments and provides links to further information about her on the Internet.