Marva Collins: A Legacy of Educational Excellence and Empowerment
Marva Delores Collins (née Knight; August 31, 1936 - June 24, 2015) was an American educator renowned for her unwavering commitment to empowering underprivileged students and revolutionizing teaching methods. She is best known for creating the Marva Collins Method, a teaching technique that she used to instruct children previously considered unteachable or learning disabled. She founded the Westside Preparatory School in Chicago, where her teaching method was first used. The method was later branded and licensed for use in schools across the United States.
Early Life and Education: Overcoming Segregation
Marva Collins was born in Monroeville, Alabama, on August 31, 1936. She received her early education in Atmore, Alabama, and Monroeville, Alabama. This environment had a segregated school system with few resources for Black students. Despite these systemic obstacles, her parents instilled in her a deep appreciation for learning and self-discipline-values that would later shape her philosophy as an educator.
Collins's family was one of the most affluent and influential clans in their city, among African Americans and whites. Her maternal grandfather was the first African American man in his town to own a car. Her paternal grandfather earned a living from his retail store and rental property. Despite having only a fourth-grade education, her father, Henry Knight, was a successful businessman who owned a grocery store and cattle ranch. He also was the only local black undertaker. Collins’s father instilled in her drive and determination and never discouraged her from doing things that were usually reserved for boys. In fact, he encouraged her to take on anything she wanted to do, and his support fueled her strong self-esteem. From the age of seven, Collins took part in weekly trips with her father to buy cattle whose meat he sold in his grocery store. Cattle stock was sold by auction, and Collins once saw her father being threatened because he had outbid a white company. Her father refused to back down, and in the end, he kept the cattle and was unharmed.
Collins loved books, and by the time she was old enough to attend primary school at Bethlehem Academy, she already had been taught to read by her grandmother. However, her school had few books, and she was denied access to the local public library because she was African American. To feed her voracious appetite for the written word, she relied on publications she could buy and borrow and those she received as gifts. She read anything she could-almanacs, can labels, magazines, fairy tales, fables, newspapers, and even a dictionary.
When Collins was nine years old, an aunt introduced her to the work of William Shakespeare through Macbeth. Although the play piqued her curiosity, she could not grasp the meaning of the story and expressed no further interest in it until high school.
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Eventually, Collins attended Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia, where she received a BA in secretarial science in 1957. She was the first person in her family to attend college. She studied secretarial sciences at Clark College in Atlanta but was unable to work as a secretary because of her race. From 1957 she taught bookkeeping, typing, shorthand, and business law at Monroe County Training School.
Early Career and Dissatisfaction with the Public School System
After graduating from Clark College in Atlanta with a concentration in secretarial skills, Collins returned to Alabama, where she taught school for two years. She moved to Chicago in 1959 and married Clarence Collins.
In 1961 Marva Collins began working for the Chicago school system. Over the next fourteen years, she distinguished herself as a compassionate but demanding teacher who set high standards for her students, motivated them to learn, and held them accountable for their performance. A champion of education, Collins refused to accept mediocrity from her students or from fellow teachers, many of whom she deemed ineffective. Dissatisfied with its apathy, neglect, and hostility toward inner-city students, most of whom were poor and black, Collins set high standards for her pupils and adopted unorthodox teaching methods. She relied on such traditional methods as memorization, and to inspire her students to read she assigned them classic texts that others considered too challenging.
It was here that she first encountered the widespread neglect and low expectations placed on Black and low-income students. Frustrated by an education system that dismissed students as “unteachable” and failed to provide the intellectual stimulation they deserved, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
Westside Preparatory School: A Beacon of Hope
In 1975, Collins left the Chicago school system to found the private Daniel Hale Williams Westside Preparatory School. With financial assistance from the government-funded Alternative Schools Network, she began with four students; within a year enrollment had increased to 20 students, most of whom were considered uneducable by the standards of Chicago public schools. Upset by the Chicago public schools' low standards, Collins opened Westside Preparatory School in 1975 on the second floor of her home, using $5,000 of her own savings to launch the institution. The first students included her son, daughter, and several neighborhood children, some of whom were considered to be learning disabled.
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Her school was unlike traditional public schools-it welcomed students who had been expelled, labeled as failures, or deemed unteachable by other educators. Instead of accepting the notion that these students were incapable of success, Collins believed in their untapped potential and refused to let them be defined by past academic struggles. She implemented a rigorous curriculum rooted in classical literature, critical thinking, and self-discipline, blending high academic expectations with unwavering encouragement. Collins was known for applying classical education, in particular the Socratic method, modified for use in primary schools, successfully with impoverished students. Collins criticized the teaching of the students, not the students themselves.
Within three years, enrollment was up to twenty-eight children and there were 175 on an admissions waiting list. The monthly tuition of eighty dollars per child was paid by parents, churches, and community donations. The school also relied on large donors such as entrepreneur W. Clement Stone, who donated fifty thousand dollars in education grants. The musician Prince also was a major contributor and became honorary chairman of Collins’s National Teacher Training Institute, which she established to train teachers in her methods. At the end of the first year, every student scored at least five grades higher on their standardized tests.
Collins often sought to teach the lowest-performing students in order to demonstrate that any child could learn. She believed that all children were capable of academic success regardless of background, and that students are best served by discipline, individual attention, and focus on the basics-reading, math, and language skills. These principles were the driving force behind her determination to educate underprivileged youths, whom she felt were neglected.
The Marva Collins Method is based on the Socratic method, which uses open discussion on an engaging topic to encourage intellectual discourse and critical thinking. Collins’s method also stresses spelling, grammar, composition, vocabulary building, word pronunciation, and usage. First-grade students read aloud from classic literature instead of children’s storybooks. The curriculum offers no recess, sports, music, or arts programs, as Collins considered them an unnecessary distraction from the learning process.
National Recognition and Impact
In 1979 Westside Prep gained national prominence following a story and interview with Collins on the television news show 60 Minutes. The 60 Minutes feature was inspired by a 1970s article written by Chicago Sun-Times reporter Zay N. Smith. Highly laudatory coverage followed in such magazines as Time, Jet, Newsweek, and Black Enterprise. In 1981 CBS aired The Marva Collins Story, starring Cicely Tyson and Morgan Freeman. Cicely Tyson, who played Collins in the TV movie, said she spent time with Collins to research for the role. The funds Collins received for the film allowed her to expand her school and move to a new facility.
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In 1982, Kevin Ross, a 23-year-old Creighton University basketball player, got to his senior year of college without being able to read. With the assistance of a Creighton booster, Ross enrolled in 7th grade at Westside Prep. By 1982, the school had two hundred students and a one-thousand-name waiting list.
Her steady success with students has brought national recognition, awards, honorary degrees, and a made-for-television movie about her life starring Cicely Tyson. President Reagan asked her to be secretary of education, but she declined in favor of staying at Westside. Collins’s success and public exposure resulted in many offers of powerful jobs, including secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan, a seat on the Chicago school board, and superintendent for the Los Angeles County schools. However, she declined all these offers to continue her work with children.
In addition to professional praise, Collins received many honorary degrees from universities such as Dartmouth, Amherst, and Notre Dame. She received over forty honorary doctoral degrees from universities, including Dartmouth and the University of Notre Dame. She was honored with the Humanitarian Award for Excellence, the Jefferson Award for Benefiting the Disadvantaged, and the prestigious National Humanities Award from President George W. Bush in 2004. Collins was featured in many publications and high-profile television shows, including CBS’s 60 Minutes, which first featured the Westside Preparatory School in 1979. The show’s producers chronicled the education and careers of thirty-three students, then produced a follow-up show sixteen years later to see if Collins’s method had been effective. Ten of the students from the original show were profiled, and all had become professionally successful, despite the fact that they grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago and a few had been labeled as learning disabled.
Collins became well-known due to the 1981 TV movie based on her life's work entitled The Marva Collins Story, starring Cicely Tyson and Morgan Freeman. She also appeared on a featured news article on CBS's 60 Minutes.
Later Career and Legacy
In 1996, Collins returned to the Chicago Public School system to supervise three of the schools that had been placed on probation. She specifically requested schools with the worst academic records and the lowest parental involvement rates, and improved the rating of two of the three schools by eighty-five percent in just half a year. In 1996, Collins was hired to supervise three Chicago public schools that had been placed on probation.
During the following year, the Marva Collins Preparatory School of Wisconsin opened its doors to its first class of students, and other schools have since opened in Cincinnati, Ohio, and throughout Florida.
Collins has trained over 100,000 teachers since the opening of the Westside Preparatory School. Collins believes that retraining teachers and shifting paradigms is essential to creating a more positive climate in the classroom. Her first question to teachers in seminars is "what's wrong with the children and parents?" To which she receives a litany of responses. The Collins methodology advocates a core curriculum that emphasizes phonics, reading, English, math, and classics. The students' reading list includes Sophocles, Homer, Plato, Chaucer, and Tolstoy--something Collins doesn't find extraordinary. "I read at least twelve or thirteen books a week because I have a passion for excellence," Collins says. "I'll begin a nine-hundred-page book, and I won't stop until I finish it. All Westside Prep students go on to college, she says. "There are no dropouts, no substitute teachers, and when teachers are absent, the students teach themselves. We're an anomaly in a world of negatives.
Today, the staff of Westside Preparatory School includes her daughter Cynthia, who was five when the school began and is now the headmistress, and son Patrick, who conducts teacher-training seminars around the nation.After her retirement, Collins continued to teach educators her methods through seminars and workshops. She settled in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and is a popular public speaker.
On June 24, 2015, she passed away at a hospice facility near her South Carolina home at the age of seventy-eight.
Collins was married to Clarence Collins from September 1960 until his death in 1995. Together, they had three children: Patrick, Eric, and Cynthia.
Controversies and Criticisms
In 1982 an educational magazine accused Collins of inflating test scores; she was also charged with plagiarism, harassing parents about tuition payments, and fueling right-wing attacks on public education. In 1982 and in subsequent articles, Collins has been criticized by George N. Despite the controversy, she retained many supporters and began a teacher-training program to impart her methods to other inner-city teachers.
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