Marva Collins
Marva Collins was an influential educator and reformer known for her innovative teaching methods and dedication to improving the education of underprivileged children. Born in Monroeville, Alabama, during the Great Depression, she came from a family of successful entrepreneurs, which instilled in her a strong sense of determination and self-esteem. Collins graduated from Clark College with a degree in secretarial science and began her career as a teacher in the Chicago public school system.
Frustrated by the shortcomings of the traditional education system, she founded the Westside Preparatory School in Chicago in 1975, utilizing her own retirement funds to create a learning environment focused on discipline and individualized attention. The school gained prominence for its success in teaching low-performing students, emphasizing basic skills and classic literature. Collins developed the "Marva Collins Method," which employed the Socratic method to foster critical thinking and intellectual engagement.
Her work garnered national recognition, leading to various accolades and offers for high-profile positions, which she declined to remain in the classroom. Collins received multiple honorary degrees and awards throughout her career, and her legacy continues to impact education, particularly for disadvantaged youth. She passed away in 2015, leaving a lasting influence on urban education and a belief that all children can achieve academic success with the right support.
Marva Collins
- Born: August 31, 1936
- Birthplace: Monroeville, Alabama
- Died: June 24, 2015
Educator, entrepreneur, and activist
Collins 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
Born and raised in segregated Monroeville, Alabama, during the years of the Great Depression, Marva Delores Knight Collins descended from a line of successful entrepreneurs. 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. The Collins family was one of the most affluent and influential clans in their city, among African Americans and whites.
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.
Collins graduated from the Escambia County Training School and went to Clark College in Atlanta, where she received a BA in secretarial science in 1957. She was the first person in her family to attend college. Collins returned home and took a job teaching at Monroe County Training School, where she began to hone her teaching skills.
While visiting an aunt in Chicago, Collins applied for a medical secretary job at Mount Sinai Hospital. It was during this time that she met her aunt’s neighbor, a draftsman named Clarence Collins, whom she married on September 2, 1960.
Life’s Work
Collins worked at Mount Sinai Hospital for about a year until she realized that she missed teaching and accepted a substitute teaching position in the Chicago public 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.
In 1975, frustrated with the Chicago school system, Collins resigned and invested five thousand dollars of what was to be her retirement money to start a school in the basement of Daniel Hale Williams University. The school, Daniel Hale Williams Westside Preparatory School, opened with three children and Collins’s daughter. After the first year, there were nearly twenty students. The school moved to the top floor of her home and was renamed Westside Preparatory School. 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.
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.
To honor her achievements in education, Hallmark Hall of Fame produced the biographical television film The Marva Collins Story (1981), starring Emmy winner Cicely Tyson and Oscar winner Morgan Freeman. The funds Collins received for the film allowed her to expand her school and move to a new facility. By 1982, the school had two hundred students and a one-thousand-name waiting list.
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 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.
After her retirement, Collins continued to teach educators her methods through seminars and workshops. She settled in Hilton Head, South Carolina. On June 24, 2015, she passed away at a hospice facility near her South Carolina home at the age of seventy-eight.
Significance
Collins’s groundbreaking teaching techniques were a boon for children from impoverished neighborhoods whom other educators had written off as unteachable. She drew national attention to urban education challenges and paved the way for contemporaries who work under similarly difficult circumstances. She provided opportunities to many underprivileged youths through her powerful belief that all children can be successful learners with the right motivation, high expectations, and dedicated teachers.
Bibliography
Collins, Marva.“Ordinary” Children, Extraordinary Teachers. Norfolk: Hampton Roads, 1992. Print.
Collins, Marva, and Civia Tamarkin. Marva Collins’ Way. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1990. Print.
Hine, Darlene Clark, ed. Black Women in America. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.
Kinnon, Joy Bennett. “Teaching That Works—Marva Collins: The Collins Creed.” Ebony Dec. 1996: 122–25. Print.
Roberts, Sam. "Marva Collins, Educator Who Aimed High for Poor, Black Students, Dies at 78." New York Times. New York Times, 28 June 2015. Web. 27 Dec. 2015.