Born in Alabama in 1936, Marva Collins became one of the most influential teachers and education activists of the 20th century. Working to gain equal access to quality education for children of color, she started her own school in Chicago and founded a style of education that came to be known as the Collins Method.
Marva Collins grew up in Atmore, Alabama at a time when segregation was the rule. Black people were not permitted to use the public library, and her schools had few books, and no indoor plumbing. Nonetheless, her family instilled in her an awareness of the family’s historical excellence and helped develop her strong desire for learning, achievement and independence. After graduating from Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia, she taught school in Alabama for two years. She moved to Chicago and taught in Chicago’s public school system for fourteen years.
Her experiences in that system, coupled with her dissatisfaction with the quality of education that her two youngest children were receiving in prestigious private schools, convinced her that children deserved better than what was passing for acceptable education. That conviction led to her decision to open her own school on the second floor of her home. She took the $5,000 balance in her school pension fund and began her educational program with an enrollment of her own two children and four other neighborhood youngsters.
Thus, Westside Preparatory School was founded in 1975 in Garfield Park, a Chicago inner-city area. It was a modest opening; coupled with her own two kids, she had just six students. Yet Collins made it clear that her classroom was available to any child who’d been failed by the bigger school systems, especially those who’d been diagnosed with impossible-to-overcome learning disabilities. The results from Collins’ debut year were hard to ignore, with every child scoring at least five grades higher than they had previously.
The Collins Method, as it came to be known, centered on phonics, math, reading, English, and the classics. Homer, Plato, Chaucer, and Tolstoy, were all part of the reading list. Not surprisingly, Marva Collins and her school became a national story. Time and Newsweek came calling, so did 60 Minutes and Good Morning America. In 1982, her life and the founding of the school were turned into a television movie that starred Cicely Tyson and Morgan Freeman.
Sadly, in 2008, due to a lack of resources of community support, Westside Preparatory School closed its doors. Enrollment had dropped from 130 to about 30 in recent years. But with thousands of her students placed in jobs and attending colleges around the country, Collins’ impact on the American school system, and the lives she helped turn around, continues.