The Final Call

Chicago educational leaders remember Marva Collins

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Marva Collins, right, smiles while listening to an audience question with fellow panelists Danny Glover and Russlyn Ali during the National Civil Rights Museum’s 2011 Freedom Award Public Forum, Nov. 10, 2011, in Memphis, Tenn. Photo: AP/Wide World photos

Her name is synonymous with educator and Civil Rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, Asa Hilliard, the father of African-centered education, Hannibal Afrik, who led the community control movement through his organization, the Black Teachers Association, and Barbara Sizemore, the first Black woman elected as superintendent of the District of Columbia Public School System.

“She is one of the first people that I know who took the education of Black children into the hands of Black people,” said Mr. Jackson, an education advocate. “She represented … that Black people can successfully educate Black children.”

Ms. Collins, a 2004 National Humanities Medal awardee, died June 24 in a hospice care near her home in South Carolina. She was 78.

Ms. Collins became a trailblazer in education after seeing the disparity between the private education her children received and that of students in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system where she taught 14 years as a substitute teacher. So Ms. Collins in 1975 opened her own private school on the second floor of her apartment building in Chicago’s West Garfield Park community.

Collins’ Westside Preparatory School educated disadvantage youths, many of whom were written off as learning disabled. But Ms. Collins shattered conventional wisdom that impoverished children could not learn when her students scored comparable to those in higher income communities.

“All children can learn. For thirty years, we have done what other schools declare impossible,” said Ms. Collins in an interview for her award from National Endowment for the Humanities.

Collins’ educational achievements garnered national media attention including a segment on “60 Minutes.” And in 1981, Hollywood took note and turned her life story into a made for television movie “The Marva Collins Story” staring Cicely Tyson. But Ms. Collins pinned the success of her school and students on a curriculum focused on phonics, math, reading, English and literacy classics such as Shakespeare and Tolstoy.

“She believed in the great books and history and historical figures. She taught kids poems and speech making,” said Congressman Danny K. Davis (D-IL) of Collins who he called a change agent.

Rep. Davis became familiar with Ms. Collins through their community activism. Both were involved in many community organizations on Chicago’s West Side. Rep. Davis credits that activism to how Ms. Collins approached teaching and why she broke with CPS.

“She was a social worker just as much as a teacher,” said Rep. Davis, who also worked as CPS teacher before entering politics. “She had these thoughts and ideas about teaching, about education and how it could be done. She figured that she was somewhat constrained and constricted by the Board of Education.

“If you are working for the Board of Education, then you needed to follow the curriculum; follow the rules,” Rep. Davis added. “She just felt that she could do her own thing. She had the courage and determination to do it and she did it. And she was good at it.”

That courage and determination led Collins to expand her school, opening facilities in Ohio and Wisconsin. Increased enrollment promoted Collins to move her school to a location on Chicago’s South Side. She became a sought after educator training teachers in the back-to-basic instruction skills known as the “Marva Collins method.”

But she was not without controversy. Many of her contemporaries questioned her credentials to teach and the veracity of her students’ achievements. That criticism, Mr. Jackson noted, came from some Black educators “who believed Marva Collins was a fraud.”

“There were many educators who were jealous of her and wanted to know why she was getting all this media attention for doing what they … have been doing for all their lives,” he said.

Still her success brought offers to head several superintendent positions as well as an offer from President Ronald Reagan to be U.S. Secretary of Education. But she turned them all down because she was first and foremost a teacher who belonged in the classroom, Mr. Jackson said.

Her work teaching Creighton University’s basketball standout Kevin Ross personified that commitment. Mr. Ross graduated from Westside Preparatory in 1983 at the age of 24. His matriculation through the Kansas City, Kansas’ education system without being able to read illustrates the failure of the public education system Collins fought against.

Mr. Ross even won a scholarship to the university, but graduated with a second grade-level education. When he enrolled in Collins’ school, she brought his reading level up to college level within a year.

“She felt that she could be of more value and more use to the Black community not being formally connected to a school system or the U.S. education system,” Mr. Jackson said. “Big titles and high positions are not very useful when it comes to educating Black children. It is actually doing the work.”

That served as aspiration for Mr. Jackson’s organization and starting the Saturday University, which offers free tutoring in math, reading and writing.

“When we looked for models for this institution of accelerated learning for young Black and Latino children we looked at what Ms. Collins did, and we drew down from it,” he said.

A former student of Collins, Javante Smith was just a kindergartner when her parents enrolled her in Collins’ school soon after it opened. Ms. Smith remembered Collins as a statuesque woman who exuded enthusiasm about learning – something she carried as she matriculated through her education. Education, Smith said, is a gift that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

“I approach my education very seriously. I take every moment of my life almost as a learning experience and I think that’s because how [Collins] approached things,” said Ms. Smith who graduated from St. Mary’s College in Indiana and is pursuing a master’s degree.

Her father, former city alderman Ed Smith, didn’t have any reservations about sending his daughter to a school housed in an apartment building. Mr. Smith, who knew Collins, sent his daughter there because she would receive the best education and “garner those cognitive skills they needed to be competitive in a very competitive world.”

Dr. Grace G. Dawson, a 36 year veteran CPS educator and administrator, who ran in the same education circles with Ms. Collins, praised her for starting a revolution that Black children can learn especially the classics.

“Nobody was thinking about teaching these kids Shakespeare and the classics in the primary grades.... You got that in college,” Ms. Dawson said.

She noted Ms. Collins students excelled because learning the classics requires “deep thinking.”

“She didn’t have to invent the wheel. All she had to do was use what was out there…. She took those kids who had less exposure and exposed them,” Ms. Dawson said.