Marva Collins

Marva Delores Nettles Collins grew up in Atmore, Alabama, the daughter of a funeral-home owner and cattle trader in a segregated town where the family had more room than most Black families around them. She learned in a one-room schoolhouse where a single teacher taught every grade at once, an arrangement she later credited with teaching her that a good teacher, not a good building, was the entire ingredient a school needed. She graduated from Clark College in Atlanta, taught two years in Alabama, then moved to Chicago in 1959 and spent fourteen years as a full-time substitute in the public schools, watching children other teachers had written off as unteachable get exactly the education that label predicted for them.

In 1975 Collins took 5,000 dollars from her retirement account and opened Westside Preparatory School in her own home, enrolling students the system had already labeled unteachable, most of them Black and poor. She taught with the Socratic method adapted for six-year-olds, put Shakespeare and Aristotle in front of children the district had given up on, and drilled phonics until struggling readers were reading above grade level within a year. CBS's 60 Minutes profiled the school in 1979, and the 1981 television movie The Marva Collins Story, starring Cicely Tyson, made her a national figure. Ronald Reagan and later George H.W. Bush each offered her the post of US Secretary of Education, and she turned both down to keep teaching. The school ran until 2008, when enrollment and funding finally gave out.

Collins built her reputation partly on numbers, near-universal reading gains, students headed to selective high schools straight out of a converted living room, and those numbers became the fight. Chicago journalist George Schmidt spent years arguing her results were overstated or unverifiable, that outside observers were never given the access to test them properly, and that the made-for-television version of the school had outrun the real one. Collins denied it and mostly declined to engage the specifics in public, which her critics took as evasion and her supporters took as a woman with better things to do than answer people who had never taught in West Garfield Park. Both readings of the record persisted past her death, unresolved by any independent audit either side accepted.

Collins married Clarence Collins in 1960 — he died in 1995, and she kept teaching for two more decades. She died in hospice care in June 2015 at 78. President Barack Obama, a fellow believer in a mother's insistence on reading, and public figures across the political spectrum praised her in the days after, an unusual convergence for a Chicago educator whose actual research record remained disputed. She received the National Humanities Medal in 2004, and Westside Preparatory's model, direct instruction, high expectations stated plainly to the child, classic texts over worksheets, outlived the school itself in the charter and classical-education movements that cite her as a founding example.

Marva Collins's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Westside Preparatory School company
  Founded with $5,000 of her own retirement savings 1975
• Marva Collins' Way book
  Co-written with Civia Tamarkin — her account of the school's methods 1982
• Ordinary Children, Extraordinary Teachers book 1992
• Marva Collins Seminars teacher-training institute company
  Prince donated $500,000 to it in 1994 1980

• August 31, 1936 aged 0 Born in Monroeville, Alabama
• 1959 aged ~23 Moves to Chicago and begins substitute teaching in the public schools
• 1975 aged ~39 Opens Westside Preparatory School in her own home
• 1979 aged ~43 Profiled on CBS's 60 Minutes
• 1981 aged ~45 The Marva Collins Story airs, starring Cicely Tyson
• 1982 aged ~46 Declines Ronald Reagan's offer of US Secretary of Education
• 2004 aged ~68 Receives the National Humanities Medal
• 2008 aged ~72 Westside Preparatory School closes
• June 24, 2015 aged 78 Dies in hospice care in South Carolina

• Booker T. Washington 1856–1915
  Educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute who advocated for vocational training for African Americans. predecessor in Black education
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. offered her a Cabinet post
• George H. W. Bush 1924–2018
  41st president who managed the end of the Cold War and assembled the coalition for the Persian Gulf War. offered her a Cabinet post
• E. D. Hirsch Jr. b. 1928
  Literary scholar whose Core Knowledge curriculum emphasized cultural literacy and shared knowledge. shared classical-education philosophy