Marva Collins' Way

"America would be infinitely better served if Marva Collins' philosophy of education somehow could become franchised and implemented on a national scale."--Alex Haley, author of ROOTS

Marva Collins offers a beacon of hope in the midst of America's educational crises. MARVA COLLINS' WAY recounts Marva Collins' successful teaching strategies and offers inspirational advice on how to motivate children to fulfill their potential. This updated edition contains a new epilogue for parents and teachers.

"The first things we are going to do here, children, is an awful lot of believing in ourselves." With these words, Marva Collins greets her students and opens them up to a potential many never thought possible. It is her constant "You can do it" that convinces her students there is nothing they cannot achieve. This independent-minded teacher's drive, courage, and dedication has helped her students reach high levels of accomplishment,. Her story can be any parent's or teacher's model.

MARVA COLLINS' WAY is a prescription for effective teaching and graphic indictment of what is wrong with much of American education today. More than just an account of one teacher's struggles and successes, it demonstrates a teacher's technique that can be applied in every classroom and home.

In 1981, this book was made into the TV movie The Marva Collins Story starring Cicely Tyson and Morgan Freeman.

Marva Collins taught school for two years in Alabama, then moved to Chicago, where she taught in public schools for 14 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. She took the $5,000 balance in her school pension fund and opened her own school on the second floor of her home.

The Westside Preparatory School was founded in 1975 in Garfield Park, a Chicago inner-city area. During the first year, Collins took in learning disabled, problem children and even one child who had been labeled by Chicago public school authorities as borderline retarded. At the end of the first year, every child scored at least five grades higher proving that the previous labels placed on these children were misguided.  60 Minutes, visited her school for the second time in 1996. That little girl who had been labeled as border line retarded, graduated  from college Summa Cum Laude. Marva's graduates entered colleges and universities, such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. They became physicians, lawyers, engineers, and educators. In 1996 she began supervising three Chicago public schools that had been placed on probation.

In 1981, she received the Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged, an award given out annually by the Jefferson Awards. In 2004 she received a National Humanities Medal for her teaching and efforts at school reform.