"Marva N. Collins"{August 31 1936-June 24,2015{

Fought for equality by providing an education to hundreds of children in Chicago's West Side.Her methods and success attracted national attention,and she was asked several times by Presidents Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush to become secretary of education,a position she

declined. Her life shows the importance of the professions in achieving equal rights and the significance of education and teachers within the black community.Henry and Bessie Knight's first and only child together,She was born in Monroeville Alabama.Henry Knight worked hard and ran various businesses, among them a grocery store, a funeral parlor,and a cattle business.The Knight family lived well,Despite the Depression.Marva spent the first twelve years of her life in Monoreville,attending the Bethlehem Academy.Her paternal grandmother taught her to read by reading out loud from the Bible. Marva became an insatiable reader, reading everything she could find-from Richard Wright's Native Son to the dictionary.She moved to nearby Atmore when her parents separated in 1948.Growing her in the segregated South,Marva,attended the Escambia County Training School,an all-black high school. Here she showed the strong will that would mark her later life as a teacher.She refused to take the required home economics course,becoming the only female student to graduate without the class.After high school,she attended Clark Atlanta University,an exclusive all-black women's liberal arts school.She majored in her secretarial science and returned to Alabama with her degree in 1957. Once there,she found that only civil service jobs were only open to blacks and ended up teaching secretarial classes at the Monroe County Training School.She moved to Chicago in 1959. Marva found an apartment,a job as a medical secretary at Mount Sinai Hospital,and her husband,Clarence Collins,all during her first year in the city.She missed teaching,however and applied to teach in the Chicago Public School System Assigned to teach second grade,she found the curriculum too limited and began to modify it.Soon her students were reading Aesop's Fables, Grimm's Fairy Tales,and fairy tales written by Leo Tolstoy.In her teaching,Marva emphasized building self-confidence through achievement.She then left teaching to have her first child, Eric. The family grew with the addition of a second son, Patrick,and eventually a daughter, Cynthia.After fourteen years in the Chicago Public Schools system,She left in 1975 to establish the Daniel Hale Williams Westside Preparatory School. She used money from her pension fund,along with financial aid from the Alternative Schools Network.Marva started with six,students,including her own son and daughter, and had an enrollment of twenty by the end of the year.In 1979,the news show 60 Minutes featured her teaching succes.Other national Time,media outlets covered her teaching methods,including Time, Jet, Newsweek,Good Morning America,and Black Enterprise.Her story provided so inspirational that CBS aired  The Marva Collins Story (1981),starting Cicely Tyson and Morgan Freeman.She turnd down President Reagan's offer to be secretary of education and opportunity to be superintendent of the Los Angeles school system,she helped more than thirty public schools,in Oklahoma in 1990. Harvard University trackd eight schools, with four principals who followed the Collins plan and four who did not. The schools that adapted Collin's methods saw remarkable success.Marva teaching methodology received renewed attention in 1995,When Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein's The Bell Curve:Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, a controversial book on blacks and education,dismissed any long-term success she had had on the children she had taught. In a follow-up story,60 Minutes examined the lives of the first thirty-three students who attended Westside Preparatory.All were successful,and many had chosen to become teachers.Marva returned to  to the Chicago Public Schools system in 1996,working with two schools located in the worst areas and poor parental involvement.Her methods resulted in decided improvement in both schools, and Marva Collins Preparatory Schools opened  in Wisconsin,Florida,and Ohio.Forty-two schools bestowed honorary degres on Marva, including Amherst College, Darmouth,and Norte Dame.She received the Jefferson Award for the Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged and in 1982 was named one of the Legendary Women of the World,along with Beverly Sills,Nancy Kissinger,and Barbara Walters.Now located on Chicago's South side,The Marva Collins Preparatory School continued  to educatcate children into the early twenty-first century.