Chicago Educator Extends Her Classroom to Compton

Marva Collins, the woman who transformed supposedly uneducable minority children into classroom overachievers, dreams of a city that will have the best school in the country. That city is Compton.

“When we begin to think of Compton a year, two years from now, people will no longer say, ‘Compton, where is that?’ They’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s where the best school in the world is. . . .’ ” said the Chicago educator, who plans to open a school in Compton in September, 1988, modeled on her famous Westside Preparatory School.

Speaking to 100 people on a green lawn at Compton College during a recent fund-raising lunch for the school, the slender, 6-foot teacher in a flowing black-and-white dress declared passionately: “I believe Compton is going to be the beginning of schools like this established in every community. . . . Compton will no longer be a local community. It will be an international community.”

Such plans from other teachers might be pooh-poohed. But Collins has a history of doing the impossible.

In 1975, after 14 years of teaching, Collins decided that the Chicago public schools were educating children insufficiently. So she quit, took her family’s life savings of $5,000 and started a private school in inner city Garfield Park

The school accepted students from preschool through eighth grade. Within a short time, 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds were reading at third and fourth grade levels and seventh-graders and eighth-graders tested at high school levels or took college courses for credit.

“First you have to build a student’s self-esteem,” she said in explaining her methods, “and then to convince them that education is necessary and to want it.”

” . . . They have to be dissatisfied with their plight where they are a leaner on society and not a contributor. Many of our children don’t realize the state they’re in. They know they’re poor but they think they must be poor the rest of their lives. They will tell me that we can’t speak the way you do, read the way you do.

“We start with things like Emerson’s ‘Self Reliance’ to believe your own thoughts. (We tell them) that Abraham Lincoln was 14 and hadn’t learned to read. We deal with things like Dick Whittington, who only had a cat and he turned the cat into a fortune. . . . We show them through the curriculum” what they can achieve.

Her school includes an academy that has trained 2,300 teachers because, she said, teachers who believe children can learn are the foundation of her system.

“I think the same kind of education that’s good for the sons and daughters of Harvard and Yale graduates is also the kind that’s good for all children,” she said.

“I think our expectations are very, very low for children. I believe they can understand anything that we’re willing to teach them. Of course they don’t understand if we go on the assumption this is too difficult for them.”

Study Without Recess

Once the children believe in themselves and want to learn, Collins said they study all day without recess at her school, taking their lunch breaks at their desks.

Collins thinks she can make the same gains in Compton, where conditions at public schools were severely criticized last May by Mary Hatwood Futrell, president of the National Education Assn., the nation’s largest teacher’s union.

Futrell said that during a visit to the financially strapped Compton schools she was “absolutely appalled” to find leaking ceilings, broken windows, filthy bathrooms, bird droppings on classroom floors and no fire extinguishers. She called the conditions “horrible” for students and teachers.

Collins, in the interview, said she did not want to criticize public schools.

“Somehow people get the idea that I’m out to destroy public schools. That is ridiculous. I’d like to see a marriage between public and private schools. There’s enough blight and failure for both of us (to correct). . . . The statistics say the schools are failing. The streets say the schools are failing. The products say the schools are failing. Who is Marva Collins? I don’t need to say that. It’s very obvious.”

Nevertheless, Collins vaulted to prominence in the late ‘70s after reporters found differences in the achievements of her students and those of Chicago public school students. “60 Minutes” devoted a segment to the school, Cicely Tyson starred in a television movie about Collins’ life and a major publisher, Houghton Mifflin Co., distributed her biography.

She turned down proposals to become secretary of education and superintendent of Los Angeles County schools as well as a $1-million offer from a Chicago businessman to re-create 100 of her schools.

The attention rebounded in 1982 when critics, claiming she had been a media creation, accused her of claiming authorship of an achievement test written by a Chicago school principal (a charge she denied); of accepting $69,000 in federal money after asserting that her school received no U.S. funds (Collins said she failed to realize the program supplying the money was federally funded), and of selecting middle-class students rather than enrolling dropouts (“All I can say to that, send me a student from anywhere--the most incorrigible, the worst learning problems . . . --I’ll give you back a different student,” she said.)

After such attacks Collins was not interested in expanding her domain when developer William T. Dawson visited Chicago in 1983 to suggest she build a school in Compton. She had heard similar proposals too often.

Forgot Discussion

“I talked to him and showed him our facility,” she recalled. “And then in time I forgot about it. . . . I guess I must have talked to at least 700 people about starting a school (over the years).”

Dawson, who with his wife, Sunny, has built several hundred homes in Compton, persisted. He made four more trips to Chicago and persuaded Collins to fly to Compton.

“I saw that it had some of the same problems . . . that are indigenous to any inner-city area, and I suppose it’s a challenge that bothers me tremendously when I see the failure of people. Because to me it’s so easy to succeed.”

Dawson donated a one-acre lot on Wilmington Avenue north of Alondra Boulevard for the building and Collins agreed to the project. She hopes to teach 250 students in a 14,000-square-foot building that will contain nine classrooms and a teacher training academy.

Dawson seeks to raise $1.6 million for a scholarship endowment and the construction of the school, which will be designed by prominent West Los Angeles architect Norma Sklarek.

During a recent visit to Los Angeles, Collins looked over Sklarek’s plans. The design contained no playground, Sklarek said, because Collins “believes school is for learning, not for play.” She called the plan “exceptional” because it contained an observation area where “teachers (in training) can observe classes . . . without disturbing the class.”

Sklarek said she designed the building to fit Collins’ unusual needs, and later Collins said she learned to stand up for her needs from her father, Henry Knight.

Collins, 50, grew up in a six-bedroom, white clapboard house with polished wood floors in Monroeville, Ala., 50 miles north of Mobile. Her father was a grocer who also ran the town’s funeral parlor and a 1,000-acre cattle ranch.

In the segregated Alabama of the 1940s, Collins said in her biography, “My father always said he would whip me within an inch of my life if he caught me getting food at a back counter (of a restaurant).

“He also wouldn’t let my mother or me go to a department store because white salesclerks gave black customers a hard time about trying on clothes. Black women had to put a piece of plastic on their heads before trying on hats. My father would not allow my mother or me to be humiliated. “

Compton residents seemed to appreciate what she learned. Many of those who heard her speak at the Compton College luncheon praised her message as they crowded around her afterward.

“I’ve been here 25 years and I’ve seen Compton go down and I’ve seen it come up. I’ve seen the changes and the look in my people’s faces to say ‘I don’t care.’ I think that’s wrong and I think Marva Collins can motivate people,” resident Marie Blount said.