Marva Collins and American Public Education
Kramer, Rita
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 16, NO.4 / APRIL 1983 : : Rita Kramer MARVA COLLINS AND AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION The "controversial" history of a contemporary innovator. I n the fall of 1975,...
...The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another...
...16, NO.4 / APRIL 1983 : : Rita Kramer MARVA COLLINS AND AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION The "controversial" history of a contemporary innovator...
...In 1979 she ended her connection with the ASN, an arm of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, but her participation in the program would eventually become a weapon in the hands of her detractors...
...Maria Montessori: A Biography...
...She made use of books salvaged from the trash bins of the local public school and a salary provided by the government-funded Alternative Schools Network.* Within months, enrollment had tripled and her previously "unteachable" or "learning disabled" pupils all learned to read, increased their verbal and math comprehension, and went on to read at increasingly higher levels...
...Tarcher, Inc...
...All the while she would be encouraging and tJ.P...
...In it, she explains the ideas and methods that first brought her acclaim and, more recently, opprobrium...
...distributed by Houghton Mifflin), $12.95...
...His story on the school, including some of the children's compositions on Michelangelo, da Vinci, Aesop, and Hinduism, was syndicated -to newspapers around the country...
...In the spring of 1977 Marva Collins sent a letter to a Chicago Sun-Times columnist who had written about suburban highschool students who didn't know who Shakespeare was or anything about his works and invited him to visit Westside Prep...
...She used her own pension money and her husband contributed the labor that made a classroom out of part of their apartment...
...In the fall of 1979 CBS ran a segment on Westside Prep on "Sixty Minutes...
...Rita Kramer is author of How to Raise a Human Being...
...An article in Time in December of 1977 brought thousands of letters from parents, thousands of dollars from individual contributors, and more publicity in other magazines-People, Good Housekeeping, Saturday Review, etc.-and newspapers...
...As journalist (and co-author of Marva Collins's book) Civia Tamarkin puts it, "Readers were touched by the story of children who had been discarded as 'unteachable' climbing to superior achievement in a school that was always short of books, paper, pencils, and even chalk...
...What she had done and what she thought about it have now become the subject of Marva Collins' Way, t a book guaranteed to incur the wrath of just about everyone in the education world today...
...It elicited six thousand letters and made Marva Collins a nationally known figure...
...Giving Birth: Childbearing in America Today...
...and, most recently, In Defense of the Family: Raising Children in America Today (Basic Books...
...8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1983...
...By the end of 1980 she had been mentioned in the New York Times as a possible Reagan choice for Secretary of Education and a year later, she was the heroine of a prime-time television "docudrama" seen by an estimated 19 million viewers...
...Again, she scrounged furniture, materials, books...
...Parents, teachers, press, all clamored to visit...
...I n the fall of 1975, after fourteen years of teaching, twelve of them in the Chicago public schools, Marva Collins opened a small private school (four pupils to begin with, one of them her own daughter) in a donated basement room in Chicago's run-down Garfield Park, the neighborhood where she lived and had been teaching...
...Her success in teaching previously backward and unruly children got around...
...At the end of that first year, she decided to take over the school herself, and moved it into her own home, changing its name to Westside Preparatory School...
...Their attitude toward school-and toward themselveshad changed...
...And Marva Collins has been in the spotlight ever since...
...Educational journals ran stories about the school...
...As millions of magazine and newspaper readers and television viewers know by now, Marva Collins's classroom technique was to begin with a discussion of a book the children had read, writing each new word on the blackboard and breaking it down into its phonetic components and discussing its meaning, letting the discussion roam over matters of history, geography, poetry, botany, while making sure the children mastered new words and added them to their vocabulary as they added ideas to their experience...
...More parents brought their children, and local press reports were followed by national publicity about the one-room school in which so much was being accomplished by means of so little but one woman's dedicated efforts...
...School officials came from as far away as Europe...
Vol. 16 • April 1983 • No. 4
