Foreword

To say critical is to understate how poorly most of our public education is serving our youth today. Indeed time and again in starkly clinical appraisal, our captains of industry have warned our sources of education that unless the U.S. produces higher-level graduates, American industry inevitably will be thrust into further jeopardy. They point out that today we confront a competition that is better motivated, better trained, and smarter than we have ever met before. Moreover, this new breed of competitor nation makes it their governmental policy to maintain their educational standards in a pursuit of greater excellence.

It is against this background that this book presents Marva Collins, whose opinions of what is and is not effective teaching afford us a palette of insights into why she must be regarded among America’s foremost educators. Surely, no other secondary school principal ever has been offered the post of Secretary of Education by two consecutive U.S. Presidents. Marva Collins turned down both of these offers, preferring to remain her own woman, unencumbered by politics and bureaucracy, as the founder and the principal of the Westside Preparatory School.

The challenge that motivates Marva Collins is to prove that something positive and constructive can be done about the deplorable rate of dropouts, which is preceded by an attendant level of scholarship among most minority youth. But the inadequacy of U.S. public education of minorities is scarcely less than the inadequacy of public education in general. Even the most elite schools of higher-education perennially cry out against the poor quality of students of all ethnic descriptions who apply for entrance. A chilling statistic recently reported by American industries states that over 30 percent of their job applicants must be rejected because they are not able to fill out the application form properly.

Time and again, Marva Collins’ students are even more dramatic than her challenge. Since she began her school fifteen years ago, every one of that grammar school’s graduates is today either attending some outstanding prep school on full academic scholarship, or has gone on to an outstanding college or university.

These are young Americans who without such schooling likely would have drifted into the surrounding world of drop-outs, public assistance and addiction.

Little wonder that education administrators from around the world travel to Chicago to visit an inner-city school and expose themselves to the program developed by a dedicated and committed teacher and principal who is doing her utmost to offer something new to education.

What Marva Collins thrusts into the minds of her students is that whomever they are, and wherever they live, they can achieve quite literally whatever they can dream – no matter what anyone else may say to the contrary.

Why is this book by Marva Collins so important? It is because this book represents her life, her convictions, and her work. Indeed, America would be infinitely better served if Marva Collins’ philosophy of education somehow could become franchised and implemented on a national scale.

Alex Haley

June 14, 1990