Prologue

I first met Marva Collins in February 1980, when I was reporting a cover story on education for Time magazine. It was a period of upheaval in education. Everything that had been festering for years seemed to be coming to the surface. What was emerging was a major crisis, the result of a rash of school system bankruptcies, the politics of court-ordered busing, declining public school enrollments, low reading scores, and rampant teacher incompetence.

As a stringer in Time’s Midwest bureau, I had convinced the editors to take a hard look at what was going on in classrooms around the country. I was looking at the situation not only through the eyes of a journalist but also as former teacher and as a parent who was dissatisfied with many of the teachers my daughter had had, first in the Chicago public schools and later in private school. To find out what had gone wrong with America education and what could be done about it, I and other Time correspondents interviewed parents, teachers, students, school board members, and academics across the nation.

In my investigative odyssey, one of the teachers I talked to was Marva Collins, the brash, outspoken founder of Chicago’s Westside Preparatory School. Marva had already been taken up by the media, hoisted onto an educational pedestal, and hailed as education’s heroine. Scores of newspapers and magazine articles and several television features, including a segment of CBS’s 60 Minutes, had named her the miracle worker who had succeeded where other teachers had failed. Anxious to get her views on education and find out if she was indeed different from other teachers, I accepted her invitation to come out to Garfield Park to see just what it was she was doing.

As I pulled off the expressway and entered the Garfield Park neighborhood. I could see it was a hazy vestige of its former self, a part of Chicago that stood forlornly like some dowdy spinster who had been jilted of her prime. The warren of streets and boulevards hugging he park's perimeter, four miles west stones, six-flats, twelve-flats, and courtyard apartment buildings. Most of the stately old mansions along Hamlin Avenue had been abused, ignored, and haphazardly chopped up into apartments. Many of the front lawns were now dry dirt plots strewn with broken glass of covered with knee-high weed thickets. A Star of David Carved over the doorway of the Morningstar Baptist Church, which used to be the Wilno Synagogue, was the only hint of the neighborhood's ethnic past.

On the corner of Springfield and Adams streets was Delano Grammar School. It had been one of the best schools in the Chicago system, and former graduates, now grandpanrents, still remembered teachers like Mrs. Wilson, who stayed and extra hour every day for a year, teaching her eight-grade class to play Hohner harmonicas.

The school now loomed ingloriously, a clumsy, pathetic hodgepodge of mismatched build annexes sprouting from its side. Its playground - once the gathering place and training ground for such neighborhood celebrities as Tom Hayes, Sid Reosenthal, and Saul Farber, all-American basketball stars, and saul's brother Eddie, who played professional baseball for the Cleveland Indians - was now buried beneath the annexes, so that all that remained were patches of gravel planted with rusted swings and slides.

If it hand't been for Marva Collins, Garrield Park would have remained a forgotten neighborhood. But she had replaced all the old heroes. Marva Collins was a powerful force in that neighborhood. I found that out as soon as I pulled up in front of her house. Four young men in their middle to late teens were loitering across the street. One of them approached me as I got out of the car.

"You going to see Mrs. Collins' school?" he asked.

I nodded uncomfortably. After all, Garfield Park was the kind of place you drove through with your car doors locked and your windows rolled up.

"OK," he said. "You don't have worry about anything. We'll watch your car for you."

I was struck by the respect they seemed to have for Marva. Later I related the incident to her and asked what her secret was.

"There's no secret," she answered. "I just deal honestly with children. They know I don't turn my nose down at them. They listen to me because I'm not some outsider who comes over here and talks down to them about what it is like to be poor. I'm right here working with them all the time. If everyone in the neighborhood treated these children with the same consistent interest, the children would do for them what they do for me."

What I eventually came to realize about Marva was that she was a teacher all the time, not just in the classroom. For her, being a teacher had turned into a fixed idea to which she obsessively referred all things and all experiences. If some found her single-mindedness over bearing, her students and the other children in the neighborhood saw it as a sign of her implacable devotion to them. And they, in turn, were fiercely loyal to her.

Meeting Marva, I was reminded of something Dr. Ralph Tyler, a former dean of social sciences at the University of Chicago, had once told me. "Teaching," he had said, "is not just a job. It is a human service, and it must be thought of as a mission." Marva seemed to see it that way. With an overwhelming dedication - which, I might add, could easily be mistaken for self-importance - she allowed teaching to consume her. As I got to know her, I saw that her life was so wrapped up in her teaching and in her students that she seldom needed anything else. She drew most of her pleasure and pain from her children. Oddly, people could accept that quality in a parent, but they had difficulty understanding it in a teacher. To many, Marva would often appear too good to be true.

When I first saw her in action in the classroom, she was every bit as impressive as the media had made her out to be. Actually, I had been wary of her miracle image, dismissing it as the stuff of media hype. But watching her perform, I suddenly understood how that image had come about. It was really a question of semantics. While Marva Collins didn't work "miracles," she was indeed a miraculous teacher. She had an exuberance, an energy about her that was both captivating and contagious.

The control and rapport she had with her students amazed me. From my own years as a high school English teacher, I knew that was no simple thing to achieve.

Marva's approach appeared so natural. There was a sense of maternalism about it. She was constantly in motion about the class, patting heads, touching shoulders, hugging and praising her students. There were more than thirty students in that room, yet no one seemed to be lost in the crowd. Somehow, during the course of the day, Marva managed to give each child personalized attention. She didn't just teach them, she nurtured them. And from the way the children responded, I could tell Marva wasn't merely putting on an act for visitor. There was an Incredible bond between her and her students.

Learning in Marva Collion's class was clearly an exciting, shared experience. The children were eager to learn. They waved their hands and jumped up and down in their seats, asking her to call on them. It had been a long time since I had seen a class work as well as this one. Many of the students were below average; some, in fact, had been tagged with learning disabilities. But their motivation was impressive.

Much of the media attention Marva Collins received focused on what she taught - on the fact that she had seven-, eight-, and nine-year-old ghetto children reading and reciting William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer. But I was more intrigued by how she taught and why her approach worked. There was a method there, but it was not readily definable. To understand it, I knew I would have to spend more than just one day in her classroom.

I wasn't naive enough to think Marva Collins had the cure-all for the ailment of education. The problems were far too complex and chronic. Students' reading and other test scores had been declining since 1963. More than thirty million adult Americans were functional illiterates; some twenty million Americans over the age of eighteen could not read well enough to understand a want ad or job application. The U.S. illiteracy rate was three times higher than that of the Soviet Union. American students were scoring lower on achievement tests than students from other industrially advanced nations, such as Germany, Japan, and Great Britain.

But after I watched Marva Collins and after I did all the interviews and research in connection with the Time Story, one thing became clear: the teacher in the front of the classroom made the difference. For years educators had pointed an accusing finger at parents, at television, at the schools' lack of funds, at children's home lives and backgrounds, and at what the National Education Association described as "the distractions which characterized American life in the past decade or so." Now, suddenly and dramatically, the public was no longer willing to accept the blame. Instead, teachers themselves were coming under scrutiny.

The previous summer, headlines announced that half of the first-year teachers in the Dallas school system had failed to pass the Wesman Personnel Classification Test, and exam measuring verbal reasoning and mathematical abilities. The Houston Independent School District discovered that half its teacher applicants scored lower in math than the average high school senior, and about one-third scored just as poorly in language skills. And the situation wasn't limited to Texas. One-third of the teachers in Florida County flunked eighth-grade math tests and tenth-grade reading tests. And only half of the applicants for jobs in the Mobile, Alabama, schools passed the National Teacher Examination. A much-publicized study by W. Timothy Waver of Boston University confirmed that college students majoring in education scored lower on the college students majoring in education scored lower on the Scholastic Aptitude Test than majors in almost every other field.

The spotlight on school finances also underscored the deteriorating quality of American education. Faced with school closings, program cuts, teacher layoffs, and possible tax hikes, parents began to take a critical look at the kind of education their children were getting. In a number of instances across the country, parents sued school districts for malpractices. There was a renewed push for minimum competency testing of teachers as well as of students. State legislatures began passing bills requiring teachers be tested for their basic skills. Teacher colleges came under attack for seemingly handing out diplomas as though they were Green Stamps. Parents stormed school board meetings to demand teacher accountability. Others turned to private schools, and some even yanked their children out of the classroom altogether and taught them at home.

Marva Collins had come to the public's attention. From the ivy-covered walls of Princeton to the grade schools of Wyoming, educators clamored to attend her workshops, and whey flocked to her classroom from as far away as Germany and Spain to observe her technique. Publishers were after her to endorse textbooks; manufacturers wanted her to advertise educational products. A Hollywood Producer planned to make a movie about her, and a group of entrepreneurs tried to set up a franchise of Marva Collins schools. Distraught parents sought her advice, and politicians solicited her help. Weeks before I met her, she had been offered the post of Los Angeles County superintendent of schools as well as a seat on Chicago's Board of Education. Within the year, she would be invited by President Carter to a White the year, she would be invited by President Carter to a White House conference on education and be tapped for a cabinet spot in then President-elect Reagan's Administration.

It was a celebrity status never before accorded a simple grade-school teacher. Everyone saw in Marva Collins what he or she wanted to see. Journalists viewed her as a maverick up against the system. Taxpayers,tired of subsidizing the growing cost of education, liked Marva's no-frills, no-gimmicks, basic approach to teaching, particularly when she was quoted as saying that more government spending was not the answer to the problems facing schools. Parents of low achievers looked to her as someone who offered hope to their children. Minority groups regarded her as a champion of equal opportunity. Conservatives seized upon her self-reliance, her traditionalism, and her insistence that old-fashioned values be taught in the classroom. And to liberals, she was a romantic idealist out to right the wrongs of society. Some teachers found her an inspirational model, while others saw her as a charlatan, a quitter who had gone outside the system, and even a treat to public education.

Perhaps no teacher deserved such attention. The headLines were calling her "super-teacher" and referring to what she did as "blackboard magic" and "miracle on Adams Street." Two years later she would make headlines of a different sort.

It took me more than a year of observing her teaching, of following her students' progress, and of talking to parents, psychologists, and other educators to separate the real Marva from her myth. She wasn't perfect, she wasn't a superwoman. For that matter, she was neither an academic, a scholar, nor the perfect grammarian. But what could not be disputed was that Marva Collins motivated children and made them want to achieve. That is what this book is about - teacher teaching.

Civia Tamarkin