Westside Story

An inner-city school that works

Each school day about 20 children, ages five to twelve, bound up the steps of an old brownstone in Chicago's rundown Garfield Park area. They settle quietly in a small classroom crowded with battered desks. Maps and vocabulary lists festoon the walls; books overflow the corners. At 9 o'clock sharp, the tall, no-nonsense teacher begins to stride up and down the rows. "What did Socrates say?" she questions. "The uneducated man is like a leaf blown from here to there, believing whatever he is told," chorus the children. "What did Marcus Aurelius tell us?" "He alone is poor who does not believe in himself," they chant in unison.

The old-fashioned drilling is part of the daily fare at Westside Preparatory School, a one-room schoolhouse founded by Teacher Marva Collins, 37, as an alternative to the local inner-city schools. For 14 years Collins had taught in the neighborhood elementary school, where false fire alarms were set off a dozen times a day, teachers came to school stoned, and "all we were doing was creating more welfare recipients," she says. When she fought to keep her students with her for two years in a row in order to drill them thoroughly in spelling and grammar, other teachers tagged her a rebel and sent her anonymous hate letters. Collins finally quit in frustration and, using the money she had contributed to the pension fund (about $5,000), opened Westside in 1975 in one room of her family's brownstone.

The daughter of a black Alabama businessman who "never wanted us to have to work for white people" and who instilled in her a strict work ethic, Collins allows no time for apathy, or mischief, at Westside. Class runs nonstop until noon. Math is taught, but reading and writing take precedence. Collins divides her pupils into three reading groups of varying ability, launching the five-year-olds with Aesop's Fables and assigning myths, novels and legends to the more advanced students. She draws up her own comprehension questions based on the classics ("Mount Olympus is the home of the Norse gods. True or false?") and has her pupils--who include her own eight-year-old daughter--memorize poems and Latin vocabulary. "Who can say that the classics are too hard for eight-year-olds?" she argues. "Why spoon-feed them until they choke on an overdose of boredom?"

In the afternoon the class labors on written reports, using library books and four sets of well-worn encyclopedias. Sixth-graders are taught how to write compositions with a bibliography; recent subjects include Roman history and Michelangelo. Second-graders learn how to diagram sentences. Collins doles out plenty of encouragement. "You're not slow; you just haven't been taught properly," she tells laggards in her strong voice, often hugging them for good measure.

Collins' educational philosophy is simple. "All you need to teach is a blackboard, books and a pair of legs that will last through the day," she says. "If you gave me $20,000 worth of audiovisual equipment, I'd leave it out on the sidewalk." She insists that students answer her in complete sentences and not use so-called black English. Her pupils, many of whom do not know the alphabet when they arrive, take standardized tests at the beginning and end of each year to measure their ability. Their progress has been phenomenal. Many jump from well below to well above their actual grade level. One, Ericka McCoy, 8, was assigned to a class for the mentally retarded before enrolling at Westside last year. Today she is reading at the tenth-grade level.

Collins keeps her pupils for only one or two years of intensive work, then encourages their parents to send them to parochial schools rather than the problem-ridden public schools. Although many parents are hard-pressed to pay the requested $80-per-month tuition. Collins has a waiting list of 150 pupils. She would like to expand Westside but refuses to apply for any federal grants. Says she: "I don't want any experts telling me what's good for these kids or telling me how to teach." Meanwhile. Westside's rigor is apparently as attractive to pupils as to their parents. Collins' brood even requested homework over the Christmas vacation.

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