Chicago Teacher who founded the Westside Preparatory School and enriched the lives of inner-city students. She employed classical educational ideas--notably, the Socratic method--while teaching inner-city kids.
She graduated from Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia.
She established her low-cost preparatory school in an effort to provide a proper education for poverty-stricken, African-American children who had been labeled (often wrongly) as "learning disabled" by the public school system.
Her daughter, Cynthia B. Collins, also became a Teacher.
She was portrayed by Actress Cicely Tyson in the 1981 television movie The Marva Collins Story.
