"I will not let you fail. Kids don't fail. Teachers fail. School systems fail. Colleges that turn out teachers who cannot teach fail." That was Marva Collins' attitude when she started Chicago's Westside Preparatory School on the second floor of her home in 1975 with $5,000. Since that time, the school has grown from six to 250 students, with hundreds on the waiting list, and a worldwide reputation for excellence.
Last week, I had the pleasure of an on-site visit to the Marva Collins Preparatory School of Cincinnati that's affiliated with its Chicago sister. In 1990, Cleaster Mims started the school with 24 students in the basement of the Olivet Baptist Church. With volunteer help, Mims and her board of directors were able to purchase the Cincinnati Hebrew Day School building. There are now 126 students, with dozens on the waiting list.Virtually all the MCPSC students are from low- and moderate-income households. All are black except two. Grades go from preschool through eighth. Almost 90 percent of the students score at grade level on standardized tests. Many score as high as two and a half, and some as high as six, grades above grade level. Boys show up to school wearing a white shirt and tie and girls in jumpers and blouses. I visited every single class and saw students bristling with enthusiasm. In one class, sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students were at the blackboard writing solutions to a fairly high level of pre-calculus math problems.
That's just part of the story because you must be wondering what government agency gave Mims the grant money to start the school. There was, and is, none. Rev. Booth, pastor of the Olivet Baptist Church, recalls the school's financially shaky beginning: "Two or three mothers wouldn't give up. We started with a raffle." Plus, Mims and other good Cincinnatians, white and black, began fund-raising events and made charitable donations.
Now you say, "What's the tuition?" It's $3,000 a year for one kid and $4,000 for two. Tuition doesn't cover all operating costs, but here's what happens. Parents chip in their time and skills to build bookshelves, do repair work and maintain an after-school center to help working parents. Then there's the energetic and persuasive Mims and her board of directors beating the bushes for used equipment and scholarship funds. I know firsthand that such zeal to provide black kids with a better education makes saying no to a request for financial help difficult.
There's a message in this story about Mims and her helpers. The message is that black people, even those with meager means, have the resources to meaningfully solve problems. That has always been the case until we were sold the idea that we are helpless victims of a racist society and that government programs, politicians and assorted poverty pimps were our salvation.
For people who say they care about the destruction of black kids' future by government schools, I want them to answer some questions for me. What kind of racism and poverty stops us from having a raffle, if needed, to start a school? Do we really have to worry about racial integration before there can be black educational excellence? How many more generations of black children's education are we going to allow to be destroyed as they're held hostage by an incompetent, costly, self-serving government education establishment? If you think we are helpless, you don't have half the character of a Cleaster Whitehurst-Mims.