Marva Collins was a teacher who believed in the potential of every child. When she felt the traditional school system did not, she forged her own path, launching a private school for low-income black children in inner-city Chicago.

She was a pioneer of school choice in the era before school choice programs, and a proponent of what might now be called a "no excuses" philosophy.

“Kids don’t fail,” she once said, according to her New York Times obituary, which ran this morning after she died last week, at 78. “Teachers fail, school systems fail. The people who teach children that they are failures — they are the problem.”

The obituary notes that detractors seized on the fact that she did not hold a conventional teaching certificate. They also questioned whether her tiny school was getting results that lived up to the bevy of media attention it revived.   (more…)