MARIE CLAY
1999 HUMANITARIAN AWARD
Reading Recovery
Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, United States & United Kingdom
In the 1970s, Marie Clay, Ph.D., started a research program to track the development of children’s literacy. From this research, she created Reading Recovery, an early intervention program designed to drastically reduce reading failure, increase children’s literacy rates, and decrease the cost. Reading Recovery trains teachers to provide intensive tutoring to 6-year-olds who have difficulty learning to read and write. The program has benefited more than 1 million children in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, England, Ireland and Bermuda. In the United States alone, Reading Recovery now involves more than 10,600 schools representing over 4,000 school districts and more than 500,000 children, having an enormous impact on children’s literacy rates today.