Reading Recovery: Scaling Up What Works

Reading Recovery is a research-based short-term literacy intervention of individualized instruction for the lowest-achieving first graders. Through its established network of university training centers, Reading Recovery will be scaled up to target persistently low-performing schools, many of which serve high proportions of ELL students and/or students who live in rural areas. Scaling Up What Works has 15 partner institutions of higher education (IHE) participating in the project to facilitate implementation of Reading Recovery in 1,500 schools across 40 states. The overarching goal of the project is to increase the reading achievement levels of students in persistently low-performing schools.  The five key project objectives are to:

• Train 15 new teacher leaders in Year 1 to serve underrepresented areas of the U.S. with a high population of schools meeting the criteria for Absolute Priority 4.

• Train 750 new Reading Recovery teachers each year for a total of 3,750 teachers at the end of five years.

• Work with more than 90,000 Reading Recovery students and over 400,000 students in classrooms or Title I small group instruction.

• Conduct a rigorous independent project evaluation including both experimental and qualitative methodologies.

• Provide high-quality oversight for the project, orchestrating activities across all the official partners.

Official Partners: There are 16 official partner institutes of higher education (IHEs) participating in the project: The Ohio State University, Clemson University, Georgia State University, Lesley University, National Louis University, New York University, Oakland University, Saint Mary’s College, Texas Women’s University, University of Arkansas–Little Rock, University of Connecticut, University of Kentucky, University of Maine, University of Northern Iowa, the University of South Dakota, and The University of Pennsylvania (the project’s external evaluator).

Sponsor Agency: The U.S. Department of Education

Principal Investigator (Evaluation): Henry May (University of Pennsylvania)