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Dame Marie Mildred Clay was a researcher from New Zealand known for her work in educational literacy. She was committed to the idea that children who struggle to learn to read and write can be helped with early intervention. A clinical psychologist, she developed the Reading Recovery intervention programme in New Zealand and expanded it worldwide.

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Ruth Johnson Colvin is the founder of the non-profit organization Literacy Volunteers of America, now called ProLiteracy Worldwide in Syracuse, New York, in 1962. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in December 2006. She turned 100 in December 2016.

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Caleb Gattegno (1911–1988) was one of the most influential and prolific mathematics educators of the twentieth century. He is best known for his innovative approaches to teaching and learning mathematics, foreign languages and reading. He is also the inventor of pedagogical materials for each of these approaches, and was the author of more than 120 books and hundreds of articles largely on the topics of education and human development.

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Kate Harrington, born Rebecca Harrington Smith and later known as Rebecca Smith Pollard, was an American teacher, writer and poet.

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Margaret Craig McNamara was the founder of the nonprofit children's literacy organization Reading is Fundamental and the wife of the United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

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Jon Scieszka is an American children's writer, best known for picture books created with the illustrator Lane Smith. He is also a nationally recognized reading advocate, and the founder of Guys Read – a web-based literacy program for boys whose mission is "to help boys become self-motivated, lifelong readers."

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James Joseph Trelease, is an American educator and author who stresses reading aloud to children as a way to instill in them the love of literature.