Gray was born in the town of
Coatsburg, Illinois, on June 5, 1885. He graduated from high school in 1904 and began teaching in a
one-room school house in
Adams County, Illinois. After four years of teaching and being a principal he went to
Illinois State Normal University for a two-year teacher training course. His studies were influenced by the North American
Herbartian movement that emphasized starting with what the child knows and proceeding with an inductive instructional approach. Gray proceeded to advance his education at the
University of Chicago where he earned a
baccalaureate in 1913. He then spent a year (1913–1914) at Teachers College of Columbia University, the only other teachers' college in the country besides Chicago. There, he came under the influence of
Edward Thorndike and
Charles Judd, both of whom had been influenced by pragmatists
William James and
John Dewey. Thorndike and Judd were also among the first to apply the new statistical methods of
applied psychology to education, considered the most significant development in the whole history of
education in the United States, and would later move their work to Chicago. At Columbia, Gray "turned toward objective measurement, mathematical precision, a critical attitude, efficiency in schools, diagnosis based on results, and the use of research results which supported the economy of silent reading, and the importance of a sequential program of reading instruction ... the very basis of reading instruction in this country for almost the next half century." At the end of his year in Columbia, he earned a Master of Arts degree and a Teachers College diploma, "Instructor in Education in Normal School." Gray returned to the University of Chicago to earn a Ph.D. in 1916 for one of the first three doctoral dissertations on reading. His was titled "Studies of Elementary School Reading Through Standardized Tests." Gray's academic career at the University of Chicago lasted from 1916–1945. He served as Director of Research in Reading at the Graduate School of Education, at the University of Chicago and became the first president of the
International Reading Association.
Jeanne Chall called him "the acknowledged leader of, and spokesman for, reading experts for four decades." During his lifetime, he was known as one of the most influential persons and researchers in the field. His contemporaries included
Arthur Irving Gates (1890–1972); Ernest Horn (1882–1967); and
Ruth Strang (1896–1971). In 1929, Gray began his affiliation with the publisher
Scott Foresman. He co-authored with William H. Elson the
Elson Basic Readers (renamed the
Elson-Gray Basic Readers in 1936) and served as director of the Curriculum Foundation Series at Scott Foresman. Gray also worked with
Zerna Sharp, a reading consultant and textbook editor for Scott Foresman, on reading texts for elementary school children. Sharp developed the characters of "Dick," "Jane," and "Sally" (and their pets, "Spot" and "Puff") and edited the series of books that became known as the
Dick and Jane readers. Gray authored and
Eleanor B. Campbell did most of the illustrations for the early readers. The characters of "Dick" and "Jane" made their debut in the Elson-Gray readers in 1930, reached the height of their popularity in the 1950s, and continued to appear in subsequent primers until the series was retired in 1965. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, after teaching millions of Americans how to read, the Dick and Jane readers were replaced with other reading texts and gradually disappeared from use in schools. He was Reading Director of the Curriculum Foundation Series Scott, Foresman & Company. In 1935, Gray teamed up with Bernice Leary of St. Xavier College, Chicago, to publish their landmark work in
readability,
What Makes a Book Readable. It attempted to discover what makes a book readable for adults of limited reading ability. ==The Adult Literacy Survey==