William S. Gray (1885–1960) was an American educator and literacy advocate.
Life and career
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. Today, the "Dick," "Jane," and "Sally" characters have become icons of mid-century American culture for many from the baby boom generation and the books have become collectors items.
Gray's study of worldwide literacy for UNESCO took four years of research and resulted in the book, The teaching of reading and writing: An international survey. Gray was the leading expert on reading in the first half of the 20th century. He promoted the whole word method of teaching reading supported by attention to context, configuration, structural and graphophonemic cues. Educators like Helen Huus found Gray's method comprehensive, because first children memorized a few words by sight, then developed the sight-word correspondence by using these known words as reference points.
Gray was also author of over 500 studies, reviews, articles, and books on reading and instruction, including On Their Own in Reading: How to Give Children Independence in Analyzing New Words. He was Reading Director of the Curriculum Foundation Series Scott, Foresman & Company.