Gerald Bracey

Gerald Watkins Bracey (August 12, 1940 – October 20, 2009) was an American education policy researcher.

He is best known for the annual "Bracey Report" in which he analyzed current trends in education, often in opposition to prevailing educational policies of the day.

The reports were published over a seventeen-year period.

Gerald Watkins Bracey was born on August 12, 1940.

He grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia with his parents, Bettye and Gerald Bracey.

Gerald Bracey was amazed at his own children’s high school experience when compared with his own education in the late 1940s and 1950s.

He was amazed that his daughter, during her junior year at a high school in Colorado, was already studying calculus and the writer Ibsen, two topics to which he himself had not been exposed to until college.

He also remarked that the complicated science fair experiments that he observed were “[l]ight years removed from the simple machines, simple equations, and phyla to be memorized in [his] high school days.”

Bracey attended the College of William and Mary and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology in 1962.

Bracey lived in Hong Kong for a year between 1965 and 1966 and traveled around Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe before returning to the United States to finish his doctorate degree.

While Gerald Bracey is most well known for his work as a critic of educational policies, that distinction came later in his life.

He went on to pursue his Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford University, which he eventually received in 1967.

After receiving his PhD in Psychology from Stanford in 1967, he first worked as a research psychologist at the Early Childhood Research group for the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey.

He was there for three years before moving on to Indiana University in 1970, working as both an assistant professor at the School of Education and Associate Director at the Institute for Child Study until 1973.

He worked at Indiana University for another three years, and then decided to travel the world from 1973 to 1977, earning his living from 1974 to 1975 by working as an adjunct of the European Division of University of Maryland’s Psychology department.

He supplemented his income by working as a freelance writer, reviewing various restaurants during the four years he was abroad.

In 1977, he returned to the United States and became the Director of Research, Evaluation and Testing at the Virginia Department of Education in Richmond, VA. During his tenure at the Virginia Department of Education he began writing a column titled “Research” for the Phi Delta Kappan in 1984; he continued writing for the Phi Delta Kappan until his death in 2009.

In 1986 he began working for the Cherry Creek Schools in Engelwood, Colorado as their Director of Research and Evaluation.

He left this position in 1991, the same year in which he wrote what later became known as the First Bracey Report.

The first Bracey Report began as an article in the Phi Delta Kappan called “Why Can't They Be Like We Were?”

The article was noticed by The New York Times, Washington Post, Education Week, USA Today, and the Bush administration.

The following year, Bracey wrote a sequel to the article.

Originally titled “The True Crisis in Public Education”, the editors changed the titled to “The Second Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education”, and requested that The Bracey Report become an annual event.

Bracey wrote the report every year thereafter.

In 1991, Bracey also founded the Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency (EDDRA) website, whose purpose was to use “the real-time power of the Net to debunk dis- and mis-information about public schools.” He became a regular blogger for the Huffington Post in 2006.

Research and Publications:

A lot of Bracey’s work during his later years was published by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado.

Among them were: Final Exam: A Study of the Perpetual Scrutiny of American Education (1995); Setting the Record Straight: Responses to Misconceptions About Public Education in America (1997); Bail Me Out!

“A booklet, “Understanding Education Statistics: It's Easier (And More Important) Than You Think” was published in early 1997 by Educational Research Service and a revised edition appeared in 2003.”

Policy briefs published by the NEPC include the following: Charter Schools (2000); Ultimate Education Reform?

Make Schools Smaller (Gregory A. Smith, Gerald W. Bracey, William Ayers, 2000); A Comparison of the Performance of the Milwaukee Public Schools and School Systems in Selected Other Cities (2000); High-Stakes Testing (2000); School Vouchers (Gerald W. Bracey, Michael W. Apple, 2001); School Reform Proposals: The Research Evidence (Alex Molnar, W. Steven Barnett, Jeremy D. Finn, Craig Howley, Gene V. Glass, Douglas Downey, Catherine A. Lugg, Barak Rosenshine, Robert M. Carini, Haggai Kupermintz, Ulrich C. Reitzug, Gerald W. Bracey, 2002); The Market in Theory Meets the Market in Practice: The Case of Edison Schools (2002); School Reform Proposals: The Research Evidence Executive Summaries (Alex Molnar, W. Steven Barnett, Jeremy D. Finn, Craig Howley, Gene V. Glass, Douglas Downey, Catherine A. Lugg, Barak Rosenshine, Robert M. Carini, Haggai Kupermintz, Ulrich C. Reitzug, Gerald W. Bracey, 2002); Recruiting, Preparing and Retaining High Quality Teachers: An Empirical Synthesis (Alex Molnar and Gerald W. Bracey, 2003); City-wide Systems of Charter Schools: Proceed With Caution (2004); Knowledge Universe and Virtual Schools: Educational Breakthrough or Digital Raid on the Public Treasury?

Handling Difficult Data and Tough Questions About Public Schools (2000); and Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered (2006).

Non-NEPC Publications include: A Lesson Plan for the Schools With Little Learning Behind It (2001); What They Did on Vacation: It's Not Schools That Are Failing Poor Kids (2002); Education's 'Groundhog Day' (2005); and Data Point to Failure (2005).

Bracey also had a number of books published in his later years.

(2004); No Child Left Behind: Where Does the Money Go?

The NEPC Legacy Publications include: The AFT Charter School Study: Not News (2004); Bill Gates, If You're So Rich, How Come You're Not Smart (2005).

(2005); Charter Schools' Performance and Accountability: A Disconnect (2005); and Separate But Superior?

A Review of Issues and Data Bearing on Single-Sex Education (2006).

The last report was unfinished, and his colleagues at the National Education Policy Center conducted the final revisions and published it in November 2009.

He was working on the 2009 version of the report, which comes out every October, when he died.