Clarence Truman Gray (1877-1951) might best be known as the “other Gray.” Clarence was born in Russel, Kansas in 1877, as the son of Bingham and Evangeline Gray. He was raised near Gosport, Indiana. 

Early in his career he served as the Superintendent of the Schools for Spencer, Indiana where he became interested the problems in reading as influenced by two primary teachers, Miss Jesse Mead and Miss Bertha Maegerlein.

Gray’s undergraduate degree in mathematics was from Indiana University (1905), and he went on to earn a Master’s (1911) and a Ph.D. (1916) from the University of Chicago. He was influenced by his course work with Professor W. F. Dearborn, and he received a General Education Board grant that allowed him to work with Dr. C. H. Judd, Director of the School of Education. 

After completing his dissertation (Types of Reading Ability as Exhibited through Tests and Laboratory Experiments), Gray joined the Educational Psychology faculty at the University of Texas, Austin. As part of his dissertation research, Gray invented an instrument to track eye movements during reading sessions, which he further developed at UT Austin in a reading laboratory provided by his department. Gray regularly partnered with the public schools of Austin, TX in testing out his ideas pertaining to diagnosis and remedy. From 1926 to 1948, Gray served as Department Chair and as acting College of Education Dean in 1947.

A prolific writer, Gray was the author of numerous publications on educational psychology, including articles appearing in the Journal of Educational Psychology, the Elementary School Journal, and Educational Outlook, and the first modern era book on remedial reading, Deficiencies in Reading Ability-Their Diagnosis and Remedies (1922) and earlier Types of Reading Ability (1917). Gray was author of the Workaday Readersand its intermediate grade teacher’s manuals (Heath, 1929). Along with David Votaw he was the co-author of Statistics Applied to Education and Psychology later in his career.