[4] His father emigrated from Jamaica and began to practice medicine when he married Gordon's mother, an elementary school teacher.
[5] Gordon's scholarship has focused on the development of students who were African-American, ethnic minorities, and of low socioeconomic status who triumphed over significant odds to become better achievers.
[10] Edmund Gordon was working at Stanford University with colleagues that were involved in John F. Kennedy's beginnings of social change.
Gordon has stated that while he believes Head Start has been a success from a government standpoint, the program could have been much more than it is today.
[12] From July 2000 until August 2001 he was Vice President of Academic Affairs and Interim Dean at Teachers College, Columbia University.
He is the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Yale University, the Richard March Hoe Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and founding director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education[13] and the Institute for Research on African Diaspora in the Americas and Caribbean (IRADAC)[14] at the City College of New York.
[21] On December 15, 2014, The Board of Regents of the University of Texas System approved the honorific naming of the newly renovated and expanded Geography Building as the Susan G. and Edmund W. Gordon & Charles W. and Frances B.
[23] In 2019, Gordon hosted the Human Variance and Assessment for Learning: Implications for Diverse Learners of STEM national conference at Teachers College, Columbia University, convening scholars, policymakers, school principals, and students together to discuss selected models of measurement for the implementation of new ways of generating and utilizing data from assessments.
[24] Archives have been established to catalogue Gordon's publishing and community engagement at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture[25] in 1990 and at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018.
[26] In April 2021 Gordon was named Honorary President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the first person to receive this recognition in the organization's history.