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He was born on December 22, 1836 at Castile, New York, United States. He was son of Joseph and Mary (Dean) Powell and brother of John Wesley Powell. The father, of English descent, was a farmer and Methodist circuit preacher, and during his frequent absences from home, William did much of the farm work and assumed family responsibilities.
He attended the public schools of Illinois. He also studied in the preparatory department of Oberlin and at Wheaton (Illinois) College.
In 1860 he became principal of the Hennepin, Illinois, schools and in 1862, superintendent of schools at Peru, Illinois. He was active in state and national education associations and in 1874 was nominated as superintendent of public instruction in Illinois, but failed of election because of the defeat of his party. His career in Washington was a stormy one. From 1870 to 1885 Powell was in charge of the schools in Aurora, Illinois, and then for the next fifteen years he was superintendent in Washington, retiring from this position in 1900, as the result of a Congressional investigation which severely criticized his educational methods.
According to an Illinois colleague, the District of Columbia schools, when Powell took charge of them, were twenty-five years behind the times and given over to mechanical routine. Powell reformed the teaching body by employing trained supervisors and requiring better education and training for teachers, enlarged the scope of the city normal school, and modernized both school buildings and teaching methods. On the other hand, an editorial in a Washington newspaper at the time of Powell's retirement said: "The school system of late in vogue in the District has been convicted of insufficiency in the public mind. It has been shown to lack harmony, to be devoid of the essentials of education, to run to extremes, to produce bad results. The lack of examinations and text-books is but an index of the course of the whole process. Fads have replaced fundamentals, a theory has supplanted the experience of generations of educators".
Though an organizer rather than a writer, he produced several textbooks embodying his pedagogic ideas. Among them were How to Teach Reading (1889), with Emma J. Todd; A Rational Grammar of the English Language (1899), with Louise Connolly.
In 1901, as representative of D. Appleton & Company he visited the Philippines to study educational and textbook needs there. His health was impaired by this trip and two years later he died suddenly at his home in Mount Vernon, New York, while reading his morning paper.
At Aurora, Illinois, William Bramwell Powell founded a training school for teachers and adopted the practice of placing promising high-school graduates as assistants in the various grades. The business high school, the first in the country, was the result of his initiative. Powell was doubtless a man in advance of his time, who sought to release the school system from traditional bonds. Besies, he co-founded the National Geographic Society. He also wrote several textbooks on writing, history and reading: Normal Course in Reading, How to Talk; or Primary Lessons in the English Language, How to Teach Reading and others. Powell Elementary School in Washington, DC is named in his honor.
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Powell was a man of vigorous personality and pronounced educational views. He lacked tact, antagonized conservatives.
In May 1865 he married Minnie Paul. Their daughter, Maud Powell, became a distinguished violinist.
