Brandt earned her B.A. from Rutgers University in 1974 and her Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington in 1983, after which she worked for the University of Wisconsin-Madison until she retired in 2010 [REF].
Brandt was awarded two fellowships, one with the American Council of Learned Societies in 1986 and another with the National Research Council in 1998, for which she was a Visiting Scholar at the United States Department of Education [REF].