Practitioner. Professionally developed. Founder.

Colorado. Oman. Brazil. Twenty years, three continents, one problem the gradebook never solved.

Colorado · Ten Years · American Public School

Tom began his teaching career in Colorado's suburban public schools — the full American experience, mixed demographics, mixed readiness, the full range of what a classroom actually looks like. He taught Algebra through Pre-Calculus, coached students through state assessments, and learned the craft of instruction the way it has always been learned: in the room, under pressure, watching some kids thrive and others slip quietly through the cracks.

He was good at the job. Good enough to earn recognition, good enough to keep getting better. But one thing nagged him. Two students could turn in nearly identical assessments, receive nearly identical feedback, and walk out of his classroom going in completely different directions. He couldn't explain why with a number. The gradebook had no mechanism for why.

Oman · Five Years · American International School in Muscat

Then came the decision that changes a teacher permanently: international education. Tom moved to Muscat, Oman, joining an American international school serving the children of diplomats, engineers, and internationally mobile families from dozens of countries. The curriculum was familiar. The students were not.

International school students are a different diagnostic challenge. They are often academically strong on paper — selected, motivated, multilingual. And yet Tom watched high-performing students hit invisible walls, struggle in ways that standardized scoring never predicted, succeed brilliantly in domains their grades had written off. The diversity of background, language, and cognitive approach was extraordinary. And it made the limitations of composite scoring impossible to ignore. A grade didn't tell you what each student needed next. It told you they were all at 78%.

Oman is where Tom stopped trying to fix the gradebook and started asking whether it was the right instrument at all.

Brazil · Five Years · IB Diploma Programme at Graded

São Paulo brought the IB — the most rigorous international academic framework in the world, full of high-achieving students whose performance still defied what their scores predicted. And it brought the moment the gradebook finally broke.

A student Tom had assessed all year — solid scores, consistent attendance, no visible red flags — fell apart at the worst possible time. Not a dramatic collapse. A quiet one. The kind you only recognize in retrospect, when you go back through the data and ask: was this visible? The answer was no. Not in the grades. But when Tom ran the assessment data through a statistical lens, the early signal was there. A latent dimension. A loading pattern. Something the composite score had been averaging away for months.

That student is why Gradient exists.

The Company · 2025 · Illinois

Tom completed graduate coursework in Statistics and Probability at the Colorado School of Mines. He had the mathematical vocabulary to name what he'd been sensing for twenty years: that student assessment data contains latent cognitive structure invisible to traditional scoring, and that Principal Component Analysis could surface it. He built the first version of the diagnostic engine on his own class data, validated it against real student outcomes, and saw what he'd expected — and what he hadn't.

Gradient Analytics Edu is the product of twenty years in three countries, watching the same instrument fail the same kinds of students in the same quiet ways. It was built by a teacher, in a classroom, because no one else was going to build it.