About Gerber Analytics

This site is about improving performance using positive recognition. I focus my efforts on two areas: secondary education and high school tennis. My goal is to to see if I can get students (and parents and communities) to increase their efforts and/or participation in these areas by providing information that recognizes high performance and strong improvement.

Receiving Media Award from GCTA Receiving the Greater Columbus Tennis Association (GCTA) Media Award - September 2011

I am a strong believer that if you measure performance and provide people with clear, insightful information on how they perform and how they can improve, then you can positively alter their behavior. It is also not just about providing information, but relative performance information. People may not care how a high school two hundred miles away performed, but it is very motivating to know the performance of a high school rival located across town.

In today's society of political correctness, we make it very easy to compare sports teams but not educational endeavors. Think about this for a second -- when is the last time you have heard someone say that America's high school basketball and football skills are on the decline? You don't. Those achievements are constantly trumpeted and this motivates athletes to do even better. This site is about trumpeting the academic achievements.

Obviously, all students have different strengths and weaknesses but all can be proficient if they are willing (or persuaded) to devote the time and effort.

Why do I do this? I am a phenomenally curious person and I love reading books that deal with the social sciences (i.e. Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and David and Goliath and Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational). Education and tennis are my social experiments, and since I track online activity you are part of it (thanks for playing along). Since I was fortunate to retire rather early (after working at CompuServe/AOL and Bank One in a variety of areas), this is how I can keep learning and hopefully contributing.

While my main interest is to report results, I also wanted to create tools to help students improve their performance. The Khan Academy project is an effort to assist students in the Mathematics subject test. With the help of students from St. Charles, Olentangy Liberty, and Columbus School for Girls, Khan Academy videos were matched with each math question on the subject test. It does not matter how old (or young) you are - if you have not taken this test - you should. Click on this link to go to this project.

How lucrative has this web site project been for me? If you know anything about web publishing, then you know that I would make far more money delivering newspapers than creating news. While at some point, I would like to make money from the tennis side of the web site, the educational portion is more about benefiting others. The good news is that you can be pleased that I am saving you (the taxpayer) hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing the education experiment myself rather than having a government entity spend the money to create it.

What is my educational background? I have never been in the education business but our family is a huge consumer of education. I graduated from the Ohio State University with a finance / accounting degree and an MBA. I am an alumnus of Miami Trace High School, which is a rural high school located near Washington C.H.

Am I really good at tennis? No. I actually prefer playing platform tennis which is an outdoor winter sport. Cold temperatures and gray Ohio skies make me very happy. Click to view the new Gerber Analytics' PlatformTennisZone.com web site that was launched in November 2012.

I am a Columbus resident. When I am not crunching numbers and working on this web site, I am tracking our investments, working on maintenance projects on the family farms (outside of Findlay and Washington C.H.), playing platform tennis, or dodging household tasks.

Contact me via a Feedback if you have any questions. My Linkedin Profile is here.

D. Scott Gerber
Gerber Analytics, LLC