Neil Bush debuts ignite learning. (News connection: up-to-date and usable education information froms schools, government, business, research and professional organizations).

For Neil Bush, it's easy to find the turning point in his life that led him to create Ignite Learning almost three years ago. He doesn't have to look any further than his family picture.

The decision started when his son, Pierce, moved to middle school. Bush, at 46 the younger brother of President George W. Bush, says his son--a typical bright, energetic youth--suddenly encountered low grades and was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.

For him, the experience was a bit of deja vu. When he hit middle school, his grades dipped and his mother, Barbara, was informed that he wasn't likely to graduate from high school.

Eventually, he was diagnosed as dyslexic (and did more than graduate from high school, he adds). This experience caused his mother to learn about and become an advocate for literacy.

Instead of putting son Pierce on Ritalin as was suggested, he and his wife, Sharon, sent him to the Howard School in Atlanta for an exhaustive test. This confirmed what both parents suspected, that Pierce was gifted in many ways, but did not learn best in a traditional classroom setting.

"It was important for us to recognize that our child wasn't in fact disabled, but rather was very gifted in certain particular ways," he says. "Secondarily, [it] was important to be able to describe these strengths to teachers with practical remedial type activities proposed in this write-up that they could use in their classroom."

The officials at Howard suggested Bush read some books on education and before he knew it, he was exhausting the category on Amazon.com. "The reading I did and the understanding I established have become core beliefs in my life, but also in the foundation of Ignite," he says.

The 70-person Austin, Texas-based company can assess how individual students learn and using broadband, it can deliver curriculum to fit that student's strengths and progress. The company has 14 schools in 12 participating school districts to test its middle school Early American History course. The privately held company expects to start selling two middle school courses in 2002, with more courses to follow.

Because of its broadband delivery, Ignite's lessons include video, text, animation and music. "Not only are we presenting the objects through different kinds of media which touch different learning buttons, but we're also presenting the material in a project format," Bush says. The lessons are designed to take the place of a textbook in class, not to replace the teacher, he adds.

"We want our system to bring out the gift that we know all kids have for learning, but to be successfully implemented, it has to meet the teachers' needs," Bush says. The company plans to test its product with 25 teachers and about 800 students before offering it for sale.

While Ignite hits some of the hot-button issues in education today, such as individualized instruction and the power of high-speed Internet access, its broadband delivery will not allow most students to access the courses at home. "It's going to take time for enough homes to have broadband access to be able to ensure that we cross the digital divide and provide this kind of rich media content to every kid at every home," Bush says.

Saying that Ignite is built "for today's world," Bush says the system should be a big help for students facing more standardized tests.

But when asked what he thought about the president's push for more standardized tests, Neil Bush says, "I'm not political, but I've studied what Secretary [of Education Rod] Paige has said.... I do challenge whether the system of assessment is a correct one today. I think we need to broaden it to include measuring attributes we want our kids to have when they get into the real world."