Ignite!

Ignite! Learning is an educational software and hardware company founded in 1999 by Texas Republican businessman Neil Bush. Neil is a brother of President George W. Bush, son of former President George Herbert Walker Bush, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Ignite! Learning uses multiple intelligence methods to provide varying types of content to appeal to multiple learning styles.

Finances

To fund Ignite!, Neil Bush and others raised $23 million from U.S. investors, including his parents, Barbara Bush and George H.W. Bush, as well as businessmen from Taiwan, Japan, Kuwait, the British Virgin Islands and the United Arab Emirates, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As of 2006, at least $2 million had come from Taiwanese interests that had given Neil Bush a job consulting for a semiconductor manufacturer, and at $3 million came from Saudi interests.

In 2002, Ignite! entered into a partnership with a Mexican company, Grupo Carso Telecom to outsource many software and product development functions. Regarding the deal, Ignite! President (then CFO) Ken Leonard stated, "That's turned out to be great." Ignite! laid off 42% of its in-house workforce (21 individuals) in preparation for the partnership. Leonard said that outsourcing production will give it the resources to develop additional course software more quickly, and that the company wants to develop an entire middle school curriculum featuring the basics of language arts, math and science.

In December 2003, a Washington Post Style article said that Ignite! was paying Neil Bush a salary of $180,000 per year.

Sales

In March 2006, Leonard said that in the past six to eight months, the company had hired national sales representatives across the country — in Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada — in order to significantly expand beyond Texas. He also said that about 80 percent of the company's customers were from Texas as of that date.

One of the company's products, Curriculum on Wheels (COW), a purple multimedia machine on wheels that offers interactive video presentations on a variety of topics in social studies and science, was first produced in 2005. As of August 2006, 1,500 had been sold. A former director of instructional technology at HISD said that the COWs cost HISD about $4,000 each and required an annual maintenance contract of $1,000 each; he advocated that HISD money be spent otherwise.

Effectiveness of learning programs

Salon magazine reported that Ignite!'s product is not well-known in the education industry field, but it does get some respectful reviews. "They're new entrants in the market," says Keith Kruger of the Consortium for School Networking, "but from what I know, it's a serious product based on some good research."

One reported success for the company is Mendez Middle School in Austin, Texas, a predominantly poor and Hispanic school. After three years of using the company's Early American History program, the principal of the school said in 2003 that the percentage who passed the Texas eighth-grade history increased from 50 to 87 percent.

In August 2006, the Houston Chronicle editorial board (composed of 10 journalists) expressed reservations over Ignite's pedagogic approach: "Ignite Learning is an Austin-based venture that markets learning programs tailored for children with short attention spans. Its reliance on jingles, cartoons and other snippets seems more likely to reinforce that limitation than to nourish intellect and learning." A teacher who used Ignite's courseware for half a year in 2005 responded: "Perhaps the Chronicle's editorialist could have spent some time in a classroom using Ignite!'s product to watch how it operates with students before making a judgment. The decision may still be that the cost is not worth the benefits, but I doubt he or she would remain as skeptical of its value as a teaching aid."

Alamo Junior High Principal Jeff Horner said he first saw COWs at a Texas Association of School Boards convention in Austin, and they have been using them in their schools. "We're enthused with them so far. It's a very unique way to get curriculum across in an interactive way," Horner said.

Promotional actions by Bush family

In 2002, then company president Neil Bush received a mixed response when he spoke of education while at Whitney High School (a school for gifted students in Cerritos, California). Among the points of his speech, he opined: "We create these prisonlike environments, then we take our hunter-warrior types and label them attention-deficit disordered and put them on drugs." (Bush has often advocated for less use of ritalin and other mind-altering drugs on children.) He added that: "Ignite! is designed to make learning fun for "hunter-warrior" kids who don't like reading."

In February 2004, the Houston school board agreed to accept $115,000 in charitable donations from businesses and individuals who specified the money be spent on Ignite's learning programs. The money came from the HISD Foundation, a philanthropic group that helps support the district. Neil Bush and Ignite! company officials helped solicit the donations for the foundation.

In early 2006, Ignite Learning announced that Barbara Bush had donated funds to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund (a charity established by former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton), with instructions that the money be used to purchase "COWs" ("Curriculum on Wheels") from Ignite! for several economically disadvantaged schools.

In March 2006, Barbara Bush visited Fleming Middle School in Houston. A Houston Chronicle editorial claims the visit violated school district policy when she used it to promote the Ignite! program. A letter from Neil Bush, in response to the editorial, said that "the Chronicle crossed the line by attacking my mother." Tom Deliganis, the vice president of school sales and results for Ignite, said "We regularly see the claim — stated and implied — that we somehow use political connections to help generate business. This is an absurd allegation that directly insults the integrity and professionalism of our clients. In fact, a majority of educators — from superintendents to teachers' aides — are fairly liberal. To the extent that many of our clients are even aware of our Bush family connection, it often works against us. Yet they buy. Why? Because they are professional educators who — like Neil, and like all of us at Ignite! — care deeply about optimizing each child's learning experience."

In August 2006, Neil Bush visited Alamo Junior High School, the 1,000th customer of Ignite! Learning.

External links

• Company website