The US education system is in crisis. There is a huge gulf in achievement between a handful of top-performing suburban public school districts and those that serve lower-income urban families.

A survey published last month by the Third International Math and Science Study revealed that most US eighthgraders trail their counterparts in industrialised countries in science and mathematics (or math as it is called in the US).

Chicago public schools lag behind countries like Lithuania and Moldova in algebra and arithmetic. Performance in maths and science has fallen to such low levels across the country that US national security is threatened, according to a top-level education panel.

Test scores of the nation's weakest elementary schools show that reading has also declined sharply over the last eight years, despite a multibillion-dollar government programme to raise the performance of the lowest achievers, and fourth-grade reading skills overall have not budged since 1992.

"After spending $125 billion over 25 years, we have virtually nothing to show for it," said US Education Secretary Rod Paige, referring to the federal government's school programmes for poor children.

In this environment many education district leaders, who are accountable to electors and subject to political drives to standardise learning, are desperate to try new ideas to fix the problem. The need for radical measures has helped make Riverdeep, founded in Dublin, one of the big Irish corporate success stories in the US.

The company offers an innovative method of improving the performance of under-achieving children, by providing curriculum-based Internet and CD-ROM learning experiences for middle and high school students, which are correlated to US national and state curriculum standards. It has evolved into such a significant force in the education market that some analysts say its online curriculum content provider threatens established textbook publishers.

Riverdeep Interactive Learning and Rapid Technology Group was founded by former north Dublin primary school teacher Pat McDonagh. After a spell sellingencyclopaedias, he saw the potential of the Internet as a teaching tool and set up CBT Systems (now SmartForce), specialising in computer based training software. Riverdeep is a direct offshoot from Smartforce, and specifically targets the US school market, with its US headquarters in an office block in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Its products are already used in 5 per cent of the American school market, says Riverdeep's US president and chief operating officer, Gail Piersons. The company charges on a subscription basis and is aggressively pushing further into the US market with a team of 50 sales people who are concentrating on the top 100 urban districts with the goal of obtaining $100 million in contracts this year and $200 million in 2002.

Superintendents in US school districts want "to be able to offer solutions that enable teachers and students to learn a way of moving them to the grade levels," says Pierson.

"We made sure to develop the product so that it can run in a variety of locations in the school, which means that it can be used by a teacher in a classroom with a single work station or computer; in a lab environment and over the Internet."

Riverdeep first entered the US market with its Destination Math programme, designed and built in Ireland, which uses pupil interaction to teach mathematics. For example, the concept that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides is illustrated on screen by showing a coloured liquid poured from the bigger square to fill precisely the area of the other two squares. In another lesson, an alien exploring the world through mathematics prompts users to investigate and compare large numbers. When a wrong answer is given to a problem, the programme will take the student back as far as needed to understand the basic principles.

According to David Mulville, executive vice-president for corporate development, Riverdeep offers solutions to all students in all grade levels across most of the key subject areas.

"We are active in the `K to 12' market, from kindergarten all the way through graduation in high school," he says.

"The products offer the capability to improve student test scores much more radically than in a traditional learning environment. There are studies that say reading from a textbook gives you a retention level of 30-40 per cent, whereas using activities which provide you with the same quality or depth of curriculum, but introduce graphics, narration, audio, and inter-activities in particular, push those retention levels up to 70 or 80 per cent."

The Riverdeep brochure trumpets successes in the best traditions of "before and after" advertising. In one instance, the eighth grade pass rate for the standard maths test increased from 57 per cent to 69 per cent at John Marshall Middle School after it adopted the Riverdeep Destination Math programme. Seven out of 10 pupils at the Houston, Texas, school, come from impoverished backgrounds. In another, the Chipman Junior High School in Bakersfield, California, where the head of the mathematics department, Bob Fulenwider, complained of the "lowest achieving group of seventh graders we ever had", reached higher than state average scores in maths after buying into the same programme.

"The product has been built to address the under-achievement issue, but in fact it works at all mainstream levels and it also works at the high end, so that within the range of content, the students can move in and out, or a whole class of students can be at different points in the product, as opposed to the traditional classroom environment where you base it at the lowest common denominator in terms of the pace at which students learn," says Mulville.

"We have competitors at the product level, developing and selling maths or science programmes, and we have competitors at the technology end of the market, but we are the first people to put the two things together and offer them as an end-to-end solution," he says.

`WE have unquestionably the largest library in the industry now of digitised educational content available for use in classroom instruction. We have bought companies that have a great library of educational software which is created on CD ROM format and what we've been doing successfully over the course of the last year is transitioning those content libraries from their CD ROM base into web-deliverable products, using the same quality of education experience and pedagogy behind the product and plugging them into the electronic platform we have."

Riverdeep hopes to capitalise on the fact that some 70 per cent of classrooms already have at least one computer with Internet access. More than one million teachers are due to retire over the next 10 years, says Mulville, and the new generation of American teachers will be "younger, and more used to using technology as part of their daily lives".

Much depends on the level of funding given to the United States' 87,598 public schools by the Republican administration, a hot topic currently being debated in the US Congress.

Earlier this year, O'Callaghan enthused about an 18 per cent year-on-year increase in federal funding promised by George W Bush. Despite his tax-cutting plan, which will reduce public spending increases, the US President has proposed a Reading First initiative, embracing the research-based approach to reading instruction. This would cost $5 billion over five years. It is designed to teach early reading skills in the nation's Head Start Program and to train elementary school teachers in research-based instruction methods with the aim of ensuring that all pupils can read by third grade.

The new federal education plan could create multi-million-dollar opportunities for hi-tech educational companies such as Riverdeep with a "massive increase in budgets for technology in schools to achieve education reform targets," analyst Gregory Cappelli of Credit Suisse First Boston, said in February, when he identified Riverdeep as one of five educational-based companies which would benefit from the Bush plan.

Riverdeep has been timing its language programme for early 2002, which coincides with the introduction of the Bush initiatives, says Pierson, an American educator who joined Riverdeep in 1999. The company would meet the expectations of federal funding for areas where students come from an impoverished background and they are building into the product the capacity to give parents ideas or help students out as they move through the curriculum, she says.

"There are things we know now about what constitutes effective reading instruction that we can build into a product that has never been possible before because the research wasn't there," says Henry Olds, Riverdeep's senior software designer.

"We know better about what we can do with students who come from poor language backgrounds, we know how to use phonimic awareness as a way of building a strong basis of children's capacity to read and interpret words. We have one of the national experts on reading research working with us and we have also gone out and interviewed a lot of teachers and visited classrooms, so we have a sense of what is going to be acceptable to meet state standards for literacy.

"We can have children use the Rebus principle basically to get across the notion that a word stands for something, the word sounds this way and looks this way, all at the same time, and that's something books cannot do."