A Math Teacher Who Decided to Change How Brains Learn to Read
In June 2002, Bob Bowen walked into Scientific Learning Corporation's Oakland offices as its new Chairman and CEO. The company had been founded six years earlier by four neuroscientists who had published a stunning paper in Science journal in 1995 - demonstrating that children with language and reading difficulties could make rapid, measurable gains through specially designed computer-based exercises that exploited the brain's ability to rewire itself. The New York Times covered it. Phones rang off the hook. A company was born.
What the scientists needed was someone who knew how to sell an idea into schools. Bowen had spent 17 years at McGraw-Hill - including a stint as Executive Vice President overseeing seven education and training divisions with roughly $350 million in annual revenues. After McGraw-Hill, he'd joined National Computer Systems and built its K-12 enterprise software business from a standing start to 40 percent market share before Pearson Plc acquired NCS in 2000. He understood the rhythms of the education market: budget cycles, superintendent turnover, the slow consensus-building that precedes any district-wide technology purchase.
Scientific Learning needed that. What it had was a genuinely remarkable product - Fast ForWord, a software program that used brain plasticity research to build phonemic awareness, processing speed, and reading comprehension. What it lacked was a seasoned operator who understood how to move units through public school systems at scale.
Bowen's first decade at Scientific Learning was about building the proof base and establishing the company as a credible player in the reading intervention market. By 2012, he was ready to move the company's delivery model into the cloud. The MySciLEARN SaaS platform launched that year, eliminating the physical disk installations that had created friction for school IT departments. More than 50 percent of the company's existing customers migrated to the new platform within months of its debut - a migration rate that doesn't happen unless the product genuinely works better.
"With the introduction of the MySciLEARN platform, we are emphasizing our customers' success by adding improved accessibility and ease-of-use to the positive learning results for which we are known," Bowen said at the time. The platform allowed districts to start small - targeting the students with greatest need first - then expand as budgets permitted. That flexibility wasn't an accident. It was a deliberate design choice for a market where funding comes in waves and district priorities shift with every election cycle.