Reed Hastings, billionaire founder of Netflix, hates public schools. He wants to eliminate school boards and replace them with corporate management. He has spent more than $100 million promoting charter schools.
“Hastings’ lavish spending has raised concerns among critics who worry that the sort of technologies and efficiencies he used to build his Silicon Valley empire and is now applying to education might not work for the nation’s schoolchildren.
These concerns were raised in 2014, when Hastings, at a California Charter Schools Association meeting, asserted that public schools are hobbled by having elected schoolboards.
“Let’s think large-scale,” says Brett Bymaster, a Silicon Valley electrical engineer who broke the story about Hastings’ school board comments on his blog about Rocketship, a charter school chain supported by Hastings. “You have someone who is contributing millions and millions of dollars to local and statewide political races and who was the former president of the state school board — whose stated goal is to end democracy in education. That is deeply disturbing.”
When Hastings served as chair of the California State Board of Education, he opposed bilingual education, leading Democratic legislators to block his reappointment. While on The State Board, he led the charge to remove any limits on the number of charters in the state and to limit regulation or accountability.
“The fact that California Charter Academy, one of the country’s largest charter school operators, collapsed and left 6,000 California students without a school during his board tenure, did little to sway Hastings’ enthusiasm for publicly financed yet privately run schools. Along with helping to fund the Rocketship and Aspire charter programs, he’s served on the boards of the California Charter Schools Association and the KIPP Foundation, the largest network of charter schools in the country. And much of Hastings’ school reform efforts have focused on technological solutions. He helped launch NewSchools Venture Fund, which has invested $250 million in education entrepreneurs and “ed tech” products. He’s also been a major backer of DreamBox Learning, which develops the math software used in Rocketship schools, and the Khan Academy, an online teaching video clearinghouse.
“But so far, the outcomes of many of these ed tech ventures have been mixed. Khan Academy has been criticized for including fundamental math errors in some of its instructional videos. And while DreamBox once championed a Harvard University study that found that use of its math software was associated with test achievement gains in grades three through five, the study itself noted it could not be ruled out that the gains were “due to student motivation or teacher effectiveness, rather than to the availability of the software.” What’s more, the user data collected by programs developed at Khan Academy, DreamBox and other companies are fueling concerns over student privacy.
“More broadly, education experts are worried about the impact of minimally staffed, call center-like computer learning labs on the nation’s students and teachers, especially as this approach becomes more commonplace in the name of cost savings and innovation. (In a 2012 Washington Post article, former Rocketship CEO John Danner noted that “Rocketeers” could eventually spend 50 percent of their school day in front of computers.)”…
“When Netflix became the first major U.S. company to offer unlimited paid family leave for both male and female employees, it was criticized for extending the policy only to its white-collar employees, not blue-collar workers in charge of customer service and DVDs. And while Microsoft has required that many of its contractors and vendors provide their workers with sick days and vacation time and Google has demanded that its shuttle bus contractors pay better wages, so far Netflix has ignored calls for improved working conditions for its contract workers, says Derecka Mehrens, co-founder of Silicon Valley Rising, a campaign to raise pay and create affordable housing for low-wage workers in the tech industry.
“Mehrens sees a similar class bias in Hastings’ approach to public education. “We see profound consequences, both political and economic, when technology industry leaders take action from a position of privilege and isolation from the very communities they desire to help,” she says. “When tech industry leaders like Reed Hastings call for an elimination of school boards or for more privatization of public schools, they block low-income people from using the one instrument that the powerful can’t ignore – their vote.”
“Hastings’ end goal for California appears to be the near-total replacement of traditional public schools with charter schools. In his 2014 speech where he discussed abolishing elected school boards, Hastings pointed to New Orleans – whose school system was largely taken over by the State of Louisiana after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and converted to the country’s first predominantly charter public school system – as a model:
“So what we have to do is to work with school districts to grow steadily, and the work ahead is really hard because we’re at eight percent of students [in charters] in California, whereas in New Orleans they’re at 90 percent, so we have a lot of catchup to do… So what we have to do is continue to grow and grow… It’s going to take 20-30 years to get to 90 percent of charter kids.”
For his contempt for public schools and his determination to remove democratic governance of education, I hereby place Reed Hastings on this blog’s Wall of Shame.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
If all this money that billionaires are throwing at killing public schools was spent to improve them, then there would be no need for improvement.
Well, yes, except that I don’t want billionaires to spend their money to “improve” schools either. I want them to pay their damn taxes and then that money should be spent to improve public schools. I also want them to pay their employees fairly so that we don’t have impoverished kids in schools to begin with.
Excellent points. Educators who are inticed into this take-down of public education are part of the problem.
TWO essential points.
It is impossible to tell the difference between ed reformers promoting ed tech and the ed tech industry promoting ed tech. There’s so much overlap between the funding for the two groups and so little transparency that there is no line between the two entities at all – it’s not a “private-public partnership”- it’s a complete melding of industry interests and ed reformers, marching along lockstep, holding hands. They all have the same employers.
My hope is public schools adopt some real skepticism about these claims and stop accepting sales and marketing in place of real information.
I am hugely unimpressed with the “personalized learning” I’ve seen in our schools and I’m not the only one- our public school just ended an expensive experiment with “online learning” for foreign language instruction because it was a disaster.
There’s a cost to these experiments. Ed reformers are just dead wrong when they claim experimenting is “free”. There is always downside risk- always. In our school’s case it was a bunch of money and two years wasted. Nothing is free.
If you’re taking the Facebook/Summit program and testing it in your school that test is not “free”. Your teachers and students are paying for it with time and effort.
Right on, Chiara.
Hastings never attended a public school in his life. With no real actual experience on his side, he, like so many wealthy entrepreneurs, has decided that public schools are unworthy. Like so many other billionaires he only hears the voices of other entitled billionaires castigating that which they do not understand. While he took a couple of educations at Stanford, he is hardly an expert. While he has tried to insert himself into education in California, he has been rebuffed. He is looking at education through the eyes of an entrepreneur that has little to no understanding of the purpose or history of public education. He is interested in a new market so he has no problem blowing up the baby with the bath water in the name of “innovation.” He is an entrepreneurial carpetbagger.
Here’s the best quote from the article, “But ultimately the problems in our schools are people problems. Technology doesn’t solve people problems. People solve people problems.” In fact, the infusion of too much technology may create new health and well being problems that are not yet understood.
People who attend ONLY private schools have NO CLUE about the POWER of attending a PUBLIC SCHOOL. These people live in a BUBBLE and their ideas are from someone who has LIVED in a BUBBLE. Why do people listen to them. I don’t. Their opinions, and that is ALL they are … OPINIONS … are THWARTED.
When ed reformers created these systems they COULD have made them more democratic. It’s not a choice between an elected school board exactly like public schools have and an appointed board like private corporations have- there’s a lot between those two poles. They chose the LEAST democratic governance model out there, and they did it deliberately. For example- we have a municipal water system here and it’s appointed, but they’re appointed by the county commissioners and there are rules to make it representative of the community.
I think that says a lot about their mind set and (not coincidentally) who funds them. They had a choice- they were designing a “government”- and they chose the least democratic model out there.
“We see profound consequences, both political and economic”…
When attention is drawn AWAY, from the failures and falsehoods, predicated
on TEST SCORES.
Is Hastings a shill for the testing complex?
Painting the “problem” as:
(public schools are hobbled by having elected schoolboards) ignores
the reality, ELECTED schoolboards don’t hobble the testing complex.
“former president of the state school board —
whose stated goal is to end democracy in education”
As if obedience, to the testing complex, WAS “democracy in education”.
Again,
Unless contradictions are brought to a head, we will remain the same.
Posted at Oped https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Reed-Hastings-Destroyer-o-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Corporate_Diane-Ravitch_Education_Limits-181108-517.html#comment716361
With comment that has LINKS TODiane’s blog posts HERE.
COMMENT: DO YOU KNOW that ending PUBLIC EDUCATION is the goal around the nation. Read about The Deluge of Cash Flowing Into the Charter School Industry
The National Education Policy Center recently issued a bulletin about the negative results of virtual charter schools. To see all the links embedded, open the NEPC report. Betsy DeVos wants more of these fraudulent “schools” to open.
Read and learn How Charter School Chains Make a Profit
In this post,journalist Stephen Rosenfeld explains how charter operates make a profit. He has only scratched the surface. Some make profits through clever real estate deals, where they buy or lease a space, renovate it at public expense, then charge the state exorbitant rental fees. Some embezzle. Some use their school credit card like an ATM. Some set up “related companies” and divert funds to those companies, which they happen to own. Some hire contractors and get kickbacks. There is no end to ingenuity when no one is watching.
In this post, journalist Stephen Rosenfeld explains how charter operates make a profit. He has only scratched the surface. Some make profits through clever real estate deals, where they buy or lease a space, renovate it at public expense, then charge the state exorbitant rental fees. Some embezzle. Some use their school credit card like an ATM. Some set up “related companies” and divert funds to those companies, which they happen to own. Some hire contractors and get kickbacks. There is no end to ingenuity when no one is watching.
*This article by Tom Ultican tells the sordid storyof rich elites who have cynically decided to destroy public education in San Antonio, Texas..
Gary Rubinstein reports that the latest Tennessee school rankings were just released. Now we know. The Tennessee Achievement School District was as complete and total failure. $100 million down the drain, which came from Race to the Top funding. AND one of billionaire Reed Hastings’ investments– The Aspire charter chain in Memphis– is in trouble and debating its future.
New York City’s Chancellor Richard Carranza held a town hall meeting in Harlem and must have been surprised when the biggest concern expressed was the proliferation of charters.
Just when you think you have heard everything that can go in the charter industry, along comes a story about the Detroit Community Schools, a charter that is in chaos.
And look at Arizona where the online high school is a failure but the CEO is getting a bonus of $8.8 million. Taxpayers don’t seem to care how their money is spent … read this story about Primavera Charter School.
*Here are just a few of the conclusions of this important report about the toxic growth of charters in Florida which urges serious review of the charter law. Otherwise the charter industry will continue to strip resources from public schools and create a parallel system that is wasteful, inefficient, and corrupt.Here is a newspaper article about this report that summarizes it and includes responses from critics.
*Given the abundant evidence of charter failure in Michigan, they have a lot to defend, but their chief debating point is: Well, what would you do?Here is his answer.
* Charter Schools in Minnesota after 25 Years, a Costly Failure
I wonder if when the 2nd Civil War explodes (when, not if), if France will take their guillotines out of storage and loan them to the US patriots fighting Trump’s loyalists and use them on the Alt-Right billionaires like Hastings who are funding Trump’s loyalists.
Let’s hope the guilotine stays put. Of the 40,000 French who fell to the “national razor”, most were poor. At its height, people were going to the scaffold when someone told on them and the committee of Public Safety needed a spectacle. One does however, long for the stocks.
Great article.
Are rocketeers like mousecateers ?
I need to rethink my Netflix subscription. Any thoughts?
Well…after the ending to House of Cards…you really might have to consider…
I’m the wrong person to ask about Netflix. There is another adult in my household who subscribes.
I used the Netflix DVD delivery service from 2005 to 2012, then dropped it. I’d planned, eventually, to return to it, until I got a whiff of Reed Hasting’s corporatist stench. Now I boycott (which is not to say, I’m mildly loathe to admit, that when housesitting for friends last summer I didn’t watch “Wormwood”).
Reed Hastings is in a YouTube video calling for an end to democratically elected school boards. The last time I looked he was on Facebook’s Board with Marc Andreessen, who pronounced India was better off under colonialism (a demagogue spouting an economic lie). The board also had Peter Thiel who thinks women voting is an oxymoron when linked with capitalistic democracy.