Reed Hastings is the billionaire founder of Netflix. He is also one of the biggest funders of charters schools.
Peter Greene found the phrase that explains Hastings’ philosophy of education: “Stars in every position.”
Hastings has had his hand in many charter pies, from backing outfits like Rocketship and KIPP, as well as serving on the board of California Charter Academy, a chain that collapsed mid-year, leaving 6,000 students high and dry to helping shape charter law in California. Hastings has also had a hand in the launch NewSchools Venture Fund, an investment group that backs ed tech and other edupreneurs. So we’re not talking fringe player here.
So what do we discover in this quote?
First, the “pro sports team, not a kid’s recreation team” aspect. A pro sports teams picks and chooses its players. A public school does not. Nor can a public school “cut” students who don’t measure up.
“Stars in every position” is the same focus. In Hasting’s mind, that may apply only to the staff and administration of a school, but people who actually work in education know that part of what creates the atmosphere and culture of a school is, in fact, the students. Would a school that has nothing but star pupils be a great school? Probably. The job in public education is to educate everyone, but what we see repeatedly with the corporate charter movement is schools that “fire” students and their families.
This is educational gentrification. Gentrification says, “This neighborhood is problematic. But we’ll come in and replace the buildings with better buildings, the stores with better stores, the apartments with better apartments, and the residents with better residents.” Gentrification is about swapping out everything except the latitude and longitude of the neighborhood. In the end, you haven’t “improved” anything– you’ve replaced everything.
You don’t improve a school by replacing everything except the building (and maybe that as well)– you’ve just replaced it, and that’s no achievement.
I also wonder how far down the star system runs. Is everybody toiling away at minimum wage in the Netflix mail room a star? Or is Netflix just another tech firm like Amazon, built on the labor of anonymous overworked underpaid people who are beneath the notice of the big boys. And how could anyone possibly apply that approach to a school?
Greene notes that Netflix is about to be sorely tested as other big corporations enter its streaming space.
To my way of thinking, the starkest contradiction of Hastings’ worldview is implicit in one of its biggest worldwide hits, “Orange is the New Black,” a brutal, sexually explicit, 7-season show about women in prison. When the prison is privatized, the corporation takes over. The only thing that matters is the bottom line. The normally inhumane guards are replaced by even more vicious guards, the GED program is eliminated, the quality of the food deteriorates, and cost-cutting leads to an inmates’ death and a convict rebellion. Does Reed Hastings watch his own shows?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Does Reed Hastings watch his own shows?”
He probably doesn’t see anything wrong with what happened after the prison was privatized. Those women don’t deserve better – they’re criminals. Treating them better would just mean less profit for the deserving.
So-called “meritocracy” is the fabric of America – rugged individualism, bootstraps and all that.
There seems to be a disease associated with success that makes the successful person believe they have the answers to life’s great questions. I’m not sure it matters if great wealth accompanies that success. There are plenty of people that believe that if only people would use their way of doing things the world would be a better place. I suppose the danger is that there are too many people who only care if their world is better.
and the biggest danger is perhaps that the type of personality you describe is allowed through modern-day interest in tech/entertainment products to become overwhelmingly, unprecedentedly wealthy — and then use that wealth to force ideas and policy onto the larger society
Yup. The small players are annoying; the big boys are dangerous.
A friend of mine is conducting an online Pearson field test. The school hasn’t used Pearson in a long while. On the upload roster page, it requires personal data about the student including meal plan and special service. But their is also a field labeled “migrant”.
Isn’t this going a bit too far? Does anyone here have more info?
Like Trump and Miller, Pearson is evil incarnate. There is no aspect of global top-down educational authoritarianism/GERM that it does not have its hand in. In the past, kids who didn’t do so well in high school could take the GED and then enter a community college or post-secondary vocational education program and learn a trade. When Pearson took over the exam, it raised the price of the test and made it a lot harder, so that now, vast numbers of kids fail it again and again and thus have to postpone moving on with their lives and, of course, to pay Pearson the testing fees over and over and over because, you know, Common [sic] Core [sic] math skills are so important to being a cosmetologist. And then there are EDTPA and other Pearson teacher assessments, which exist to ensure that prospective teachers are evaluated according to their Deforminess (When I took the licensing test in Florida, I had to hold my nose and answer the questions as an Ed Deformer might–it was easy enough to decide, in each case, what the Ed Deformy correct answer would be). The new Pearson literature texts are a blasphemy against humane learning–random, idiotic, messy, disorganized, gaudy, scattered, riddled with errors, extraordinarily shallow, and very, very Common [sic] Core-y and Test Preppy. Of course, Pearson was a big player in the high-stakes testing market, and it has announced a “digital first” strategy–a company commitment to depersonalized education software because pixels are cheaper than print is. Pearson calls itself “The World’s Learning Company,” but I have a suggestion for a slightly different and more truthful corporate motto:
Pearson, Not Persons
Also–applied a long while back (& I can’t take credit for it–it probably came from someone commenting on Diane’s blog)–
“Pearson, Always Earning”
(Although I would change the S to a $.)
Hastings suffers from the same elitist malaise that permeates so-called reform. It is social Darwinism applied to education. The strong exploit the weak for their own gain. It is the same type of thinking that the 19th century robber barons exhibited. Social Darwinism allows them to exclude, berate and carve up urban neighborhoods so developers may profit. It allows them to fire black teachers and scapegoat teachers and schools. It gives them permission to allow the many to be sacrificed to provide opportunity to a few chosen students. So-called reform is the brain child of the 1%. It is undemocratic, and taxpayer dollars should not be wasted on this failed experiment.
Speaking of “Orange Is the New Black,” is an orange jumpsuit on Donald Trump too matchy, matchy?
Not at all….as long as he is allowed to keep his streak of bright yellow hair for some contrast.
Perfect. I can see that we are of one mind about this.
I don’t think they will allow him to keep the flag pin, though.
Trump 2020 / 2020 / 2020:
20 for obstruction of justice and conspiracy with a foreign power while acting as an unregistered agent of that power (collusion), 20 for money laundering for Russian mobsters, 20 for sexual assault, 20 for conspiracy to commit kidnapping, 20 for misappropriation of charitable funds, and 20 for violation of the emoluments clauses of the Constitution.
True philanthropists with money to burn would simply found private schools and conduct their experiments on voluntary subjects, risking nothing but their own dollars and the careers of fools. But no, these corpulent, er, corporate raiders demand public money and compulsory guinea pigs as fodder for their hobby horses. When they leave institutional destruction and ruined lives in their wake they cut and run and simply pull another lame-brained bright idea out of their rectal hoppers. They’ve got a billion of them …
So TRUE, Jon.
I cannot pretend to have seen inside the mind of Bill Gates, but he has been the major funder and instigator of the Common [sic] Core [sic], of VAM; of educational data-management systems; of depersonalized education software; and of high-stakes standardized testing. And I did read a piece by him many decades ago in which he lamented that the major costs of schools were in facilities and teachers’ salaries and extolling online education as an answer to those issues, and all these “reforms” just happen to involve spending a lot on computers, and he just happens to be the world’s premier computer monopolist.
I’ve said this before on this blog: since the real problem in American education is poverty and inequity, these billionaires could do a lot of real good by funding after-school institutions to supply meals and safe places for socializing and playing sports and doing art and and so on–Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs sorts of places staffed by coaches and counselors.
It’s just wild how much influence these people have over public schools that serve 50 million children.
The entire premise is arrogant. It’s fatally flawed. No amount of fake humility can alter the basic structure, which is we outsourced public education policy to 15 billionaires.
Go look for any criticism of any billionaire ed reform funder among anyone who worked for the Bush, Obama, or Trump Administrations. There is NONE. 100% captured. That’s because it’s an ecosystem and they all move inside it. They go from public jobs to foundation jobs and back again- whole careers. So much so that they have lost the capacity to imagine NOT doing what these people say.
Reed Hastings could tell them to jump off a bridge and 10 ed reformers would immediately launch policy doing just that for 10,000, 100,000, one million public school students. There would be no dissent.
They are qualified because they are rich or they are rich because they are qualified- doesn’t matter which one you use.
Duncan used to deny he took direction from the ed reform billionaires, so just being a regular person and not having “access” and no way to read his mind, I thought about what that would look like- what would not taking direction from them entail? A criticism, right? A rejection. Polite- obviously, I’m not talking about some barn-burning refusal, but SOME question or criticism. None. There is none. The two rejections – on testing and then the Common Core did not come from ed reform. They came from public school parents. Bottom up. Ed reform did their absolute best to first ignore and then deny there WAS any opposition, up to and including Duncan going out of his way to insult NY parents.
I don’t even oppose (some) testing and I did not oppose the Common Core and I knew they were unpopular and being rejected.
Duncan was not only stupid but also a liar. He was entirely in the pocket of Bill Gates. His education department did one Gates-funded study and initiative after another, including a study of real-time monitoring of students’ gritful attention to task using Orwellian galvanic skin response bracelets and retinal monitors.
Duncan infamously claimed that under him, billionaires had “no seat at the policy table” while he himself was playing their yes man. “Pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain!” LMAO.
Watch Arnie duck this “YES”-or-“NO” question about whether or not private sector business interests should be infiltrating and influencing the public sector public school system.
No, it’s not “an odd question.” It’s a pretty straightforward one, especially from someone who, in another context, insisted that private sector business interests do not and should not have “a seat at the table” when it comes to public education.
Thanks for the video.
Why hasn’t anyone said anything about the connections between Barack and Michelle Obama and Reed Hastings? There was never more a robust threesome than them!.
Under Hastings you can kiss your locally elected school boards goodbye. Who needs democracy when you’re a billionaire owner of a media company and when you’re an ex-president who’s lasciviously capitalizing on his former position?
Thank you for stating that.
Unfortunately, in my soon to be former district, criticism of the Obamas was verboeten, so when charters, PARCC and the rest of the onerous agenda was discussed amongst staff, we usually framed it as Arne Duncan/Rahm Emmanuel initiatives.
That’s why I wish more people would value substance at least as much as identity.
Former LAUSD School Board Member Ref Rodriguez resigned in disgrace after pleading guilty to serious election crimes, but after he made key votes to promote and expand school privatization through the expansion of charter schools.
Guess who came to his rescue and paid for his legal defense?
https://www.scpr.org/news/2017/10/17/76743/netflix-founder-donates-75-000-to-lausd-board-memb/
(Read the comments from activist Robert Skeels underneath this article.)
A “star in every position” is colonialism. The ruling class chooses and controls the “stars”.
A young man convicted of murder was asked about a childhood incident in which he threw a kid’s hat onto the roof of the school. He was asked what his heart felt like about what he’d done. He replied, “My heart doesn’t feel. It just beats.” The richest 0.1% would likely say the same.
If we read Max Eden’s story about a black mother in New Orleans posted July 2018, at the Koch-linked Manhattan Institute (“Catholic Schools…”), we can each judge the compassion or lack thereof as Eden recounts the loss, to this one woman and to her community caused by charter schools.
Where is Hastings gonna find 3 million star teachers?
Hastings and Bezos don’t know how to create star workers; they skim off the creme de la job market. A well-endowed school system could do this too, but it’s a zero-sum game. It’s not improving American education as a whole.
The stars are on video. The goal is to defund bricks and mortar schools and create profits from digital products. The kids of the ruling class will continue to receive quality education and be inculcated with the fallacy of superiority.
“A star in every position?”
I bet we all would love to help Reed Hastings see stars.
You know what I mean!