Netflix CEO Thinks Local School Boards Have To Go
Why is it that the wildly wealthy: Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Mark Zuckerberg, the Waltons even our own Rex Sinquefield, feel they are uniquely qualified to tell us how to run our school systems? The latest to join the chorus is Netflix CEO Reed Hastings who told a meeting of charter school officials that the problem with public schools is that they lack “stable governance” which is what keeps them from getting better each year. Bill Gates spent billions on his small school program which produced no statistically significant improvement in student performance. Mark Zuckerberg spent millions in Newark NJ trying to fix their schools and had similar results. What gives Hasting’s the veritas to pontificate on public schools? He has invested in and is an adviser to the Rocketship Education charter school network, a network that has failed to deliver on its promises of performance and to the local community, so I guess that makes him as qualified as any of them.
What Hastings told the California Charter Schools Association in March was this (from theStopRockethship transcript of his speech),
And so the fundamental problem with school districts is not their fault, the fundamental problem is that they don’t get to control their boards and the importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing and you can’t do long term planning to a system of large non-profits…The most important thing is that they constantly get better every year they’re getting better because they have stable governance — they don’t have an elected school board.
The language itself is telling as to his thoughts about public schools. They are a living breathing system, separate from the public. He says that the problem the Districts have is that They don’t control the local board. See how the District is some separate entity according to him that is shackled by randomly chosen people who direct it? He does not recognize the district as the creation of the local community who created it and who has every right to direct it.
Brett Bymaster fought Rocketship in San Jose, where they had plans to build a new school, and won. His lawsuit showed that Rocketship did not keep their promise of maintaining local school boards in their other California schools. He now runs StopRocketship.com.
Hastings complains that governance is constantly changing and this leads to a lack of long term planning. But such change in governance is exactly what this country was built on, citizen Netflix CEO Thinks Local School Boards Have To Go | Missouri Education Watchdog:
