Can Netflix CEO's $100-million education fund avoid big-donor pitfalls?
The Netflix co-founder and CEO has announced the creation of a $100-million fund for education philanthropy. The Hastings Fund's first gifts will go toward scholarship programs for minority students, not sweeping system change.
Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings became the latest member of the billionaire education club on Tuesday, when he announced the creation of a $100-million philanthropic foundation.
"I’m so blessed to be able to do this," Mr. Hastings wrote in a Facebook post, thanking his company's employees and 57.4 million subscribers for "making this possible."
The first two gifts of the fund, which will be led by former New Schools for New Orleans Chief Strategy Officer Neerav Kingsland, will give $1.5 million to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) and the Hispanic Foundation of Silicon Valley.
In the past decade, tech moguls from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg have proven eager to fix the country's underperforming schools, often with a "disruptive" mindset.
"West Coast philanthropy is marked by innovation, it's about disruption, it's about change," Emmett D. Carson told The New York Times in October. Dr. Carson serves as CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, through which Hastings is funding the "creatively named" Hastings Fund (Hastings's own description). Donors coming from Silicon Valley "bring this go-big or go-home willingness to fail, and see failure as a good outcome if you learned something," Carson added.
Critics say that this gung-ho experimentalism is better suited to the boardroom than to the classroom, where a "willingness to fail" affects students, their families, and communities. Visionary donors' grand plans have often gone sour without support from the teachers and parents most impacted by sweeping change: Mark Zuckerberg's own $100-million investment in schools in Newark, N.J., for instance, has become something of a cautionary tale for investors.
But the Hastings Fund may learn from earlier investors' growing history of trial, error, and success, including Mr. Hasting's own years in the education sphere: He led the push for more charter schools in California, where he was a member of the state's board of education from 2000 to 2004 (and named president in 2001).
Hastings has also supported a bevy of charter schools and appropriately "disruptive" approaches to learning, from Aspire Public Schools to the video-based Khan Academy and Rocketship Education, an elementary school network that uses so-called blended learning to deliver some daily lessons through computers, not certified teachers – meant to individualize learning and save teachers some time for the most struggling students, although the model has had mixed results.
"Our aim is to partner with communities to significantly increase the number of students who have access to rich and holistic educational experiences," the Fund's website says, under the banner "All children deserve amazing schools."
It's a sentiment that nearly everyone in education agrees with; the question is how to provide it. A particularly heated debate surrounds charter schools, which are managed privately but funded publicly. Advocates say their experimental approaches are not just beneficial, but vital in cities where district schools just aren't cutting it. Critics, on the other hand, say every dollar spent Can Netflix CEO's $100-million education fund avoid big-donor pitfalls? - Yahoo News:
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