

Reed Hastings ( By Richard Brian/Reuters)

(adding reaction from California School Board Association)

There seems to be no end to the expertise that America’s billionaires possess and are happy to share with the rest of us about public education. Apparently making a fortune in the business world makes them experts on how to educate children.

Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Mark Zuckerberg, various Waltons — these are just some of the prodigiously wealthy who have decided that they know how public education can be “fixed” and have plowed big money into it. And after billions of their dollars have been spent for their pet projects, the real problems facing public schools remain.

The newest bit of “wisdom” for public education comes to us from Netflix Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings, who is a big charter school supporter and an investor in the Rocketship Education charter school network. At a meeting of the California Charter Schools Association on March 4, he said in a keynote speech that the problem with public schools is that they are governed by elected local school boards. Charter schools have boards that are not elected and, according to his logic, have “a stable governance” and that’s why “they constantly get better every year.”

Here’s a transcript of part of the Hastings speech, published on stoprocketship.com (and you can watch the video below):

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. And that’s a real tough issue. Now if we go to the general public and we say, “Here’s an argument why you should get rid of school boards” of course no one’s going to go for that. School boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years. 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 8% of students in California, whereas in New Orleans they’re at 90%, 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% of charter kids….And if we succeed over the next 20 or 30 years, that will be one of the fastest rates of change ever seen around the world for a large system, it’s hard. [applause]

Actually, all charter schools don’t have stable governance and all of them aren’t getting better every year (plenty close because of their lousy governance) and even charter advocates have called for changes to improve governance structures. What Hastings is suggesting is that democratic elections themselves create unacceptable instability in governance of public education.

Hastings is right, of course, to say that elections can cause a change in policy when people with different ideas are elected. That’s what elections are for in a democracy. And certainly there have been — and still are — locally elected school boards that are miserable at their jobs. On the other hand, charter schools, financed primarily with public funds, have appointed boards not accountable to the public.

He appears to be presenting a vision of education in the United States where nearly all students are educated in collections of charter schools: “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 8% of students in California, whereas in New Orleans they’re at 90%, so we have a lot of catchup to do.” Really? Even many charter advocates recognize that the charter model will not work for a majority of America’s school children. Besides, if he is using the charter-heavy New Orleans Recovery School District as a model, we should run for the hills.

After Hurricane Katrina, most of the schools in the recovery discovery were turned in to charters, which reformers like Hastings see as a silver bullet to all that ails public education. But many of the district’s charters do worse than the traditional public schools, and many of those that do at all better have selective admissions. And there’s this, from a story last September from the Times-Picayune: “The Recovery School District reprimanded nine New Orleans charter schools in the first four months of a accountability system that aims to tighten oversight of 59 largely independent campuses, according to public records.” Imagine that. The charter governance wasn’t good enough.

Hastings suggests that the “stable governance” of charter schools leads to stable schools, but, alas, big changes occur in charter schools. Let’s look at Rocketship, on whose unofficial board of advisers Hastings sits. Rocketship became known — and won $2 million from the Obama administration to help it grow — with a “blended learning” model that is designed to incorporate traditional classroom settings with a computer “Learning Lab” for students. The idea behind the lab was that students could learn basic lessons in math and reading while teachers could work with students on more complicated material. Part of the attraction, too, was that the computers would cost less than hiring more teachers. But get this: Last year Rocketship realized it had to revamp its fabulous “Learning Lab” because it wasn’t working very well. The charter network’s Web site says it is still piloting “flexible learning spaces at some of our schools — spaces that will allow our teachers be even more effective and students to learn even more.”

Here’s a reaction from Josephine Lucey, president of the California School Board Association and a member of the Cupertino Union School District Board: