Netflix CEO advises ending elected school boards

By Seth Brown     1/20/11 6:00pm

Replace elected school boards with school boards that select their own members. That was the recommendation Reed Hastings, CEO and chairman of Netflix and former president of the California State Board of Education, brought to Rice Wednesday night for improving K-12 education.Hastings, who came to Rice as part of a lecture series presented by the Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program and the Knowledge Is Power Program, presented his thesis before he was joined onstage by Houston Independent School District Superintendent Terry Grier.

According to Hastings, the main problem with having elected school boards is that although good administrators may help a school system improve in the short term, after they depart, the improvements they made quickly vanish. He cited his own experience in California, where he said he watched the progress made by one Los Angeles superintendent fall apart.

"All the energy and talent dissipated away," Hastings said. "That's stuck with me."

---

---

Hastings contrasted elected school boards with the leadership structures of corporations, non-profit organizations and the military, all of which he said have progressed significantly since 1950 because of their self-perpetuating nature - new leadership is selected by the old leaders.

"It allows for some new thinking, but there is continuance of purpose," Hastings said.

Hastings said that charter schools, which are run by non-profit organizations, have the same sort of leadership structure - a board which selects its own members - and are thus capable of long-term improvement. He cited New Orleans, where he said 70 percent of students attend charter schools.

"They're doing great work, getting better and better," Hastings said. "We're going to see New Orleans rise and rise and rise."

By evolving to a point where schools are run by non-profits, Hastings said that competition between schools in the same area would stimulate educational advances.

"What you want in a large, great city like Houston is a series of charter schools competing to do best by kids," Hastings said.

Grier said that with 203,000 students in HISD, there are not enough charter networks to take all of the students and that New Orleans would have had much more difficulty getting such a high percentage of students into charter schools had not so many students fled after Hurricane Katrina. Hastings said that he wanted a slow evolution with a few more charter schools each year.

"Doing something radical at once is not a good solution," Hastings said.

One of the tasks in bringing this change about is convincing the people already working in school systems that charter schools are a way of helping kids, Hastings said.

Grier said that some of the worst governed schools in the country are charter schools and that he thinks it is more important to have the administration focused on the students.

"It's about getting adults to focus on children and children's issues as opposed to adults' issues," Grier said.

Grier noted that 44 of the 294 schools in HISD are charter schools and that while these and other Houston charter schools have been successful, he is not certain that making all schools charter schools is the solution.

"I take my hat off to charters like KIPP and YES, [...] but I'm not sure that I'm quite ready to throw out the baby with the bath water," Grier said. "I've been a charter advocate for a long time, but charters have not been at it long enough [for them] to declare victory."

Grier said he worries that as charter organizations grow, they will begin to have the same bureaucratic issues that public schools currently do. Hastings said that these stem primarily from the elected school board members and that the ability for the boards of charter schools to select their own new members would thus allow them to avoid these.

Hastings said that the last big change in education was the rise of high schools between 1910 and 1930 and that since then, there has been very little change.

"There are always some great districts on the move, but if you look and step back, any given district doesn't fundamentally improve," Hastings said.

Hastings said that he feared that America was falling behind in the world. For instance, in 1957 when the Russians launched Sputnik and in the '80s when the German and Japanese economies were experiencing high growth rates, the educational system was often blamed, but political responses to the problem did not result in real change, Hastings said.

"When something is bothering society, the political class channels that energy, [...] but not much really changed," Hastings said.

Hastings said that the trend continues today with fears about globalization and that educators properly learn to be cynical in response to waves of misplaced blame and superficial political reactions.

Jones College freshman Luis Fernandez said that, although he thought the idea of democracy and having elected officials was essential to the idea of Americanism, he thought Hastings' proposal was interesting.

"With a school board that reelects itself based off of merit, you get people looking out for the school," Fernandez said.

---