Netflix Founder on How to Solve Inequality, Polarization

When Reed Hastings, Netflix founder and CEO, endorses something, it carries enormous weight. Last summer, he and his wife Patty made a $120 million contribution to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, helping to stabilize and grow important institutions that have floundered in recent years. Said Hastings in Forbes last year, "Both of us had the privilege of a great education and we want to help more students – in particular students of color – get the same start in life."

Hastings has long been a supporter of programs that strive to deliver the best educational opportunities for students and families. I first came into contact with him in 2000, when he was working with the late John Walton to help the emerging charter school sector gain access to public school facilities. Hastings advocated lifting the cap on charter schools and became the most vocal supporter of charters and accountability on the California board of education. His support for technology-enabled, personalized learning has helped garner widespread support for that approach to education. He is a founder of Rocketship Schools, a blended-learning charter school model, and an investor in the successful DreamBox Learning, a provider of high-quality, personalized math instruction. Hastings is a serial innovator who applies to education with equal gusto that which he does in business.

Along with GSV Founder Michael Moe, I recently had the opportunity to interview Reed on the inaugural episode of our new podcast, In Piazza. (This article is, in part, excerpted from that discussion).

He told me about the connection between his work with charter schools and this important commitment:

It's close to 30 years that I've been working on charter schools and providing more opportunities for kids' education, with really incredible results, and I would say broadly I'm interested in things that provide kids more opportunity. Now that Netflix has done so well and, frankly, the scale of my donations has increased, we're doing more now at the college level also. I've been a donor to UNCF for a long time and to Morehouse and Spelman, and then this gift last summer was a big investment, post-George Floyd, for the path ahead, the path of reducing income inequality and racial inequality. The path to that really is education.

Hastings believes that achieving equity in education requires a multi-pronged approach:

You know, we're such a distributed education system: all our different universities, all the different school districts that are taking different approaches. In Washington, D.C., about half the kids are in charter public schools. And the great thing is not only are they doing a good job, but the district is also doing a better job than it did 20 years ago.

So it's really the growth of charters [that] helps raise all boats and give all kids an opportunity, and we see that again in New York and Oakland and San Francisco in Los Angeles. It's really a multi-city story."

Hastings is a contrarian when it comes to teachers' unions:

Way too many people in the charter movement are anti-union and think the union is the root of the problem.

But if you look across the country, the states that have strong unions – such as New Jersey and Massachusetts – they do incredibly well on education. And the states that have really weak unions – like Mississippi and Arkansas – they don't do as well, so, if anything, the data are significantly t in favor of unions.

We've got to get over this thing that the union is the problem; the problem is the lack of opportunity and innovation, and that's where nonprofit charter schools really help because they have a sense of mission and purpose. And we've seen this other big trend which has been fantastic – tech in education, and that's starting to make a real difference, both in school district and internal policy.

On technology and online learning into which students have been thrust because of Covid, the Netflix CEO believes in giving schools wide decision making:

I think each school should be able to pick what it wants to use and should be a broad market. I'm not endorsing any particular approach.

Generally, we want to get the Internet to be an active part of students' learning so that they can be learning in the classroom and out, as we've been forced to do in this pandemic. So I'm very encouraged and, if you look at how technology has transformed other sectors of our economy, I'm sure it's going to have a positive impact on education, too.

Hastings says that computers can play a substantial role in helping students advance in skills needed for the future:

There's fewer and fewer industrial-manufacturing type jobs, and even those are getting more high-tech.

He has also always been a proponent of accountability and worries that the backlash against testing, including in colleges, which are moving away from SATs and ACTs in favor of just grades, "is a big overcorrection" and will result in grade inflation. He believes that we need to invest more in more accurate testing. The self-described progressive is also not a fan of school boards, which he sees as an impediment to stable school district leadership. But he is hopeful that education can help lessen the polarization that is such an unfortunate aspect of public life today:

Our society is struggling with two big innovations. One is cable news and talk radio – specialized media – which gives people what they want in their viewing choices but reinforces their viewpoint, whether that's left or right. The other is social media, which has done that in spades.

That pushes on us quite hard, and our society hasn't yet figured out how to deal with that. I'm confident we will see a series of course corrections so that we can get back to a more thoughtful, more curious discourse.

That ability to disagree and try to see the other person's perspective is something that we can build more of with education.

His advice for those who want to help accomplish that?

Well, if you're a social entrepreneur, on the nonprofit side, then I would build a charter school network that's better than all the others. Build on what's been done and deliver incredible results for kids.

If you're on the for-profit side, I would probably do Ed Tech and try to [create] amazing global learning solutions that you can sell to people all around the world; those are some really big opportunities.