Netflix Chief Ready To Help DFER Fix Education

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) is delighted to announce that Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, has joined their board, "bringing a disruptor's lens to education." That seems about right.

First, a reminder of who DFER really are. One of the key founders of DFER is Whitney Tilson, a big time hedge fund manager (you can read more about him here). Long ago, Leonie Haimson had a great quote from the film version of Tilson's magnum opus about ed reform, "A Right Denied," and it's a dream of mine that every time somebody searches for DFER on line, this quote comes up.

The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…

DFER's mission has always been to convince Democrats that they should be backing ed reform ideas from the right. It's standard to find them trying hard to convince Democrats that it would be a winning strategy, like the recent NYT piece by their chief Jorge Elorza in which he tries to sell taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

Hastings, meanwhile, is a long time fan of school choice programs. Hastings has been plenty active in the charter sector, managing to help push through the California law that not only did away with charter caps, but made it possible to run a chain of charters with just one (unelected) board. Unelected is how he likes them-- in 2014 he told the California School Boards Association in fairly clear terms that elected school boards were a scourge and should be done away with.

Hastings likes to note that way back in the day, he was a teacher. That was with the Peace Corps in Swaziland over 40 years ago. But he's been a busy edu-preneur for decades, and he certainly knows all the classic bits.

There's the whole "unchanged classroom" shtick. Hastings sees schools as being like the entertainment biz thirty years ago-- "a model built for a different era" and has often claimed that "the traditional classroom model—one teacher, 20-to-50 students, sage-on-a-stage—is ripe for reinvention." He declares "the schools of the future won't look like the schools of the past," which is his one accurate observation, though he could easily note that the schools of the present don't look like the schools of the past. Lord, they were ushering the sage off the stage back when I was in teacher school. 

Paired with that is the claim that "Netflix replaced a one-size-fits-all broadcast model with something more personal and responsive," which is just a silly claim. In 1997, when Netflix launched, cable tv was achieving great new heights of variety. Hell, Fox News launched in 1996. Back then, boys and girls, cable provided actual variety before free market forces pushed cable channels to become barely distinguishable imitations of each other (you know, back when MTV played music and A&E stood for Arts and Entertainment, and there were two comedy channels). The broadcast model was already well and fully disrupted, and the only thing that Netflix disrupted was the practice of having to go to the store to rent DVDs. 

So guess what Hastings thinks is the key to this new shift in education? Here's a hint-- as of last year, Hastings is on the board of Anthropic, the big AI company.

"AI is a once-in-a-thousand-year shift, and what happens in K-12 is at the center of it,” Hastings continued. “The schools that figure out how to combine individualized software with teachers focused on social-emotional development are going to unlock something we’ve never seen before."

Individualized computer instruction is definitely a thing we've seen before, though what we've seen is the many ways that it crashes and burns and fails to deliver its many promises. There is no reason to believe that the newest iteration of the giant plagiarism machines is likely to change that, no reason to believe that education delivered through a screen is somehow superior to education involving other humans, both as teachers and as co-students. Hastings believes AI can help make education more personal, which highlights how oxymoronic it is to propose personalization that is delivered by non-persons. 

"He sees AI enabling a shift where teachers become more like coaches and build deep relationships with students."

Why does he see that? How does he see that happening? Could it be that replacing teachers with "coaches" solves that nasty labor problem with schools and helps make them more profitable? And yes, his description sounds very much like Alpha School, a ridiculous school model that is somehow beloved these days with its assertion that students can get a full education with two hours per day on computer. It's technoamnesia all over again, as folks just seem to forget that we have seen this model tried and failed. AI will make it better by... being more expensive, in every sense of the word?

Oh well. DFER and Hastings are just as dangerous to public education separately as they are together. May they have many lovely meetings together