June 4, 2015

Wants and duty

I've been a Netflix subscriber since October now, having finished up Breaking Bad then working all the way through Archer, Sherlock, Better Off Ted, and as far as Good Eats allows on Netflix as well as almost all the way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer and about halfway through Mad Man and Peaky Blinders. Feel free to check out what I've watched. I've got no secrets on that list.

But there's a little bit of a problem...

See, it looks like Netflix's CEO, Reed Hastings, has a bit of an opinion about education. To quote from the Washington Post...(where they're quoting the transcript of his speech to the California Charter Schools Association)...
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]
I've been forgoing Chik-fil-A sandwiches for a while now, but giving up the Netflix will be way harder.

Maybe I'll just start writing letters to Mr Hastings every couple of days.

No comments: