Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix, emphasized his support of nonprofit charter schools during his keynote address to the Council for A Better Louisiana annual luncheon today.
Hastings calls the nonprofit school model the future of public education in the state, pointing to what he sees as the successful all-charter system in New Orleans, and the cure for unequal opportunities.
“We as a nation want relatively quick fixes, but if you look at past changes, they’ve made almost no difference to the lives of our pupils,” Hastings says.
High superintendent turnover, with major school districts averaging one every three years, leads to organizational problems and teacher dissatisfaction, he says.
Hastings sits on the board of directors for KIPP, a growing charter school company with 200 schools nationwide that’s opening its first school in Baton Rouge this fall.
“If we could fix the schools we have, that’s definitely the best solution,” he says. “But people have tried for decades and decades and decades.”
The executive also spoke about how he helped grow Netflix from a garage-housed company mailing DVD’s one envelope at a time, to the international production company that it has become today.
Through a series of self-described “lucky” happenstances, from coming about during the first internet bubble of the early 2000s, leadership changes at competitor Blockbuster, and the rise of streaming services, Hastings says Netflix grew through its flexibility.
“Any one of those, Blockbuster, streaming … any one of those could have killed us,” Hastings says.
When Netflix launched its first original content with House of Cards, it changed how the public saw the company. Eight years later, it’s one of the largest content producers in the world.
Hastings says the company continues to push for flexibility over efficiency, with freedom and “as few rules as humanly possible.”
It’s a system, he says, that only works with creative companies, not traditional manufacturing and industry.
