Charter schools advocate
Reed Hastings to speak April 12
BY THOURAYA RAISS
Reed Hastings, a prominent
advocate of charter schools and a software entrepreneur,
will speak at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 12, in CERAS
112. The lecture, sponsored by the School of Education
and the Peninsula Community Foundation, is free and open
to the public.
Hastings, currently chief
executive officer of NetFlix.com, previously founded Pure
Software. In February he was appointed by Gov. Gray Davis
to the State Board of Education. He is an active member
of the Technology Network, which is made up of high-tech
CEOs seeking to improve the education system.
"If public schools
don't adopt the same principles of competition and
accountability as exist in the private and nonprofit
sectors, they will continue to deteriorate,"
Hastings says in a statement posted on the website of the
New Schools Venture Fund. "More and more parents
with means will send their children to private schools,
and the institution will become like Medicare, an
alternative for only the most disadvantaged."
Hastings says there is no
overarching strategy to improve public schools and that
education reform is "littered" with business
people who seriously want to help schools. "One way
to permanently impact the system would be to have 10 to
20 percent of California schoolchildren enrolled in
charter schools. That would be critical mass, and enough
of a force to induce a competitive dynamic in the
system."
Hastings holds a
bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College and a master's
degree in computer science from Stanford. SR
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