As Obama Seeks More Money for Charter Schools, Questions Raised over Billions Already Spent

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Lisa I want to play for you a comment by Reed Hastings, who is the CEO of Netflix. He is a supporter and an investor in the Rocket Ship Education Charter Schools Network. Last year, at a meeting of the California Charter Schools Association, he called for the abolition of local school boards. His speech was posted on YouTube. The audio is not great, but if you listen carefully, you can hear his words.

REED HASTINGS: And so the fundamental problem with school districts is not their fault. The fundamental problem is 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 nonprofits. Now, if we go to the general public and we say, here is an argument why you should get rid of school boards, of course no one is going to go for that. School boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years. And 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 catch-up to do.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix and a big supporter and investor in the charter school industry, last year at a meeting of the California Charter Schools Association. Lisa Graves, your reaction and also this whole issue of the long-term goal of eliminating any kind of democratic process for parents and communities in their school boards.

LISA GRAVES: Well if you listen closely to what he said, what he said was we need to abolish the school districts — we need to abolish the school boards, basically. School boards are really the only way that we have democratic-controlled, direct democracy, over our schools. For ordinary public schools, if they have want to build a new gym, a new stadium, they have to go to taxpayers to get permission to expand the school system, to get taxes to expand. And also, people can elect who is on that school board. What we see through charters and the American Legislative Exchange Council’s agenda is an effort to circumvent local democratic control. To basically remove control of these schools, these charter schools, these often for-profit enterprises that are related to them. And that’s part of the design of them.