The hearing, in a committee of the State Senate, was supposed to be routine. I, an L.A. Times reporter at the time, didn’t even bother to cover it. The subject was reappointment of the president of the State Board of Education. The president, Reed Hastings, was thought to be a shoo-in.

After all, Hastings, a tech entrepreneur and Democratic donor from Santa Cruz, had put together a successful ballot measure to make it easier to pass school bonds, launching a new era of school construction statewide after decades of neglect. He’d supported the state’s accountability system for schools, and backed the establishment of public charter schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Hastings also had bipartisan support—he’d been appointed four years earlier by a Democrat, Gov. Gray Davis, and was nominated for re-appointment by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.

But the hearing went sideways. Some education groups didn’t like charter schools, or his blunt interest in transforming education systems. Hastings himself suggested that he was felled by criticism from bilingual educators after he pushed for more instruction time in English for English-language learners. Ultimately, two members voted to re-appoint him, and two voted against. A fifth legislator, a Democrat named Debra Bowen, who would soon be elected Secretary of State, abstained. At 2-2, his reappointment was effectively blocked.

This unexpected political assassination made a few headlines, but soon faded from view. Hastings vowed to continue his educational work but didn’t fight back (“I lacked political deftness,” he later said of the episode). After all, he still had his day job running the DVD subscription service he’d co-founded years earlier. It was called Netflix.

With our school systems melting down and with Netflix now one of our state’s most powerful and creative entertainment forces, it’s worth asking what would have happened if this Battle of Hastings had gone a different way.

In retrospect, 2005—and that rejection of one of California’s richest and most effective Democratic supporters of school reforms—looks like the beginning of an ill-conceived retrenchment in California’s educational ambitions.

Over the past 15 years, state leaders, and the teachers’ unions who elect them, turned hard against educational reforms—saying they wanted to focus on regular public schools. They obsessively opposed public charter schools and specialized programs, put obstacles in the way of online education and technological alternatives to the classroom, and dismissed anyone who dared pursue educational innovation as a tool of billionaires.

The state also junked the testing-based accountability system that gave parents and communities clear guidance on how their schools were doing—replacing it with a confounding color-coded system of measures designed to obscure our students’ academic stagnation. And, cynically, Gov. Jerry Brown created a new funding formula to help poor schools—only to admit that he had given up on the goal of closing racial and economic disparities in student performance.

While Gov. Davis, Hastings, and others once worked to make it easier to build public schools, today’s California is busy closing schools, in part because of rapidly declining enrollments. The state boosted school funding during the 2010s, but the new money has been gobbled up by retirement benefits, not students. And promises to support school-age children more comprehensively—in areas from child care to health care—have not been followed by action.

As California education has gone backward, Hastings has been propelling Netflix forward. After becoming dominant in DVD rentals, Netflix survived a bumpy transition to streaming video to become a global giant, with more than 200 million subscribers. The company isn’t just popular or well-run; its shows, from The Crown to Ozark to Orange Is the New Black, are smart and at the cultural cutting edge. Netflix leads all other companies in nominations at this month’s Oscars.

During these past 15 years, Hastings has remained involved in education, but as a philanthropic outsider. He backed the charter schools and technological innovations in education that the state of California was trying to make harder to pursue. He supported the Rocketship schools, charters which tried (and sometimes failed) to grow fast and integrate technology, as well as the online Khan Academy and DreamBox Learning, which develops online math lessons.

These efforts drew extensive criticism and controversy. So did his public statements arguing that elected school boards, and the politics and turnover they bring, were preventing schools from achieving the stable management necessary for educational improvement. He argued that streaming technologies and data collection could make education more personal and effective for kids around the world. And in California, he kept giving money to progressive ballot measure campaigns (including those to end the death penalty and reduce sentences for non-violent crimes) and to Democratic candidates who fought for school reform (and usually lost to union-backed opponents).

For all his trouble, he was frequently dismissed, by unions and media (including, on occasion, your columnist), as another billionaire pursuing tech-centric, quasi-private educational reforms that wouldn’t serve all students.

Then the pandemic hit.

Suddenly Hastings’ future-oriented vision made more sense.

When California schools shut down, they didn’t have their own online platforms. The only things that worked were the online tech systems like the ones that Hastings had funded; California teachers used videos from the Khan Academy, and my own kids’ teachers had them doing all their math on DreamBox.

Teachers, schools, and their districts lost track of many of their neediest students; California had never really built the extensive data systems that Hastings and other education reformers had advocated. Instruction time was cut drastically, putting English language learners and special ed students further behind. Parents, feeling abandoned by closed and unresponsive neighborhood schools, went desperately searching for alternative educational arrangements—of the kind Hastings had supported.

The pandemic exposed just how weak and broken the educational system had become. Without a real system of accountability like the one California had junked, we can only guess how much learning children have lost. Local school districts were exposed as powerless to reopen their schools. And in recent months, San Francisco began a relentless campaign to prove, all by itself, that Hastings had been right to dismiss local school boards as pointless.

Silicon Valley hasn’t invented a time machine, so we’ll never know what would have happened if we went back to 2005 and reversed that decision to cast off Hastings and so much of what he represented. But the state does have the power to change what it does going forward.

The state must transform schools, and not just to help today’s students recover from pandemic learning loss. Our students must be better educated and more technologically adept, and the achievement gap must be closed. Parents need more choices that fit their children. And our schools themselves must be made safer, so they can remain open no matter what new disasters or emergencies that 21st-century California throws at them.

If it’s going to achieve such transformations, California needs to bring its most creative and ambitious people back inside the educational system.

The post Revisiting California’s Battle of Hastings appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

During our final weeks, long-time customers were coming in distraught, some of them even in tears. Many seemed to be searching for some exotic answer for why we were closing, but the reasons for Rocket’s demise were what you’d expect: new technologies, Netflix, a bad economy, and fewer customers. The owners of Rocket Video felt they were investing a lot and getting very little return.

I first came to Rocket Video in the late 1990s. I’d completed my Master’s Degree in “film and video” at American University in Washington, D.C. and moved to Los Angeles, leaving behind my family, my girlfriend, and a full-time library job. I moved into a place with two friends from AU.

It was a tough time. I couldn’t find work, and the only friends I had were my school chums. They were getting tired of me. My funds were low and my credit cards maxed out. Then a friend suggested I try getting a job at Rocket Video.

The application process wasn’t all that easy. Everyone had to go through interviews and a written test. One part of the test was a multiple-choice section that focused on everyday filing skills, but the other was a list of 30 directors. The test taker had to cite as many films as possible made by each director. (Documentarian D.A. Pennebaker was probably the hardest.) In any case, I was enough of a film buff to pass, and the owners of Rocket gave me some part-time hours. It was a start.

All of us employees bonded quickly. In fact, my new friends were so cool that my formerly exasperated AU friends now warmed to me again and sought out the company of my new colleagues. I also managed to find a full-time job dubbing commercials at Video Monitoring Services. This was followed by a few years at Passport Productions, where I wrote documentaries on film history.

Even when I had full-time jobs, though, I never stopped working part-time at Rocket. It was a cool place to be, and there was always something going on. People told me they were impressed with my knowledge of film, and some customers would come in just to ask me questions.

About a decade ago, during an entertainment industry slump, I got laid off at Passport Productions. At the same time, Rocket’s manager left, and I got an offer to take his place. I took the job, thinking I’d stay for another year or two. I wound up staying 10. I guess I liked it.

Over the years, I learned a lot of lessons. One was that you can’t please everyone. For every person who loved our selection, someone else didn’t. I came to rely simply on my own judgment when ordering titles or making deals.

I also learned that people can be difficult-very difficult. They complain. They shoplift. They say abusive things. I had an unexpected phone altercation with a patriot who’d made a pro-war documentary about ongoing military campaigns. My refusal to order a copy of the DVD sent him into a diatribe about DVD distribution. When I told him I was in no mood for a lecture, he threatened to come to the store and kill me. In the end, he made do with posting on Yelp that Rocket Video did not love America.

Another lesson: people go pretty crazy over late fees. Sometimes, customers would sneak in an overdue movie and place it on the shelf, claiming it’d been there all along. People even threatened to beat up our video clerks over extra fees. It’s amazing what someone will do to avoid paying three more dollars.

I think many of our customers forgot we were running a business and had to make money somehow, that rentals couldn’t just be free. Still, even customers who complained incessantly would keep coming back, because we had a selection like no other. They’d cancel their accounts, then sheepishly re-open them.

If Rocket Video had some difficult customers, the many kind and wonderful customers made up for them. We employees got Christmas presents, cards, and gifts of booze. We got invited to birthday parties, plays, and special events. Some customers would bring us baked goods or fresh fruit. Many came in daily just to chat with us. Rocket was a community. It was a place for movie buffs to meet and shoot the shit about what they loved.

A lot of celebrities were among the regulars, and they were often the nicest customers we had. Some even became personal friends. They appreciated being left alone to browse the racks, but sometimes they, too, stuck around just to talk. That’s how I found myself talking with William H. Macy about the lighting in The Mad Ghoul, a horror film produced by Universal in 1943.

You never knew who was going to drop in. Charlize Theron, Vince Vaughn, Wim Wenders, Morissey, Will Ferrell, Angelina Jolie, Billy Bob Thornton, Marilyn Manson, Drew Barrymore, Leonard Cohen, Sylvester Stallone, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Buck Henry, Peter Bogdanovich, Madonna, Janet Jackson, and even the late Michael Jackson-all walked through the doors of Rocket Video.

My favorite was Faye Dunaway. Certainly, she could be a little demanding. The first time I encountered her, she bounded through the doors of the store and yelled, “Quick, I need Reservoir Dogs right now! I’m double parked on La Brea!” Another time, when we called to tell her a certain title had come in, she was livid. “What are you doing calling me?” she yelled into the receiver. “I am trying to write! Don’t you know I have to answer my own phone?”

But she was also generous and gracious. In 2010, when Rocket Video moved from a building near Pink’s to a building further south on La Brea, it was Faye Dunaway who cut the ribbon to celebrate. She praised me for my film knowledge and said if she ever won another award she’d thank Rocket Video and Jeff Miller in her acceptance speech. I still have her number in my cell phone, even if I’d never be foolish enough to call it.

Soon after taking over as manager of Rocket, I started putting together in-store events. These usually took place on Thursday evenings, and they’d spotlight actors, directors, writers, or other industry professionals. We wanted to make Rocket a real hangout, with chairs, books, and places to get comfortable. Our first guest was my buddy Steve Stoliar, who’d written a book called Raised Eyebrows about his time working as a secretary to Groucho Marx during the last few years Groucho’s life. The audience was mostly our friends, but it was large enough to call the night a success. Eventually, these became popular enough that people would call us to put them on.

You never knew what was going to happen at our events, and unexpected guests were common. When special effects master Ray Harryhausen was the star of the evening, so many fellow Hollywood legends showed up to pay him tribute that the guest of honor compared it to an episode of “This Is Your Life.”

My favorite night was a celebration of The Incredible Hulk, the TV series that ran from 1978 to 1982. The Hulk had an immense effect on my life. It was what inspired me to get interested first in comic books, then real books, and later in writing and film more broadly. Our main guest was Kenny Johnson, creator of the show. He brought along director and producer Chuck Bowman. I invited, as a surprise guest, the actress Mariette Hartley, who won an Emmy for her appearance on the Hulk. Then Lou Ferrigno, the Hulk himself, walked in, and the crowd went wild. After the main event concluded, I gave a tearful speech about how special the show was to me.

There were many other great moments. Shelly Winters made her final public appearance at Rocket. Peter Falk made one of his last appearances there, just a few months before a series of surgeries triggered a sudden onset of dementia. Falk was funny and charming and unforgettable, and he apparently liked the cookies in our makeshift “green room,” because he scooped them all up to take home with him. Our final guest before we shut up shop for good was actress Nancy Kwan, star of Flower Drum Song and The World of Suzie Wong. That was the last of dozens and dozens of special events.

And now, after 30 years of business, it’s all over.

During the first several decades of motion pictures, a movie would run, then disappear. Maybe there would be a reissue a decade later, maybe not. Other than that, old movies vanished. Television changed that. Video stores changed it even more. We could reconnect with our cultural history, and the impact was remarkable. Video stores like ours had films that nobody else-not Netflix, not Amazon, and certainly not Blockbuster-ever did. We were guardians of film history. But now those pieces of history have been sold off for parts. Suddenly, we seem to be going in reverse, back toward that age when movies appeared and then vanished.

Hollywood is a tough place. Landmarks get demolished. The Brown Derby is gone. The Tail o’ the Pup hot dog stand is in some warehouse in Torrance. In traffic, drivers swerve manically and cut you off, as if to signal they have to get there before you. In a culture so inward-looking and self-centered, focused only on the next big thing, we easily forget the paths and paving stones that led us to where we are. Film history is important to Los Angeles. A sense of community is scarce. Rocket Video offered both those things. I don’t know if Angelenos will miss a place like Rocket right away, but I think they will eventually. I know I already do.

Jeffrey Miller is a writer, film historian, and former video store manager who lives in Los Angeles.

*Photo courtesy of Mike Ambs.

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