California charter school funder Reed Hastings has underwritten the non-profit Charter School Growth Fund’s purchase of 2-year-old DreamBox Learning, a much-praised company producing online math software for K-3students. Beyond an undisclosed purchase price, Hastings is putting up an additional $10 million to extend DreamBox  offerings to other grades and to add literacy software  –  evidence of Hastings’ interest in scaling up e-learning for public schools.

Hastings will serve as CEO of the non-profit, while continuing as CEO of Netflix, which he founded. John Danner, CEO of Rocketship Education,  San Jose-based elementary charter schools that have integrated online instruction into the school day, will join the board of directors. Danner led the search that led to Bellevue, Wash.-based DreamBox.

Rocketship has created a hybrid model of learning that combines classroom instruction with a daily use of a computer lab for 100 minutes. That has freed up $500,000 that Rocketship has used to build and own its own schools – unusual for charter schools – and to plow back additional  money into instruction. But while innovative, the online learning hasn’t produced the learning gains that Danner had hoped.

What impressed him about DreamBox, he said, was its flexibility in adapting to each student, diagnosing why a student is stuck, then providing lessons before frustration  and  boredom set in. A reviewer for USA today said that the software’s “ability to adjust on the fly to add more help, or skip over areas already mastered, is phenomenal.”

Danner said the company will compete for a online contract that Chicago Public Schools will soon put out to bid for before and after school intervention. Charter schools like Rocketship will provide the labs for the company’s new software. It will be five years, Danner said, before there will be enough evidence to determine the right balance of online and classroom learning.