I blogged before about Dreambox, a tech startup that makes interactive games to teach math to kids. They were acquired this past week by Charter School Growth Fund, and the acquisition was funded by Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings.

Mr. Hastings said that he thinks netbooks will be ubiquitous in schools in a few years, creating huge opportunities for online learning software.

“I think we’re on the edge of a real inflection point where the hardware becomes so cheap that Web learning is really throughout the schools,” he said. “But what I noticed is there’s really not that many people working on the software.”

DreamBox was started last year — I wrote about it at the time — and creates personalized lesson plans, hidden in games, based on which concepts children understand or need to work on.

“What makes their product so impressive is it adapts to each student’s learning, and that’s the Holy Grail of this field,” Mr. Hastings said.

There is major innovation on the horizon for public education. This is one of those quiet, early signals.