Paul Hill

Founder, Center on Reinventing Public Education

Paul Hill is a research professor at the University of Washington Bothell and founder and former director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which studies alternative governance and finance systems for public K-12 education. He has been a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings and Hoover Institutions. He chaired Brookings’ National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education, which issued its report, School Choice: Doing It the Right Way Makes a Difference, in November 2003. In 2013, he became the chairman of a national task force of scholars exploring polity issues in rural education. His most recent books are Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools (Brookings 2012) and A Democratic Constitution for Public Education (University of Chicago Press 2014).

His book, It Takes a City (Brookings 2000) is a primer for city leaders and foundations on strategies for transforming failing urban public school systems. He is also the author (with Lawrence Pierce and James Guthrie) of Reinventing Public Education: How Contracting Can Transform America¹s Schools (Chicago 1997).

Hill is the 2007 recipient of the Thomas J. Fordham Prize for Distinguished Scholarship.

Before joining the University of Washington faculty, Hill worked for 17 years as a Senior Social Scientist in RAND’s Washington office. For most of that time his research focused on the reform of elementary and secondary education. He conducted studies of site-based management, governance of decentralized school systems, effective high schools, business-led education reforms, and immigrant education. He also contributed to studies of defense research, development, and acquisition policy.

At RAND he served as Director of Washington Operations (1981-87) and Director of the Education and Human Resources program (1979-80). While a government employee he directed The National Institute of Education’s Compensatory Education Study (a congressionally mandated assessment of federal aid to elementary and secondary education) and conducted research on housing and education for the Office of Economic Opportunity.