Paul T. Hill
Distinguished Visiting Fellow

Expertise: Education policy, education reform

Paul T. Hill is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education. He is the John and Marie Corbally Professor at the University of Washington's Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs and the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. The center, which is funded by foundations and businesses, develops alternatives of financing and governing public education.

Hill is also a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's Economic Studies Program. His work focuses on reform of public elementary and secondary education. For Brookings he recently led a national working commission on educational choice whose report, School Choice: Doing it the Right Way Makes a Difference, was published in November 2003.

Hill is the coauthor of Charter Schools and Accoutability in Public Education (Brookings Institution Press, 2003) and editor of Charter School against the Odds (Education Next Books, 2006) and Choice with Equity (Hoover Institution Press, 2002), both assessments by the Koret Task Force.

His book, Fixing Urban Schools (Brookings Institution) 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, and he contributed a chapter to Private Vouchers, edited by Hoover Institution senior fellow and Koret Task Force member Terry M. Moe.

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

Before joining the University of Washington Hill worked for 17 years as a senior social scientist in RAND's Washington Office. 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 RAND studies of defense research, development, and acquisition policy. While at RAND he served as director of Washington operations (1981–87) and director of the education and human resources program (1979–80).

As a government employee (1970–77) Hill 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. He also served two years as a congressional fellow and congressional staff member.