Center for Reinventing Public Education – the Billionaires’ Advocate

Robin Lake and Paul Hill

By Thomas Ultican / Tultican / August 26, 2020

In 1993, Political Science Professor Paul T. Hill established the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs on the University of Washington campus. The research group Hill founded is steeped in public school failure ideology. On their web site Hill let it be known “The Center has a definite point of view.” Among the points listed are:

“The ineffectiveness of big city public schools clouds the futures of millions of children.”

“Incremental efforts to improve urban public education without disturbing the school boards, unions, and central office administrators have failed, largely because roles, missions, and interests of those organizations are incompatible with effective schooling.”

“There are now far too few good public schools in big cities, in part because the entire structure of city school systems, from regulation and funding to teacher selection and professional development, is hostile to school quality.”

“To create good schools in urban areas where academic failure is the norm, we need an entirely different way of creating and operating schools.”

The CRPE 1999 “about” statement says,

“The Center pursues a national program of research and development on such proposals as charter schools, school contracting, choice, and school system decentralization, via alliances with the Brookings Institution, The RAND Corporation, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Chicago.”

Professor Hill, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, was a member of Brookings’ cadre of researchers convinced that American public education was failing. Furthermore, they shared a general agreement that market based business principles were central to the solution. They believed teacher’s unions and governance by locally elected school boards must overturned.

In 1990, Bookings had published John Chubb’s and Terry Moe’s book, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools in which they asserted that poor academic performance was “one of the prices Americans pay for choosing to exercise direct democratic control over their schools.” A few years later, Brookings published Fixing Urban Schools co-written by Hill and Mary Beth Celio. It was a call for running schools by contracting with private operators like the Edison Project.

From its 1993 founding thru 1999, CRPE survived by doing research projects for the Brookings Institute, the Rand Corporation, the United States Department of education, the National Business Roundtable and a few others.

Hill hired researcher Robin Lake the year after founding CRPE. Lake conducted research on charter schools, contracting, and standards-based school decentralization. She led the evaluation of The National Business Roundtable’s national systemic reform initiative.

Big Money Started Arriving

CRPE was fortunate to be in Seattle, Washington where the world’s richest man decided to implement his opinions concerning education. The fact that he was so rich appeared to be his only qualification for what became an outsized influence over public education.

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