In 1997, Paul Hill published his book Reinventing Public Education: How Contracting Can Transform America’s Schools (the center where I work at the University of Washington was founded on the ideas presented). With his co-authors, Lawrence Pierce and James Guthrie, Hill proposed that all schools in a city should be contracted out to school-based nonprofits as a means of improvement. He contrasted his proposal with the concurrent charter school movement, in its infancy at the time. He wondered about the then-limited scope of the charter concept. Often seen as “piloting” new ideas for the public school system at large, would charter schools ever grow to serve every child in a city?
