It began as a casual question — and a flicker of curiosity — uttered during a meeting of ProPublica journalists who this year are reporting on publicly funded private schools. We were discussing how, in many states, basically anyone can open a private school wherever they want. No experience, no training, no curriculum required.

One of our editors jumped in and asked: What if ProPublica tried to establish a private school?

We were intrigued. We are longtime education reporters, not educators. Would that matter? Where, if anywhere, do states draw the line on who is fit to run a school — and in some cases, collect public money to fund their ventures?

We decided that testing the thesis that anyone can open a school would be valuable to our ongoing reporting, particularly at a time when we have found that private schools are growing rapidly across the country — in barns, farms, co-working spaces, people’s homes and parks. These new schools are fueled by taxpayer-funded vouchers and other programs, and our reporting has revealed states have little interest in monitoring them.

We had some inspiration to draw from: In 2015, comedian John Oliver founded a tax-exempt church to show how easy it was for televangelists to avoid paying taxes while soliciting millions of dollars.

Some of us live in Chicago and are well aware of the lore of the Mirage Tavern, a real bar that undercover reporters operated in the 1970s to expose corruption in the city. While that investigation had a substantial impact, and led to a new city oversight agency, it also drew criticism for its deceptive practices.

We drew lessons from that reporting and set some ground rules at the start of our experiment. To be clear, we had no intention of operating schools. We won’t enroll any students.

Most importantly, it would be critical for us to be transparent about who we were in our applications, using our newsroom phone numbers and email addresses. In one state, we even disclosed that we were “journalists exploring opening a........

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