Operation Public Education, or OPE, was established in 2000 to design a new reward structure for public schools that aligned the interests of teachers and administrators with the goal of significant increases in student achievement. With funds from the Annenberg Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and the William Penn Foundation, OPE built its comprehensive framework through two basic activities. We traveled to states where innovative efforts were underway and brought leading reformers to Pennsylvania to share their ideas. When all the travel and seminars were completed, we selected practices that supported one another and had been shown individually to improve instruction and raise student achievement. In 2003, OPE asked six members of the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN) to vet the framework, and we adopted several of their key suggestions to ensure that the approach was both fair and teacher-friendly. Taken together, the framework represents a comprehensive rather than a piecemeal approach to school reform.

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