The Operation Public Education framework consists of individual components that fall under one of three pillars: The New Reward Structure, Support for Educators, or Piloting the Framework. In this realigned system, new forms of accountability are introduced, but they go hand in hand with new forms of professional development to help educators succeed in their instructional tasks.

The New Reward Structure
The framework aligns the system’s goal of high achievement for all students with new forms of evaluation and compensation.

The new system recognizes the complexity of teaching and uses a balanced approach to gauge teacher effectiveness. Value-added assessment provides an empirical component in both teacher and administrator evaluation by identifying the most effective and least effective performers. These student learning results are accompanied by a peer review process that uses rigorous evaluation protocols to differentiate the quality of teaching behaviors. Taken together, they replace simplistic ratings of “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory” and offer a much more comprehensive picture of teacher effectiveness.

These multiple measures are used to determine the progress teachers make in climbing a career ladder. No teacher would earn less in the new system than they did at the top of the old and much higher salaries would be available for highly effective educators and those serving in leadership roles. To ensure that the approach is perceived as fair, all educators are included in the compensation system, and administrators also have a career ladder to climb based on their performance on comprehensive rubrics and the annual academic growth of their students.

See The New Reward Structure overview page for additional information on the key principles and individual components.

Support for Educators
New rewards, while necessary, are far from sufficient. Alone, they will not result in higher student achievement because they do not include other system changes necessary to help teachers increase their effectiveness. Educating all students to high standards is challenging work, and as such, teachers need to be provided with ample time and resources to improve their practice.

The framework offers a vision of new supports that is team-based, job-embedded, driven by teachers, and sustained over time. Educators receive extensive professional development to understand how the growth metric differs from the achievement metric and how assessment data can be used to maximize, rather than simply measure, student learning.

With data driving the decision-making, additional assistance is made available to all teachers: multi-year mentoring for new teachers, consultants for struggling teachers, and coaches for all other teachers who wish to improve their classroom instruction. A system of Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) governs the remediation process, which provides struggling teachers with extensive support, but leads to timely dismissal if a panel of teachers and administrators agree on the recommendation.

See the Support for Educators overview page for additional information on the key principles and individual components.

Piloting the Framework
Piloting a framework such as Operation Public Education's (OPE) will require sufficient resources, a comprehensive communications strategy, and a thorough evaluation. Though much of the framework has been specified, local educators must still decide what the reforms will look like when fully embedded in the culture and practice of their particular district. Operation Public Education (OPE) has developed guiding principles to help school districts develop the necessary capacity to implement and evaluate such an effort.

See the Piloting the Framework overview page for additional information on the key principles and individual components.