Don’t botch this rollout

Brace yourselves, New Yorkers. The state seems to be on its way to another botched rollout of a so-called education reform.

It’s happening in the rush to implement a teacher evaluation system under a law passed just over two months ago. It gave the Board of Regents only until June 30 to come up with a whole new system for evaluating teachers. This was Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s answer to the last evaluation system, which called for what many parents said was too much testing and which resulted, in Mr. Cuomo’s view, in too many teachers being rated effective.

Under the timetable set by Mr. Cuomo and reluctantly embraced by lawmakers, school districts will have until Nov. 15 to negotiate local evaluation systems under the Regents’ model and have them approved by the State Education Department. Districts that miss the deadline risk losing this year’s state aid increases.

We’ve seen this kind of rush before. The results weren’t pretty.

We saw it with Common Core, which is inextricably linked to the phrase “botched rollout” for how New York imposed the new standards before curriculum materials were ready and tested students on material that many hadn’t been taught.

We saw it with the last teacher evaluation system, introduced around the same time as Common Core. With it came more tests, sparking outrage from parents and teachers about wasting class time on questionable measurements of teacher effectiveness. Upward of 200,000 students boycotted the latest standardized tests, with their parents’ blessing.

Now we are seeing what threatens to be a repeat of this upheaval.

Even supporters of teacher evaluations say the idea of judging teachers based on a single high-stakes test, as the law now requires, is flawed. They argue that to gauge student progress, multiple tests are needed over time. But parents and teachers say there’s too much testing. Tests are useful, many educators say, only if teachers get data in time to address weaknesses. But that isn’t the plan here.

There ought to be time to weigh these concerns. Instead, schools seem poised to plunge headlong into an initiative that sounds like it’s simply not thoroughly vetted. And how can we expect children to thrive and learn in such an atmosphere of adult discord?

To their credit, the Regents are now expected to allow four-month extensions for districts that legitimately can’t meet the deadline. But isn’t that just more paperwork? Isn’t it an acknowledgement that this is moving faster than at least some districts will likely be able to accommodate?

Voices across the education community are calling on the Regents to slow down. They’re right. To avoid more turmoil, which can only harm students, the Regents should tell Mr. Cuomo and lawmakers that this idea needs more thought and discussion, and that the deadline is simply too tight. Let the governor sue the Regents if he wants. New York’s kids deserve better than another botched rollout.