The Department of Education finds itself in a less than optimal situation: A deadline looms for getting under way with a pilot program reforming the way teachers are evaluated, at the same time a contract standoff with the teachers union continues to fester.

Ideally, public schools officials and the Hawaii State Teachers Association would have been at the table together to hash out how such an important program will work. But that ship, it seems, has sailed. It would be better at least to begin the process of reform, rather than wait until everything’s settled on the contractual front, something that could take a very long time, judging by the level of current hostilities.

The Abercrombie administration’s decision to implement the terms of its "last, best and final" contract offer has both parties locking horns over a question that the Hawaii Labor Relations Board now must answer: Was the state’s action prohibited under labor laws?

So the best way to deal with the evaluation test in this circumstance would be to do as state schools Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi suggests: Go ahead with the pilot program, even if the reforms result in an evaluation that, for now, will be nonbinding.

The reason there’s such urgency around the issue is that bids are due next week for hiring a contractor to help overhaul teacher evaluations and make them more "performance-based." That reform element was a key component in Hawaii’s winning a federal Race to the Top competitive grant. The aim of the pilot is to base 35 percent of a teacher’s rating on student academic growth.

In earlier discussions, HSTA leaders had been open to the concept, although they correctly note that the precise formula — how precisely to link teacher performance to academic growth — needs to be crafted carefully to be fair.

The shortcomings of Hawaii’s system for evaluating its public school teachers have been well established. To cite one critical overview, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonpartisan research and policy group, issued a study in 2008 on Hawaii’s challenges in retaining effective teachers. In it, the council gave Hawaii a letter-grade of D for "identifying effective teachers": "Its teacher evaluation system uses classroom observations but fails to require evidence of student learning through objective measures such as standardized test scores."

Correlating teacher evaluations with student performance will provide a useful prompt notifying school administrators that there may be a problem with a teacher’s approach. That should not by itself lead to anyone’s dismissal, but it at least would shine a light on the need for improvement. Without this measure of accountability, it’s easy to see how chronically lackluster job performance could be swept under the rug.

Matayoshi makes the rational case that HSTA approval is not required at this stage because any evaluations yielded in the pilot would not be part of a teacher’s personnel record. Thus, she contended in a letter to the HSTA, the DOE is not implementing a new evaluation that bypasses collective bargaining. That seems fair: What is developed through this nonbinding pilot among select teachers could be used as a basis for later negotiations with the union over the evaluation’s final form.

What seems unreasonable is the HSTA’s position, that all forward progress must stop until the union agrees — especially when chances for that in the near term seem slim indeed.