New York State will ask a Staten Island judge on Wednesday to dismiss a lawsuit by parents seeking to change the teacher tenure laws. The suit was brought by plaintiffs who claim the current tenure process violates students’ constitutional right under state law to a sound basic education.

Both sides will make their arguments Wednesday before State Supreme Court Justice Philip Minardo on Staten Island. So will lawyers for the city and unions representing teachers and principals, who have all joined the defense. It could take months before Minardo decides whether the suit can proceed.

The heart of the lawsuit argues that teachers play a vital role in that sound, basic education. However, it says an unknown number of ineffective teachers remain in the schools because the tenure system makes it too difficult to remove them. Plaintiffs claim tenure also gives senior teachers more job protections in the event of layoffs, regardless of their effectiveness.

The plaintiffs include two different groups of families in New York City, Albany and Rochester. One group is represented by former TV news anchor Campbell Brown’s Partnership for Educational Justice, and includes parents who claim their children fell behind in school because of their teachers.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Brown's group received financial support from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and Walton Family Foundation, two philanthropies very active around teacher quality issues.

The other group of families is led by Mona Davids of the New York City Parents Union, which filed the first lawsuit on Staten Island last year. The two suits were consolidated in September. They’ve received national attention because they’re modeled after the Vergara decision in which a judge last year struck down California’s tenure system for violating the educational rights of minority students in particular.

But court papers submitted by State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office accused the New York plaintiffs of engaging in "outlandish statements" and “a great deal of rhetoric and hyperbole.” The state argues that its sound, basic education law sets a minimum threshold and “does not mandate that students be instructed by those they perceive to be the ‘best’ teachers.”

The state also says the plaintiffs don’t have legal standing because their claims are vague, with no definition of an ineffective teacher, and because they can’t prove their children were directly harmed by the tenure laws.

“Neither complaint in this action alleges that plaintiff or a plaintiff’s child has been instructed by an allegedly ineffective teacher who retained a teaching position” because of the tenure law, the state asserts. Two of the named plaintiffs don’t even attend a public school.

The teachers union claims tenure is merely a right to due process, and not a job for life. Compared to California, New York also has a longer, three-year probationary period before teachers receive tenure.

But the plaintiffs argue that the current disciplinary process is so cumbersome that schools wind up keeping bad teachers. The attorney for the Davids group called this "super" due process, and noted that only 12 New York City teachers were dismissed for incompetency between 1997 and 2007. Meanwhile, both groups have argued that there must be many more ineffective teachers because nearly two thirds of all students in the state were not proficient on the state’s 2014 math and English tests.

The state has countered that the plaintiffs relied on old data, and ignore a new teacher evaluation law that includes the observations of supervisors and student performance on state exams. Attorneys for Brown’s group, however, claim it can still take too long to remove a teacher because two years’ worth of ineffective ratings are needed.

“Defendants would hide behind the new law, but a new coat of paint cannot ask an already crumbling structure.”

Critics have also noted that just 1 percent of teachers, statewide, were deemed ineffective in 2014 under the new evaluation system.

The only other successful suit involving the state’s guarantee of a sound, basic education was the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case, in which the plaintiffs were able to prove New York’s school aid formula shortchanged districts including New York City. The case took a decade because there were so many appeals and education groups say the state never lived up to its agreement to provide billions of dollars in additional funding to schools.