We are in a rare time in public education in California.

The landmark lawsuit Vergara v. California has added new hope and a new sense of urgency to improving public schools across the Golden State.

As a teacher in Compton and Los Angeles, I have seen some of the poorest students in the state, those most in need of a quality education, stripped of their best teachers and accordingly denied educational opportunities because of unfair and unconstitutional statutes.

These laws — controlling teacher tenure, dismissal and layoff decisions in California — were challenged in a lawsuit filed by nine public school students, and on Tuesday the judge issued a decision in favor of the plaintiffs. With this landmark decision, California has taken a critical step toward offering all children in California the high quality education they deserve. Now, teachers, parents, students and policymakers have an opportunity to develop and implement an innovative new system for recruiting and retaining top teaching talent to our public schools.

Over the course of the two-month trial, current and former teachers, principals, superintendents, education policy experts, economists and students described in heartbreaking detail what I know to be true. An unnecessarily complicated, dehumanizing and dysfunctional system lays off teachers without dignity and respect, leaves parents and administrators feeling helpless to do what they know is best for their community, and lets students fall through the cracks. We now have a chance to change this.

Prior to this decision, the Permanent Employment statute granted teachers permanent employment status after a period of only 16 months. As superintendents and principals testified during trial, administrators need more time to make such important personnel decisions.

The defendants argued during trial, however, that this law was necessary to attract and retain teachers. Since I entered the classroom, I have never desired my career to be based on time spent on the job. Instead, I’ve wanted career milestones like tenure to be based on the expertise and success I exhibit in my classroom with students. I’ve wanted meaningful evaluations every year that take into account how much my students are learning, accompanied by thoughtful feedback from both my peers and my supervisors.

But diligent evaluations mean nothing without real accountability. The Vergara lawsuit revealed that 19 teachers in the entire state of California have been dismissed for poor performance in the past 10 years. During the trial, superintendents described the expensive, bureaucratic maze they must navigate to get persistently poor performers out of the classroom. While I believe we must ensure that struggling teachers get the support they need, it is just as important that we let go those who cannot improve after a reasonable amount of time.

Of course, most of California’s public school teachers are very good at what they do and love educating our children. In fact, each year the profession attracts a new cohort of highly motivated educators ready to prepare our children for success.

Sadly, however, California’s system stacks the deck against the effort to retain bright new professionals. Governed by the principle of “last-in, first-out,” the seniority-based layoff statute forces school districts to make layoff decisions independent of teacher quality.

Personal experience has shown me that it is vitally important to keep teachers in the classroom who have shown their worth across a broad continuum of benchmarks that measure student success, from test scores to graduation rates to cultivating real-world skills for future employability. I have seen such teachers, including myself, laid off year after year with no recourse but a union-appointed lawyer who will only argue a teacher’s level of seniority and never the merits of seniority as it relates to the quality of a child’s education.

I entered the teaching profession because I believe deeply in the promise of public education, and I want a system that cares how well I am educating my children more than how long I’ve been around.

For far too long, however, we have been shackled with a system where hard work is not rewarded and where our unions have worked to protect those who are unable to improve. It is past time for unions to step up and leverage their influence to engage with stakeholders and create solutions instead of standing as barriers to reforms that are better for our kids.

Getting to a better system is no easy task. But we owe it to the nine students who bravely stood in open court to tell us the system is broken and to the rest of California’s children to work together to create a system that works for all students.

Chris Ciampa is a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District.