RALEIGH, N.C. – The North Carolina Association of Educators plans to sue the state over the elimination of teacher tenure.

The legislature voted to do away with teachers’ lifetime job protection and implemented something else instead: administrators select the top 25 percent of teachers and give them a $5,000 raise; everyone else gets one-year contracts, the Clayton News-Star reports.

The teachers association contends that forcing the new agreements on current teachers violates implied contractual rights to earlier job protections, according to media reports.

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Senate leader Phil Berger, the lawmaker who pushed to eliminate tenure, thinks the association’s concerns are silly.

“Only in the warped world of education bureaucrats and union leaders could a permanent $5,000 pay raise for top-performing teachers be branded as a bad thing,” Berger spokeswoman Amy Auth told the News-Star.

The problem is school administrators apparently don’t know which teachers are the best. That’s likely because the tenure-based system was tied to evaluations that were worthless. What’s the point of a rigorous evaluation when teachers are guaranteed employment?

“In 2011-12, just 17 out of 95,000 teachers in the state were fired. Critics of the tenure law also point to cases in which it took months between the beginning and end of the process to dismiss a teacher,” the news site reports.

Tenure protections technically don’t prohibit a school district from firing a teacher, but the “due process” they’re required to go through to make it happen is so time consuming and expensive most avoid it at all costs.

The new system requires school officials to do their jobs again, and, well, that’s a lot of work.

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“Principals and school administrators … complain they have been left with an impossible challenge in identifying the teacher to whom the bonuses will be offered,” according to the News-Star. “They say the result will further undermine teacher morale.”

Teachers will get over it, and we suspect many will quickly improve to ensure they’re rehired next year. The top 25 percent of teachers likely have no issue with the new law. The lawsuit challenging the law only makes the needed transition more difficult.

Administrators would be wise to get on board with the new program, and begin devising effective ways of sorting out their top performers. It may take a year or two to work out any issues, but in the end students will be far better off with teachers who must now keep on their toes to keep themselves employed.