An education advocacy group on Thursday threw down the first challenge to New York’s teacher tenure laws in the wake of a landmark court decision in California last month finding such laws there unconstitutional.

A lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court on Staten Island argues that the tenure laws violate the State Constitution’s guarantee of a “sound basic education” by making it difficult to fire bad teachers and by protecting the most veteran teachers in the event of layoffs, regardless of their quality. The suit, filed against city and state education officials, names as plaintiffs 11 public school students whose parents belong to a group known as the New York City Parents Union.

The road ahead is less than certain in either state.

Already, the California Federation of Teachers has vowed to appeal the decision in the case, Vergara v. California. And union leaders, legal analysts and others said it would be difficult to gain any traction on the issue in New York’s judiciary.

“It is basically unprecedented for a court to get into the weeds of a controversial education policy matter like this,” said Michael A. Rebell, an education lawyer and professor at Teachers College at Columbia University. “Even if a court agrees there is a problem, they are more likely to defer to the legislative branch, which, in New York, has been trying to deal with these complex tenure issues and knows more about the workings of these policies.”

Document: Lawsuit Filed by the New York City Parents Union

Mona Davids, the president of the New York City Parents Union, said the suit was modeled on the Vergara case, in which Judge Rolf M. Treu of Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that the tenure laws deprived students of their right to an education under the California Constitution and violated their civil rights. He also ruled that seniority rules requiring the newest teachers to be laid off first, as in periods of economic downturn, were harmful.

Challenges to teacher tenure laws are moving to the courts since efforts in state legislatures have repeatedly been turned back. Critics of the existing rules say tenure essentially guarantees teachers a job for life. According to the New York suit, only 12 teachers in New York City were fired for poor performance from 1997 to 2007 because of a legally guaranteed hearing process that frequently consumes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Education reform groups, some of them supported by Wall Street philanthropists, are expected to support a wave of Vergara-inspired suits. Ms. Davids contended that her suit was different because it was not being bankrolled by outside interests.

“We are our own Superman and we are putting our students first, and we don’t need anyone else from the outside to manage us and control us and tell us what needs to be done,” she said.

However, Ms. Davids said she expected that if multiple cases were to be filed, they would eventually be lumped together by the courts.

Mr. Rebell and others said they were not sure if eliminating or changing tenure rules would lead to more effective teachers or improve educational experiences for those in poor areas.

In New York, teachers can earn tenure after a three-year probationary period, which city school officials can extend for another year, and often do. That represents one big difference with California, where teachers can win tenure after 18 months, and even before being certified.

Once granted, tenure in New York does not afford any advantages in pay or job assignments. Its most important benefit, in the eyes of teachers’ unions, is protection against indiscriminate, unjustified or politically tinged hiring and firing.

“Tenure doesn’t protect bad teachers,” said Carl Korn, a spokesman for New York State United Teachers, the statewide union, adding that its lawyers are “already gearing up” to defend tenure in court. “It allows good ones to fight for what students need.”

State education officials say that a new teacher evaluation law, which assigns teachers one of four grades each year, will make it easier to fire teachers who repeatedly get poor marks, although very few did so in the first year that the law was in effect.

“With that evaluation system, the teachers who get promoted, the teachers who stay, would be the teachers who are high performing,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said when asked last month about the Vergara case.

Timothy Daly, the president of the New Teacher Project, which has advocated changes in the way teachers are hired and fired, agreed that the new evaluation system could help remove bad teachers in New York, in contrast with California, which he said had “a very outmoded system for evaluating teachers.”

On layoffs, though, Mr. Daly said New York and California had the same “last in, first out” law, so a challenge on that front could “be formidable.”

Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for years set about “ending tenure as we know it,” and principals under his administration were nudged to judge teachers more critically. By last year, barely half of teachers earned tenure after three years, with the most of the rest having their probation extended for another year.