The great weakness of New York’s education system has been school leaders’ inability to get rid of ineffective or incompetent teachers, so it’s news worth celebrating that changes in state law have made that process easier.

After decades of complaints about the unwieldy and expensive disciplinary process for tenured teachers, called 3020-a, New York last year passed reforms that streamlined the required hearings. In the past, 3020-a hearings would play out over more than a year — often two years.

Since schools are in most cases required to continue paying a suspended teacher while also paying the teacher’s replacement (not to mention the school district’s lawyer), hearings are expensive.

Faced with that expense, school principals and superintendents have been reluctant to discipline teachers, even in cases of gross incompetence. Instead, school leaders have often been willing to provide good references if teachers agree to leave.

So, bad and sometimes abusive teachers have been able to maintain their careers, and contact with children.

The reforms have improved the situation by shortening the average time it takes to resolve disciplinary cases, which decreases the amount of money districts have to spend. Cases are lasting four or five months now.

But we agree with the New York School Boards Association: More needs to be done to reform 3020-a. The association recommends:

— Establish a state hearing panel to hear and decide cases.

— Authorize districts to fire tenured teachers without a 3020-a hearing if they have been convicted of child abuse in an educational setting; their teaching certificate has been revoked by the state; or they failed to obtain permanent certification.

— Clarify that teachers must cooperate in the school district investigation of 3020-a charges against them.

— Eliminate paid suspension for teachers awaiting 3020-a proceedings, or cap the length of time they are paid.

— Require teachers facing 3020-a hearings to disclose the nature of their defense prior to the hearing.

We were amazed to read tenured teachers who have abused children in school and been convicted cannot be summarily fired. Likewise teachers who had their teaching certificates revoked or failed to get certification.

What about a teacher who never showed up for work — could he be fired? What about a teacher who showed up but screamed obscenities at students the entire class every day?

Obviously, more reforms are needed to bring some common sense to the situation. School officials should not be able to fire teachers capriciously. But they should be able to fire teachers who are dangerous, abusive or grossly negligent in their jobs.

School leaders should have the power almost every other boss has, in the public and the private sector, to get rid of employees who have a destructive effect on the workplace, whose behavior runs counter to the mission of the enterprise and whose negative job performance drags down everyone around them.

Teachers should want the rare bad apples forced out, and we’re guessing most of them do. Nonetheless, the teachers union has fought to maintain the powerful tenure protections that have made firing teachers, or even disciplining them, difficult.

When accountability is lacking, mediocrity can go unchallenged, and teaching is too important to allow that.