What exactly does it take to fire a bad teacher in Washington?

What does it actually take to get an irresponsibly disastrous teacher fired? Apparently, even when students are groped on a school trip due to rules she refused to enforce, it is not enough to fire a teacher.

You have a Garfield High School choir teacher, in Carol Burton, who broke school rules by drinking alcohol on an out-of-state field trip.

Listen: Jason Rantz interviews Carol Burton

That’s not even the worst of her dereliction of duty: she refused to inform students of a rule saying boys can’t go into girl’s rooms and vice versa. Consequently, a male student ends up groping two female classmates who were visiting his room.

Burton admits to knowing about this rule. In fact, she knew about it roughly five months before having to implement it on this school trip, but, as it happens, never complained to the district about it. But she told me that she didn’t like the rule, so why enforce it?

“I did know about that rule …” Burton told me in August of last year. “… and that implies that straight boys and girls cannot be trusted. And it’s a little weird. If you’ve been together for 16 hours all day long in very small rules, in various practice areas, in various hotels, all kinds of different circumstances and then arbitrarily say ‘okay, no longer can we do that.'”

What a shocker. Teenagers, most of whom will think about sex throughout the day, can’t be trusted to stay in rooms with people they find attractive, without supervision. Burton seems to believe not allowing kids in each other’s hotel rooms, privately, is “arbitrary.” I feel like most parents out there might disagree.

But even more troublesome is she somehow turns this rule into a social justice fight, arguing the rule treats heterosexual and homosexual students differently (up until her interview with me, I had not heard her ever make that claim before).

“I looked at all my straight kids and all of my gay kids and said ‘How do I enforce this equitably?'” she explained. “The implication here, of course, is that we don’t trust straight kids, so we do trust gay kids?

Perhaps she thinks we shouldn’t trust gay kids? I’ll write this off as an inartful way to make her point; after all, it seems like a contrived social justice argument she made to convince a judge that she shouldn’t be fired. She seems okay using gay students as props (at one point, her lawyer told me she was saving suicidal gay student’s lives) to excuse her pathetic, irresponsible behavior.

And it worked. She’s getting her job back.

A judge said while she clearly violated rules, Burton shouldn’t have been fired. Seattle Public Schools then released this statement:

We are disappointed that the district’s decision was not upheld. Ms. Burton was terminated because Seattle Public Schools determined she violated policy, and the district believed it was important to send a clear message that student safety is a top priority. The judge agreed with the district that Ms. Burton engaged in misconduct, but he reversed the district’s decision to terminate her. We will continue to review the findings to determine next steps.

I hope the next steps include an appeal. Burton shouldn’t have a job. Just when the Seattle School District finally steps in to try to fire a bad teacher, in a world where bad teachers are protected by unions, you have a judge step in and make a judgment informed by ideology, not facts.

A cop acts in self-defense, and activists call for the cop’s firing. A teacher drinks on a trip, doesn’t enforce a rule that would have prevented two girls from getting groped, and I hear silence from activists. What does it take to get bad teachers fired exactly?

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