Fired teacher’s lawsuit offers reminder: Document everything, apply it evenly

A teacher’s discrimination suit against his former school district reminds employers of the evidentiary burdens employees face and shows what a defensible investigation looks like.

What happened

Joe Bravo, a teacher of Mexican-American descent, was accused by six different students of making racially and culturally insensitive remarks about their educational prospects. The Dallas Independent School District investigated and ultimately fired him. 

Bravo sued, claiming the district’s true motive was discrimination against him because of his own ethnicity, not the students’ complaints. Both the federal district court and the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals (whose rulings apply to all employers in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) ruled in the district’s favor.

Requirement to provide comparator evidence upheld

Long-standing precedent requires employees who sue for employment discrimination to satisfy the so-called “prima facie” standard by showing, among other things, that a “similarly situated” employee outside their protected class (for example, race, sex, etc.) was treated differently under nearly identical circumstances. The idea behind this requirement is intuitively obvious: If the only material difference between employees subject to differing employment decisions is their protected class, that alone could be evidence that a discriminatory animus motivated the employment decision at issue.