[2013-2015] Affirmative Action Lands In The Air Traffic Control Tower

https://manhattan.institute/article/affirmative-action-lands-in-the-air-
traffic-control-tower

The Obama administration forces the Federal Aviation Administration to 
move away from merit-based hiring criteria.

When a plane starts its final descent, are the passengers more concerned 
about the competence or about the skin color of the air-traffic 
controllers on the ground who will help the pilot land safely? The answer 
may be obvious to readers, if not to the Obama administration.

A recently completed six-month investigation by Fox Business Network found 
that the Federal Aviation Administration has quietly moved away from 
merit-based hiring criteria in order to increase the number of women and 
minorities who staff airport control towers. The changes come despite the 
fact that the FAA's own internal reports describe the evidence for 
changing the hiring process as “weak.”

Until 2013, the FAA gave hiring preference to controller applicants who 
earned a degree from one of its Collegiate Training Initiative schools and 
scored high enough on an eight-hour screening test called the Air Traffic 
Selection and Training exam, or AT-SAT, which measures cognitive skills. 
The Obama administration, however, determined that the process excluded 
too many from minority groups. In May 2013, the FAA's civil rights 
administrator issued “barrier analyses” of the agency's employment 
procedures, which recommended “revising how the AT-SAT is used in 
establishing best-qualified lists.”

By the start of last year, the FAA was using a biographical questionnaire 
(BQ) to initially vet potential hires. The questions—“How many sports did 
you play in high school?”, “What has been the major cause of your 
failures?”—seem designed to elicit stories of personal disadvantage or 
family hardship rather than determine success on the job.

“The FAA says it created the BQ to promote diversity among its workforce,” 
reported Adam Shapiro of Fox Business. “All air traffic control applicants 
are required to take it. Those who pass are deemed eligible and those who 
fail are ruled ineligible.”

The FAA would not tell Fox Business what the biographical test is trying 
to measure and did not return my phone calls. But an FAA report released 
in October, “Using Biodata to Select Air Traffic Controllers,” concluded 
that the AT-SAT exam, not the biographical questionnaire, is a much better 
predictor of performance. “The biodata items assessed did little to 
improve our ability to select applicants most likely” to complete training 
successfully, said the study. “If biodata are to be used to select 
controllers, additional research is required to identify those biodata 
items that will add to the prediction of controller training performance 
over and above the effect of AT-SAT score.”

Given that training an air-traffic controller can cost more than $400,000 
on average, selecting candidates based on who is likely to complete the 
process makes economic sense. Hans Bader, a legal scholar at the 
Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes that the FAA's focus on diversity 
is not only inefficient but may be a violation of the Civil Rights Act. 
“The FAA's jettisoning of merit-based hiring criteria violated the Supreme 
Court's Ricci decision, [Ricci v. DeStefano, 2009] which limits agencies' 
ability to discard hiring criteria in order to increase minority 
representation, especially when there is no strong evidence that the 
criteria are not job-related,” said Mr. Bader.

After the FAA changed its screening process in 2014, thousands of 
applicants who were already in the pipeline—people who had obtained an 
FAA-accredited degree, taken the AT-SAT exam and had been designated 
“well-qualified” to become air-traffic controllers—were told by the 
government that they would have to start the process again. “But this 
time, when they applied for a job, their college degrees and previous 
military experience would mean nothing,” reported Fox Business. “They 
would now compete with thousands of people the agency calls ‘off the 
street hires'; anyone who wants to, can walk in off the street without any 
previous training and apply for an air traffic control job.”

In other words, the current policy is to deliberately favor less-qualified 
applicants over more qualified applicants in the name of obtaining the 
“right” racial and gender mix among air-traffic controllers. Advocates of 
“diversity” insist that discounting objective measures of ability and 
competence is harmless, but history shows that it can be deadly.

In 1973 Patrick Chavis was one of five black students admitted to a 
medical school in California through an affirmative-action program 
designed to increase minority enrollment. Allan Bakke, a white applicant 
who was rejected despite having much higher test scores than the black 
applicants, sued. In 1978 the Supreme Court struck down the program, but 
Chavis would go on to earn his medical degree and become a poster child 
for advocates of racial preferences. In 1995 he made the cover of the New 
York Times magazine. Sen. Ted Kennedy called him “the perfect example” of 
how affirmative action worked. In 1998 the California medical board 
revoked Chavis's medical license, noting his “inability to perform some of 
the most basic duties required of a physician” after several patients in 
his care died or were severely injured.

Admitting poorly qualified students to medical school increases the number 
of incompetent doctors. A selection process for air-traffic controllers 
that favors race and gender over ability is no less dangerous.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal


-- 
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump.  We look 
forward to America being great again.

The disease known as Kamala Harris has been effectively treated and 
eradicated.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that 
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Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem.  It has none.

Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden 
fiasco, President Trump.  

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the 
The World According To Garp.  Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood 
queer liberal democrat donors.