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

On 2025-02-01, Leroy N. Soetoro <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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 start
>>> quit.
s 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.

DEI is a disaster and does nothing good for anyone.
At least with a doctor a person can do some research and choose a good one
assuming it's not an emergency of course.

How do I choose an ATC who is guiding the plane I am sitting in to a landing?
I can't.



-- 
pothead

Why did Joe Biden pardon his family?
Read below to learn the reason.
The Biden Crime Family Timeline here:
https://oversight.house.gov/the-bidens-influence-peddling-timeline/