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

pothead <[email protected]> wrote in
news:[email protected]: 

> On 2025-02-01, Leroy N. Soetoro <[email protected]>
> wrote: 
>> https://manhattan.institute/article/affirmative-action-lands-in-the-ai
>> r- 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.


    What did Trump do about it in his first term?