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SCOTUS strikes down reverse discrimination

oldhat said:
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P.S. Can we do away with the myth that affirmative action means giving a patently unqualified black applicant immediate preference over Socrates Elmer Gantry Joe DiMaggio when he's applying to college? Affirmative action doesn't work like that. A.A. is a policy where race may be considered as one of many facets of an applicant. Which translates to, all other things being equal, the under represented minority should be given preference.
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It depends on the implementation. In the case of Mich Law, that was practically what was going on as detailed by Ed on 60 Minutes.
 
parky76 said:
I support the conservative judges decision today.
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So do I -- and that's not a frequent occurrence for me.

Ever since I first heard of this case, it struck me as a prime example of a tangible, real-life problem caused directly by public innumeracy. The entire controversy sprung from the fact that people went from agreeing that the test was racially neutral, to declaring that it must be racially biased after all, simply because none of the 20 people who passed it were black. 20 people? If 2000 people had passed it and none of them were black, then there would clearly be something to look at... but 20? That's like concluding that a coin must be double-headed because it came up heads four times in a row. (Not literally, but you get the idea).

If the average Joe -- or more to the point, the average New Haven bureaucrat -- had even a rudimentary understanding of statistics and the importance of sample size, this never would have been an issue, let alone a Supreme Court case.

But given that it did become a Supreme Court case, my biggest disappointment was that it was another sharply divided 5-4 split, with the dissenting opinion basically coming down to, "This decision is a travesty of justice that future generations will view as yet another nail in the coffin of our society, penned by a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."
 
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linusrichard said:
Boy, to read this thread, you'd think the case had something to do with affirmative action, or that the defendants discriminated against somebody.

What they did was throw out the test results because the white and hispanic applicants did better than the black applicants, so they figured the test must be biased, so they wanted to find a way to choose whom to promote without using a biased test. Also wanted to avoid getting sued.
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linusrichard attempts to get this discussion on point and even he misses the core issue. This is NOT a racial discrimination case. It is a case about judicial activism. There was ample precedent for the action the defendants took as support by previous court cases. Now you and I may not like the precedent but it is NOT the job of the courts to redress societal grievances; it is the job of the courts to uphold established law.

Established law supported the defendant. The Supremes engaged in judicial activism by overturning precedent. If the process used by the defendant was racist, then it is the job of the legislature to overturn that process, not the judiciary.
 
This case shows how close our litigious society is to gridlocking itself.

Throwing out the promotion list not because of being sued, but for fear of being sued. Next step, no promotions, out of fear of being sued by one side or the other. Then no hiring at all.

So this is another precedent setting case that limits AA. And allows cities to function. It's progress towards fairness.
 
On Diane Rehm this morning, they were discussing the latest batch of rulings by SCOTUS.

In regards to this one, a possible scenario is to just toss the written tests completely. There are other criteria which could be employed for promotions, criteria used by a wide variety of businesses and organizations.
Oral boards, performance reviews, practical tests, etc.

For some reason I don't understand, many fire departments around the country have used these written tests as part of their promotional process. They have been problematic for some time. The St. Louis fire department went through a very similar impasse a couple of years ago which resulted in all the tests being thrown out and the fire chief sacked, all this to head off the lawsuit that would have inevitably been filed.

Police departments have traditionally employed a written test as well, but as a part of a rather lengthy process that included physical exam, oral board, interview with the chief, and often a written essay.
 
oldhat said:
Also, just to get rid of the race warfare tinge to this debate, it doesn't primarily help racial minorities, A.A. mostly helps women.
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Then it would seem to be strange as women are more likely to have higher education than men.
 
Bikewer said:
On Diane Rehm this morning, they were discussing the latest batch of rulings by SCOTUS.

In regards to this one, a possible scenario is to just toss the written tests completely. There are other criteria which could be employed for promotions, criteria used by a wide variety of businesses and organizations.
Oral boards, performance reviews, practical tests, etc.

For some reason I don't understand, many fire departments around the country have used these written tests as part of their promotional process. They have been problematic for some time. The St. Louis fire department went through a very similar impasse a couple of years ago which resulted in all the tests being thrown out and the fire chief sacked, all this to head off the lawsuit that would have inevitably been filed.

Police departments have traditionally employed a written test as well, but as a part of a rather lengthy process that included physical exam, oral board, interview with the chief, and often a written essay.
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Do we know that Newhaven didn't do this? When my brother went for his leutenants exam, there was a written exam that he needed to study a lot for. This was with a fire science degree from the univerisity of New Haven. Then there were practical simulations, including one of a burning house were the decisions you make are enterpreted by the computer into how much of the house burns down.

But the written parts are often given first because they are the least resource intensive to give to a large aplicant pool, and if you need a certain score to be considered, why not give it first?

This is how hireing is done in fire departments, you first have to pass the written test, then you need to pass the physical. And of course AA means that minorities recieve extra considerations.
 
I'm trying to figure out, what is the explanation for why the minorities scored so much lower on the exam? If it's not that the examination itself is inherently (not necessarily intentionally, but inherently nonetheless) biased against them, then what is it?
 
Read the decision here. The document is 93 pages long.

There is a strange dynamic that may come about from this case. The New Haven exams were not the only type of exams. Other exams existed, and apparently these other exams did not produce results along racial lines as the New Haven exams did. According to Justice Ginsburg's dissent:
The Court similarly fails to acknowledge the better tests used in other cities, which have yielded less racially skewed outcomes.
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In a footnote, Justice Ginsburg said:
Even a detached and disinterested observer, however, would have every reason to ask: Why did such racially skewed results occur in New Haven, when better tests likely would have produced less disproportionate results?
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That other exams tests produced less racial division seemed not to be in dispute. The position of the majority was that the mere fact that less discriminatory exams existed did not mean that the New Haven exams were legally flawed.
In other words, there is no evidence—let alone the required strong basis in evidence—that the tests were flawed because they were not job-related or because other, equally valid and less discriminatory tests were available to the City.
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The majority's position makes some sense. The New Haven exam has to be judged on its own merits, and the fact that a better exam existed doesn't mean that New Haven ought to be legally required to use it or that the New Haven exam is automatically afoul of the law.

But consider the dilemma faced by those who must give such exams, especially if they had previously given an exam that may have been one of those "equally valid and less discriminatory" exams. Do they continue to give the same type of exam? Or do they adopt an equally valid and MORE discriminatory New-Haven-style exam, since this exam was blessed by the Supreme Court?

This sort of thing happens quite a bit. Occasionally a document—a contract provision, a jury instruction, a statute, a conveyance, a trust instrument, an exam—comes before a court and the court basically says, "This is probably not the best that could be done, but legally speaking, it passes." In response, people draft documents in accordance with what the court said was okay, even if the court said that the document wasn't all that good in the first place. Instead of document quality getting better, it gets worse.

Will this happen in this case? Hard to say.
 
parky76 said:
and there is no evidence that this exam was anything but color-blind.
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Other then the fact it preferentially selected against African Americans…

It may be difficult to say why this test preferentially selected against this group but the results went well beyond statistical chance.

That leaves 3 possibilities IMO

1) The test was skewed against African Americans despite the attempts to make it fair
2) A training system that selected against African Americans getting the skills they needed to pass the test
3) African Americans are innately less qualified at the things the test covered.

1 and 2 both provide sufficient reason for redoing the test.

3 is basically a racist statement that people of African decent are inferior and the SCOTUS just rubber stamped it.
 
My interpretation of the case is that the SCOTUS has narrowly decreed that changing the rules after the fact is unconstitutional, if the reason you changed them is because you didn't get the result you thought you ought to get.
That is really all it means.
 
pgwenthold said:
I'm trying to figure out, what is the explanation for why the minorities scored so much lower on the exam? If it's not that the examination itself is inherently (not necessarily intentionally, but inherently nonetheless) biased against them, then what is it?
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lomiller said:
Other then the fact it preferentially selected against African Americans…
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It could be a million different things. Small sample size, anyone?
 
Interesting that no one on this thread has mentioned that the Supreme Court reversed a decision that nominee Sotomayor endorsed as a federal appeals court judge. Now had Sotomayor been on the bench ...
 
pgwenthold said:
We could include small sample size onto the list that lomiller gave, and that would make it four. Any other possible explanations?
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Small sample size isn't a reason why blacks didn't do well on the test...it's just an indication that what we have doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the nature of the test. Repeated, scientific study helps determine that. Has there been an actual study on the test itself?
 
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