Posted on 05/31/2007 3:34:26 AM PDT by Lovebloggers
The state has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit by requiring Boston, Brookline, and 18 other cities and towns to offer police and firefighter jobs to minority applicants who took civil service exams that a judge later found were discriminatory.
The state would also pay a total of up to $1.45 million in back pay.
The agreement, which will be presented to a federal judge for approval Wednesday, calls for the hiring of 66 minority candidates statewide, including 26 in Boston, who scored high on police or fire exams between 2002 and 2005, but lost out to higher-scoring white candidates.
A federal judge ruled last summer that the state's 2002 and 2004 firefighter exams discriminated against blacks and Hispanics and was about to hold a trial to consider additional claims resulting from arguments that the 2003 and 2005 police exams were also unfair to members of minority groups.
Harold L. Lichten, a lawyer who filed the class-action suit against the state and the city of Lynn on behalf of four black firefighter applicants, said they agreed to settle because the state came up with a new "state of the art" exam last year that appears to be much fairer to minorities.
"Our goal was to secure an exam that actually predicts job performance . . . so minorities would have a reasonable shot of doing as well [as white applicants] on the exam, so there wouldn't be resegregation of departments," Lichten said.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
And, they didn’t even need Jesse Jackson to assist in the shakedown.
Notice there are no examples of the disriminatory questions on the old exams. This is another case of demanding equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity.
They all took the same tests, MAY THE BEST MAN WIN. Anything else is just pandering.
The new test is in ebonics....
So if I test two people, and I hire the person who scores highest I’m engaged in discrimination?
We ought to also apply this standard to judges: Give a test to an attorney and a bum off the street and then hire the bum as a judge. We could name it the bum bench test and fill courtrooms with bums making rulings. We’d probably be better off.
The NFL’s 32 teams each employ 2 starting cornerbacks. All 64 of these players are Black. Clearly, the methodology whereby they are chosen is flawed.
The main criterion for the position is speed. One has to be fast enough to stay with the very fast (almost exclusively Black) wide receivers in the league. They measure your speed in the forty yard dash. A time of around 4.4 seconds is required.
Since Caucasians apparently are incapable of such achievements (as witnessed by the team rosters,) clearly a judge needs to rule that there is discrimination involved.
Perhaps a written test should be given, with questions such as: If a wide receiver runs the forty in 4.2 seconds, and the slow, white, middle-aged cornerback runs it in 6.2 seconds, by how many yards will the receiver be open, assuming a 5 yard cushion and a pass that is thrown 4 seconds after the ball is snapped.
(I don’t know either, but I think I just figured out how to get jobs for 120 lb. Asian cornerbacks.)
Man have I ever been there and done that. DC spent millions on a project similar to this, It was called the Chittlin test. Trying to write test questions that only blacks can answer correctly is an impossibility,so eventually they come up with quota’s.
Theylower the test scores or they hire the top people and keep using names off the list until they get down to where there are blacks, Sometimes they use the same test for 4 or 5 years to get down to the black test scores.
If that dosnt work they use a scheme of oral interviews to weed out whites . Of course the oral interview just means whites score low and no record is kept of the secretive sessions.
I am surprised this place is so long in coming up with this crap, Most large cities went through this 15 or 20 years ago,and have started going back to hiring qualified people again. I guess its on a comeback.
The famous Chittlin test didnt work ,because although they spent a great deal of time and effort trying to write questions only blacks could answer, white applicants still wrote better scores.
I have seen some of the Judges and dont doubt that is eaxctly what they are doing.
Ebonics? Oh, they wish!
Funny personal story about language stereotypes. I was eating in a fast-food place when a middle-aged Latina woman came in and spoke to the cashier, a teenage Hispanic-looking boy, in Spanish. The boy replied, “I don’t speak Spanish.” The look on her face was priceless.
SO we need to fire the whites and hire lower scoring minorities...state based discrimination.
I don’t have a problem with female firefighters - as long as they can hall 200 lbs. down 10 flights of stairs. Trouble is the new test is probably 5 lbs. down 1 flight of stairs. Diversity first, safety last.
Yep, being at a fire or a shoot out is just where you want a lower performing person next to you.
What's wrong with this picture? The HIGHER SCORING candidates were white, so the LOWER-SCORING were discriminated against?
What a load of crap!
This is the lawyers' way of fleecing taxpayers to line their own pockets, wherever someone "loses", and the winner is penalized for over-achieving?
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