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Notes -
A major discrimination settlement has been reached with NYC candidate teachers.
The NY Post is reporting that New York City has reached a $1.8B bias settlement with roughly 5200 Black and Hispanic teachers who failed a New York State teaching certification exam, which prevented them from serving as teachers in NYC public schools. At least 225 would-be teachers will receive payments exceeding $1M (not including ancillary benefits like lifetime pensions for jobs that were never performed).
I am not a lawyer, and I have no familiarity with this kind of litigation, but I was surprised at the settlement. It's possible that NYC got spooked by recent high-profile discrimination lawsuit outcomes (jury verdict against Equinox here, settlement with Fox News here), and it's possible the legal fees and likely result of a trial made settling prudent for NYC. But I wonder whether NYC politicians (or bureaucrats) failed to mount a vigorous legal defense out of ideological sympathy for the plaintiffs.
I also don't see how this kind of settlement - available only to failed candidates based on their race - can satisfy an Equal Protection standard. Won't failed white candidates have a discrimination claim?
Anyway, there's no shortage of culture war angles to this story. NYC famously pays $38,000 per public school student / year, with mediocre outcomes; once again the tax payer seems to get a raw deal. There are the perennial issues around disparate racial impact from ostensibly race-blind hiring practices. The NYT doesn't seem to have reported on this, which raises questions about media coverage. And so on.
I want to focus on a different question, though: to what extent (if at all) do such high-profile, lottery-style bonanzas undermine the case for honest, low-paid toil among the working class? I have a pet theory that the seeming arbitrariness of financial success in America (and perhaps other countries) is a major factor (not the only one!) among prime working age men exiting the labor market. Events like this feel deeply unfair - why work your whole life if you can get paid to not work? And nobody wants to participate in a system that's rigged against them.
The reason the city lost is because the test setters did not have the requisite proof that performance on the test was reflected in performance on the job. It probably was, almost any standardized test like this would be, but their only testing was asking a small number of teachers whether the topics on the test were important to teaching or something.
IQ testing job candidates (even if/when there are outcome differences between groups) is 100% legal in the US. The military does it. Countless civilian employers do it (those famous ‘Google interview questions’ are IQ tests). Police do it. There are companies like Wonderlic, Pearson etc who make a lot of money selling these tests to employers.
But you have to prove the test reflects on-the-job performance within a reasonable period. This is ridiculously easy, employee evaluations and objective measures of success (targets, sales figures, good feedback, etc) will almost certainly reflect intellectual ability with a strong correlation, but you have to put in the work and say “on average, here are the stats that show that the higher you score on this test, the better you do in the job”.
In this case it went against NYC’s politics to argue the test did work, so instead they tried to claim the state made them do it, which seemingly wouldn't have been accepted as an excuse by the court.
This is another good reason to despise "civil rights" attorneys. Sure, we already know that pretty much every type of job performance correlates with IQ, but if you don't hire the appropriate HR workers and file the appropriate paperwork, you can expect to be sued for racistly not proving that you actually do prefer to hire competent employees.
That’s all lawyers. The law is about technicalities.
Is filing for habeas corpus after your client has been arrested because he criticized the president a technicality?
Yes, there is a lot of rent seeking in the American legal profession, but "all" is a strong word.
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