“New York City will pay up to $2,000,000 per person to minorities who failed an old teachers exam, saying the test was racist for expecting teachers to be literate. It’s settling despite newer teaching exams having similar disparities, dispelling the allegation,” notes Luke Rosiak of the Daily Wire.
“The case concerns a test given in the 1990s. Since then, a test called Praxis has been the standard for teachers. It also had huge racial disparities, so New York went to a more subjective one called edTPA. But blacks also failed that one twice as often!”
“The tests are very easy and essentially evaluate whether teachers could pass the K-12 class they’d be teaching. The argument here is that because of ‘disproportionality,’ kids should have to be taught by teachers who don’t know the material, dooming those kids to failure.”
“At least 225 failed test takers are going to get at least $1 million,” notes Richard Hanania of the University of Texas.
The New York City Board of Education was sued for so-called “racially disparate impact,” which is when a colorblind job requirement rejects substantially more minorities than whites. Such “disparate impact” sometimes violates a provision of the awful Civil Rights Act of 1991, which was passed by a progressive Congress with the support of some RINOs (President Bush vetoed it in 1990, then signed it in 1991 after it was made slightly less awful). In theory, an employer can defend a job requirement, despite its “disparate impact,” by showing it has a “business necessity” for using it. That is, if people who meet the job requirement are much more qualified (not just somewhat more qualified) than people who flunk the job requirement. (See 42 U.S.C. 2000e-2(k)).
But in practice, employers in New York City usually have to get rid of job requirements that have a disparate impact, even when the job requirements are reasonable and result in a much better workforce. That’s because judges in New York City are very progressive, and tend to find that any common-sense job requirement that has a “disparate impact” on blacks is not justified by a “business necessity.” Moreover, New York City is a very left-wing place, and most of the City Council and most city staff and lawyers want to abolish merit-based hiring criteria that have a “disparate impact,” even if they result in the most qualified person being hired.
New York City essentially threw in the towel, capitulating to this lawsuit, under the prior, hardline leftist mayor, Bill DeBlasio. (The current moderate Democrat mayor, Eric Adams, is less bad than most of his political rivals in New York City’s awful, kleptocratic political system).
The supporters of this lawsuit do not care about the quality of education New York City’s schoolchildren get, says Rosiak. “This is a shocking example of K-12 schools being viewed as primarily a jobs program for adults–adults who are willing to inflict harm on children for their own financial benefit.”
“The NEA in 2011 said a study (that it co-wrote) showed that Praxis was racist, but the paper actually said the opposite, finding it tracked perfectly with all other indicators of performance, such as GPA and SAT.”
“Notably, education majors do WORSE on teacher credential exams than other majors. That’s really embarassing for a professional training track. But the response to people failing the exams wasn’t to improve teacher training so they were smarter; it was to say the test was racist.”
The Daily Wire reports:
New York City will pay nearly $2 billion to black and Hispanic people who wanted to become teachers but failed the exam, settling a lawsuit that alleged that the disparate passage rates showed that the test was racist.
Some individuals who never worked as teachers will get more than $1 million each, and could even get pensions which will inflate the cost well beyond $1.8 billion, the New York Post reported. The Post interviewed 64-year-old Herman Grim, who will be paid $2,055,383 after failing the test “a lot.” He could not provide any examples of how the questions were racist.
One anonymous Brooklyn principal told The Post the city was “crazy” to settle the case because “The standards are the standards … To hire people who are not qualified and change the requirements because a certain group didn‘t pass the test is bulls**t.”The settlement concerns the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, which prospective teachers took between 1993 and 1995. More than 90% of whites passed the test, while only 53% of blacks and even fewer Hispanics did….Teaching exams are notoriously easy, essentially measuring whether the teacher could pass the class she is teaching. Praxis’ creators said that “All of the content and skills in the three Praxis 1 tests … cover skills that do not exceed a high school level.”
New York City is, to a large extent, run by a parasitic class that collects city money. As Sam Antar observes,
New York has a disproportionate population of homeless people because there is a lot of money to be made by “nonprofit” entities in cohorts with their “progressive” political cronies in maintaining, rather than eliminating, homelessness. For example, the NYC Council, recently overrode Mayor Eric Adams veto, and passed a law that allows able-bodied people to receive rent vouchers with no work requirement. Billions of dollars are funneled into politicians’ pet “nonprofits” without any accountability or measurement of their effectiveness. For example, NYC Comptroller Brad Lander funneled over $500 million to nonprofits with ties to his wife with no measurable results. His pal, former Mayor Bill de Blasio funneled over $850 million to his wive’s ThriveNYC mental health initiative with no measurable results and most of that money remains unaccounted for.
Sources: news.ballotpedia.org/2023/07/14/new
nydailynews.com/news/politics/
