Thanks for compiling this, Trace. Very well-summed up!
My only question is this… “But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue.”
I either don’t buy that or don’t understand what you mean. This seems like the DEI/Affirmative Action chickens coming home to roost, right? Aside from the black CTI grads left out of the class action lawsuit.
At its core, it is the case of a very few members of a special interest group hijacking a process that nobody else was paying close attention to. Most Democrats, seeing the specific fact pattern, will agree that it is wrong. Most progressives want competent air traffic controllers. It is a case of ignorance and coalitional politics more than it is an example of fundamental antipathy towards excellence, and it should be understood that way. The more it is treated as a partisan issue, the less likely Democrats will progress on it.
You can say "everyone wants competent air traffic controlers," but you also note that those promoting diversity goals are "between a rock and a hard place in the impossible task of avoiding disparate impact while preserving objective standards."
No man can serve two masters, and it's clear which master the democratic coalition has chosen to serve. So I have to agree with Colin B.
The problem is those promoting diversity goals genuinely believe that there are just as many, and likely more, qualified nonwhite, non-male candidates for all possible jobs relative to their percentage of the population relative to the other side. They're worse than creationists, and significantly more powerful and influential.
>"Most Democrats, seeing the specific fact pattern, will agree that it is wrong."
Will they? The Congressional Black Caucus was part of the consultations that produced this travesty, and they actually aren't terribly out of step with nonblack Dems on racial issues affecting blacks.
"At its core, it is the case of a very few members of a special interest group hijacking a process that nobody else was paying close attention to."
To be fair, this how most actual policy change gets done. The big difference between the two sides of politics is which special interest groups they let get away with things.
"Most Democrats, seeing the specific fact pattern, will agree that it is wrong. Most progressives want competent air traffic controllers." How do you square that statement with the strong widespread support for diversity hiring among Democrats? (Genuine question.) Affirmative action by definition favours diversity over merit. Prima facie, it seems that even if supporters want competent professionals, they are willing to sacrifice some quality in exchange for more diversity. One counter-argument is that mandating diversity does not sacrifice quality because racism means that highly qualified minority applicants do not get hired even though they are just as good as white applicants. Is that what you mean by the 'specific fact pattern'? Do you think most Dems justify diversity hiring on that basis, and would think that diversity hiring is generally good, but that argument just happens not to fly on these facts? Or is it that they are willing to sacrifice quality for diversity in many areas, but just not in air traffic control? (I would have thought most people want competent doctors as well, but there is a widespread push to eliminate the MCAT and some schools have done that, at least in part.)
It varies. There are two broad sets of opinions about diversity hiring: the one most normal democrats espouse, and the one a few highly informed cynics quietly hold to:
The former proposes that it’s a mild edge between functionally identical people, particularly seeking out qualified people from circles they wouldn’t normally be found. This is what most normal Democrats support and believe. The latter is “it will lead to decline and that’s fine” racial spoils, which is a minority view. There’s some middle ground with “it will lead to a bit of short-term decline but long-term improvement,” which normal people can be persuaded towards. But again, the first school is the biggest.
OK, that makes sense. That seems to imply that the majority of Democrats do not support quotas because that goes beyond the 'mild edge / tie-breaker' position. Is that right? (Ie descriptively, most Democrats do not support quotas.) More broadly, you seem to be saying that in your view, Democrats will not support specific instances where it is clear on the facts that it goes beyond the 'mild edge' position. Presumably, to lose support for diversity hiring generally, the normal Democrat would have to be persuaded that diversity hiring typically and systematically goes substantially beyond the 'mild edge'. That will be difficult, as any individual instances can plausibly be explained as an aberration. Do you agree? (FWIW, at my institution we had for decades a formal tie-breaker provision in favour of women, which did in fact operate purely as a tie-breaker.)
Quota's could still work. If you were trying to staff people to work the register at McDonalds, you could certainly have a quota for 70% minority hires without a meaningful drop in the quality of the workforce. (I am not advocating for quotas)
"The former proposes that it’s a mild edge between functionally identical people, particularly seeking out qualified people from circles they wouldn’t normally be found. This is what most normal Democrats support and believe."
Most normal Democrats, and many other people support and believe this, because this is the way it's generally presented. But this isn't the way it operates in the real world.
You don't have to search very hard to find people (activists, consultants, HR professionals) who candidly state that his level of preference doesn't give significant results. The solution is that managers, bureaucrats, and admissions officers must take aggressive action focused only on achieving diversity statistics. Corporate executives are frank that some senior executive must be "accountable" for achieving diversity goals. Managers know how to achieve metrics; if the metric focuses on race or sex, and not aptitude or competence, the selection process will be adjusted accordingly.
>>"It is a case of ignorance and coalitional politics more than it is an example of fundamental antipathy towards excellence, and it should be understood that way.... I am confident that Buttigieg can see that just as well as the rest of us, that for many, it is simply the same neglect everybody else has shown towards the case that has led it to linger awkwardly unresolved for a decade. .<<
If these things are true, then this story will go viral among progressives, and Mayor Pete will do the right thing. Agreed?
That’s true, and I agree with Chase about Mayor Pete just being the guy holding the potato when the music stops.
But how did this approach to hiring start? I don’t think I’m crazy to see fingerprints of the progressive wing of the left here. It may be a step removed from workplace DEI trainings or affirmative action college admissions, but it’s not like you have to go all the way back and find the butterfly’s wing flap that causes things like this.
You're right, but it's also because not enough people called out the BS when it was first happening. We though the DEI stuff would remain in the universities....which seems completely naïve now, because where else could they go but into HR departments around the world?
And as Bill Gates knows, the best way to sell your product is to government - no matter if that product is software or "vaccines" or reverse racism.
I think part of that is due to the ideological capture of our institutions. A lot of legitimate concerns get brushed aside because of a reluctance to believe “your side” has some truly insidious shit going on. Most of the right’s media is batshit, and most of the left won’t look in the mirror. That’s the reason I’m uncomfortable with Chase’s framing of this as a bipartisan issue. I feel like that’s a little too generous.
Also, as someone working under a massive government contract, I can assure you that Bill Gates is correct.
"That’s the reason I’m uncomfortable with Chase’s framing of this as a bipartisan issue."
I don't want to put words in his mouth here, but I think he means that we can all agree it's a problem that needs fixing, not that both sides of the aisle are responsible for the problem. (Apologies if I'm way off the mark here.)
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"Also, as someone working under a massive government contract, I can assure you that Bill Gates is correct."
And a second important factor is that government is much much much much much much much slower at 'turning the ship around'. Real free market companies are cutting DEI programs left and right, but government isn't under the same financial pressure to perform........
“I don't want to put words in his mouth here, but I think he means that we can all agree it's a problem that needs fixing, not that both sides of the aisle are responsible for the problem.”
I may have misread him. If that’s what he meant, then I hope he’s right and that both parties are identifying the problems here.
I don't have the time to lurk in the comments anymore, but whenever I do I think it's a little strange that nobody goes around collecting people like you for fun and profit. The person who won the Freddie DeBoer book review contest last year comes to mind for her quote along the lines of "one day he can grow up to be like me, a prolific substack commenter". Trace and Freddie got his start in the trenches in the same way. Just look at the incredible surplus good that comes from the tiniest bit of funding to your local neighborhood high-verbal IQ autist.
You probably don't remember me, but Jesse would audibly sigh when he took my Callin call, because I would occasionally write giant reams of autistic conspiracy theories to him, including trying to get him to break the Evergreen campus blowup before it went mainstream. My last email (to him and Trace) was last week.
1. First, this is an excellent piece. Well done Trace.
2. While I could do the standard “this is why DEI/AA bad” post, I don’t think it will add much.
3. You mention in a different comment that Buttegieg is basically being pushed by a very loud but small portion of the Dem base. In your opinion, what is the best way to have normies (eg those not into racial identitarianism or disparitism) sideline the racial rent seekers?
4. Number 3, but for cases where it isn’t immediately obvious, such as the FAA?
5. Your previous article “the GOP is doomed” shows why the GOP will have trouble implementing its priorities. Assuming that a GOP administration would not stand for such racial rent seeking (from the parties in question here at least), what is the solution? Electing Dems means getting people sympathetic to the malefactors.
3. Speak openly and confidently about it while avoiding extreme political views in general. Normies, as it were, follow social cues. If social cues indicate that sidelining rent-seekers is viable, that is what people will do, particularly if stories of those harmed by the rent-seeking are made more salient.
4: Harder. Institutions are truly run by a very few people, and not always those at the top of the power structures. If the wrong person gets in there’s only so much that can be done. Not as sure here.
5: GOP admin is comfortable with other forms of rent-seeking; the question of politics is largely one of whose special interest groups will win out. The answer to political questions in general is to push the political upside of opposing something such that it’s higher than the downside, which can be done in both parties.
Thanks as always Trace for doing the legwork and posting receipts. I will pay you the highest compliment I can think of: When I saw the long tweets, I thought "Hell yeah, a long Trace tweet."
My stance on most diversity quotas and such is, yeah it sucks, but if it stops you, you ought to reconsider. I agree this is a special interest story outside of the public eye, that would lose by supermajority in any vote.
That being said... did this really take a decade to get to federal court? It's shocking to me that something so open-and-shut, and also so crucial to public wellbeing, could just get run over by a guy who's emailing "This is to reduce competition" and "Do you see the pattern here". This is something that any supermajority of voters would destroy. It is obviously illegal. It is obviously bad, preposterously bad that it summons The Worst People You Know to Make a Good Point.
When people talk about the hazards of industry, they correctly worry about the future harms. There's something funny about the opposite harm in government: "Work in government to make a big impact, because no matter what you do it takes a decade to fix it if it's wrong."
Trace -- good article. But not sure I understand the relevance of your conclusion here:
"People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level . . . . But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it."
Seems like you're absolving someone of responsibility here. And maybe it is true that no one person is at fault; I agree with you that the current Secretary of DoT can hardly be responsible for changes that occurred in the Obama Administration.
But this debacle did not emerge out of thin air. It flourished in a certain kind of political climate that has in turn received tremendous support from one side of the ideological spectrum. Be their fruits ye shall know them.
This is probably one of the more absurd instances of a kind of affirmative action -- but I'd suggest it isn't exactly unique. Elevation of diversity over competence (or in this case, potential for competence) is a theme running through numerous private and public initiatives. And while some may harp that "we can have both, how dare you suggest otherwise," the proof seems to be in the pudding.
Few people think that it would be bad, all things taken together, to have more black doctors or air traffic controllers or software engineers. Or women, or disabled people or [insert preferred class here]. But the process-oriented liberal mind fixates on juking the stats at the end of the pipeline -- rather than abandoning these bizarre obsessions and focusing on substantive reforms.
ETA: In sum, sure, this isn't a partisan issue. But this problem is directly related to a certain, specific, obvious ideology.
It's not on offer, but would you take the complete elimination of these programs in exchange for intellectual amnesty? Amnesty and memory-holing all the bad behavior? I'm not 100% sure I would, but I would definitely consider it.
Root cause analysis isn't worthless, but it is overrated. Identifying root causes can be interesting and valuable, but that isn't always true, and even when it is true, you can always do it separately.
I think this scandal is not likely confined to the specific case at hand here regarding hiring air traffic controllers. The most significant quote for me was the Team 7 document describing "multiple hurdles" as a known approach with the quote "research has demonstrated that this approach maximizes diversity". The implication is clear: this underhanded method of (a) screening out most candidates based on an upfront litmus test of select candidate characteristics that can favor members of desirable groups (with limited or no evidence of job relevance), followed by (b) screening on core aptitudes and qualifications with a now lowered standard, had already been implemented in other areas. Likely many times in federal government hiring, both before and after this change to the ATC process.
We are only hearing about this specific process because the unfairness to the CTI college grads cost them so much time and money that it has triggered a lawsuit, in addition to the biographical test being so blatantly absurd. And even then, non-conservative media cannot be bothered to report the story! Go digging, and I would bet you will find many similar hiring process changes over the last 15+ years that have perversely deprived the public of being served in government by many of the best applicants for these jobs or discouraged them from applying altogether. One might start by asking, which other agencies have Herbert Wong and associates ever advised?
We already know one other example of the two step screening tactic being implemented in recent years; the use of DEI statements in academic hiring works in exactly the same fashion. Multiple institutions are confirmed to use these statements as an upfront screen that must be passed before they even look at a candidate's resume. STEP 1: You rid your candidate pool of most of the wrong race, sex, etc., candidates through this farcically subjective DEI statement. As an added bonus, you also screen out some of "right" identity candidates that might not be quite onboard with your ideological program as revealed by their tone-deaf references to color blindness or other outdated concepts (in the ATC context, you drop some of those black candidates who didn't have the political instincts to become student members of NBCFAE). STEP 2: You evaluate research and teaching records of a smaller, less competitive, pool of remaining candidates (i.e., academic bar lowered). This nonsense is just as much as a scandal as the air traffic controller biographical test.
On a final note, I would observe that the FAA's astonishing clearance of NBCFAE and Snow of wrongdoing tells us that this behavior by identity based advocacy groups in the federal public service is considered unremarkable. It certainly is not in any way punished. So, we can be sure that sharing of inside information on hiring processes, rigging resume screens with keywords and blatant favoritism on in-person hiring "panels" are all happening in earnest in government hiring.
Excellent post, particularly on the issue of the defensiveness of the left on the effectiveness, risks, harms and trade-offs on various "DEI" initiatives as any critique of being "racist" (and often is trumpeted by very racist persons as you so well noted!) cedes the issue to the racist right. When more becomes publicly known and reported (assuming it will be reported!), that the FAA has been putting perhaps under-qualified applicants into air traffic control using a test specifically designed to seek out traits of "under-qualified-ness" as *actual qualifications*, with the coinciding reporting on the increases of near misses and incidents with air traffic control, where will the public side with? The "left" which has been running interference on these policies and at times, gaslighting the public about the trade-offs of merit to other considerations? Or the right, which, in this case, has been revealing the issue? And which side should a rational center want to trust more with resolving the issue? The racist right that will take this as evidence to move forward on a lot of other racist social engineering and policies? Or the center-left that *should* be more interested in less ham-fisted approaches to achieving diversity that doesn't eliminate completely "merit" from the equation (but which has been neglectfully absent in this role in the pursuit of "racial justice uber alles")?
The left is doing itself no favors in continuing to champion DEI bureaucratic "interventions" and policies that are increasingly being revealed as ineffective, harmful and quite frankly, unpopular - even within the groups they propose to champion. Guess what - Black people fly too! And I'm guessing they would feel better about ATC being staffed by the most qualified individuals and less concerned about the racial and gender percentages of!
Secondly though - why is the solution to improving and increasing diversity never to move the push back towards the education and training and preparation of targeted demographics in the first place? If "under-represented" demographics have a lower pass rate of the original screening exam, why not put the resources and effort into providing better training and preparation to produce more "diverse" applicants who can pass that screening when they're ready to take it? It's the same problem with "diversity quotas" at the career and higher education levels - at that point it is just a shuffling of the requirements to allow a larger proportion of applicants who would not meet the traditional bars of application a path to entry - but does nothing to ensure their actual success and competence.
If we truly want to see more diverse cohorts in these areas, the remedy is at the primary and secondary educational levels, let alone on addressing the myriad external factors that tend to produce disparate impacts of poverty and community and family dysfunction in mostly minority areas, or lack of access to rigorous education that has standards and expectations for personal conduct and achievement. Instead, minorities are not only subject to more dysfunctional communities and poverty, but the public schools they attend are often also spending a lot of time mis-educating them (the scandal around the reading education contrasting a program popular with teachers that yet failed to teach kids to actually read must have profound impacts on these disparities on the cohorts that came up under those programs - since the 90's until fairly recently in most states - so we're talking a lot of Millennials and older Gen Z's were taught barely literate reading skills which of course impacts the rest of their education - wealthier/stable household children had access to external options (tutoring, parental intervention, private schools that taught traditional reading pedagogy, etc) to correct what wasn't being taught properly in schools, poorer children did not have those alternatives and were instead failed, majorly, by the only educational systems they did have access to.
Basically, and TLDR - more time spent on addressing the roots of under-representation and under-performance on high stakes/high achievement exams and no more rigging at the point of the entry. And the "left" *and* "center" needs to get real about this - propose some real solutions and stop ceding the truth of the issue to the racist Right, or we will get "solutions" all right :(
"If we truly want to see more diverse cohorts in these areas, the remedy is at the primary and secondary educational level"
The thing is, we ARE doing this. Or trying to do it. We've been doing it for decades. And it is not working. We pour so much money and effort into trying to close the "achievement gap" and it never closes.
I think the time has come for radical honesty. Either some groups, like Asians and Ashkenazi Jews, are genetically more intellectually gifted than others, OR, their family cultures are better at inculcating the value of intellectual excellence.
Can we just start admitting this now? Or at least consider it and see what kind of policies we come up with?
The IQ differences, whatever they are, wouldn't be significant enough to cause the kind of economic and life-satisfaction differences we still see.
Cultural differences, however, are significant enough. The difference between a good school and a bad school has basically nothing to do with money(the difference between a good school and a great school might). It's almost entirely dependent on the culture of the students. If the students don't value discipline and education, it is a shitty school. And vice versa.
Well, for one, I wouldn't equate just putting funding money into schools with improving achievement and academic performance. For one, per-pupil funding doesn't necessarily mean that the greater the spending = the quality of the education and access to resources. A lot of times that funding differential is swallowed in the simple COL dollars where funding schools in large urban areas just costs more, period, than funding schools elsewhere, so you can't just look at the raw dollar amount and assume that means urban public school students have access to campus like schools with lots of high tech, electives and top notch teaching staff and curriculum, because reality tells us that's definitely not the case for schools that serve a large poverty population versus schools that don't, and whose per pupil funding in raw dollars is actually less. There's a lot of ways that money gets eaten up before it actually benefits individual students - and yes, administrative overhead, particularly in large districts is a problem.
But also as I mentioned, there's issues of what is being taught and how as well. For a good decade+ students in many/most public schools were taught with an inadequate reading program that not only produced very poor reading results, but also cost a grip to "support" (students who couldn't figure out the "cue based reading" were placed into very expensive intervention courses, which, given the difficulty of learning this way, meant a lot of students were placed into high dollar "intervention" courses that attempt to supplement what wasn't being taught "for free" to begin with). Wealthier students and students with supportive families were able to compensate for this - tutoring, parental intervention, access to private schools. But poorer students with less resources were stuck with this - and a large disproportionate number of those were minorities - and I can't believe this poor foundation in literacy doesn't account for a lot of the educational/disparities measured during and since. That's just one example, but I'm sure we can find a lot of other ways that modern public education curriculum and classroom management policies could be reformed to better serve especially higher poverty/higher dysfunction communities (charter schools that operate in some of these areas have often demonstrated results with stricter conduct codes "back to basics" curriculum, etc).
So I definitely wouldn't say just because some money has been thrown at the situation to varying degree of results means we've tried "everything" so now we get to resort back to a "preferred" explanation (of some), that of "racial intelligence". I do think the group variance has a lot more to do with family and cultural support than any inherent hereditary "IQ" (something that has not been proven is actually genetically based because it's almost impossible to separate environment/nurture from that equation) - and yes there is some onus on communities and individuals to create the sort of environments that foster achievement and success versus those that don't, but understanding some of these problems are very systemic and cyclical that it's hard to assign any "quick fix" that individuals can do beyond leaving those environments altogether.
Also, beyond just the primary/secondary school, what of setting up more training/education centers through local community colleges for things like training for the ATC certification and test? They could offer these programs with rigorous training and education that prepares candidates for the test, focused on areas they want to try to recruit from, and not everyone would get to take the test that didn't pass the course first, so still a merit/funneling process but one that recruits in targeted areas (as well as non!). That would still be a lot better than just eliminating the test and hoping the "math was hard" and long term unemployed applicants can handle vectors and trajectories in an extremely high stress "no fuck ups allowed" situation ;P
So, literally there's a TON of things we can be doing better probably before resorting to racial IQ stereotyping and dismissals - and yes, the "left" and many of the institutions currently dominated by left/progressive ideologies need to give up on "quick fix" DEI at the entry bar and focus much more on evidence based approaches for education and preparation instead - let alone setting expectations around the goals of "improving diversity" in these fields is likely going to have a long tail, maybe generational, in achieving if *done right* - including those around discipline and conduct expectations - the notion that it's somehow "racist" to expect Black students to attend class, do the work, not be disruptive or disrespectful, is actually what is "racist" - not only for those students but those are stuck in classrooms with a high proportion of disruptive students that ruin the school experience for those who do want to try and leave with "something".
I think there’s something to the cultural argument though. I don’t want that to sound disparaging, because culture is complicated and influenced by our systems and history.
But, coming from the Philadelphia area, there are some sharp cultural divides. My wife’s friend went from working in an education center on the Main Line ($$$) to taking a teaching job in west Philly (not $$$,) which was partly ideological. Her horror stories of locking her classroom doors because some of the older kids were trying to get into the classroom to attack the younger kids kinda stick with me. I don’t know how you learn in that environment, and I don’t know how closely related literacy is to that issue.
She ended up feeling kinda helpless. She was in a terrible situation but didn’t want to abandon the kids, and was just powerless to elevate them from their situation.
Yeah I only mention the literacy issue as one issue, definitely the breakdown of discipline and even having discipline standards and expectations is a big part of it. Like why are older kids being allowed to even attempt such a thing? Would similar behavior be tolerated in a wealthier/whiter school - or just in general a complete sort of anarchy be allowed in the school? It's super harmful to the kids that have to learn under those circumstances obviously, but also harmful to the ones that are being given messages that anti-social behavior carries no consequences and really not preparing them for anything other than the ole' school to prison pipeline. I don't know how much of this stems from "progressive ideology" around notions of discipline and particularly as it applies to Black students, a lack of staff/resources to properly enforce the rules, as well as a breakdown in the community that is creating children with some severe behavioral problems :/
There’s also this town named Paulsboro in New Jersey. I’m pretty familiar with the town and the school system there. The high school’s zone covers a big area that included my first home and my best friend’s first home. My sister also substituted there.
Paulsboro’s school district is very racially mixed (but also very segregated.) I knew a lot of graduates from the school, lots of black and white. The white students always came out of the same school in better shape, scholastically. Most of black graduates I knew were barely literate, while the white students on average just seemed to fare better. I don’t mean that disparagingly, these are all people I knew and cared about.
Now excluding any racial differences in intelligence, which I reject, what was going on here? They have the same teachers, the same funding. The middle schools the kids attended were usually different, maybe the white kids that went to middle school in nearby Gibbstown and then high school in Paulsboro better prepared than the black kids that lived in Paulsboro and went to the Paulsboro middle school? Could be.
What stuck out the most to me, though, was that out of the kids I knew, all the white kids’ parents were still married and all of the black families I knew were single parent households. Monocausal explanations are usually pretty flawed, but this situation was too glaring not to notice. Kinda inclines me toward cultural explanations.
Your second to last sentence is the critical one. It is probably partially genetic, but certainly more cultural than anything. I've seen it firsthand too many times. Some kids, depending on their background and friends, take their future seriously. Some don't.
Wow, 10/10 investigative work! I too would have lost my bets on this if I had made any. I expected the diversity push to be a consequence of their personnel shortage, not the reason thereof. And I had expected that some time during the 8 years that this has been happening, someone in charge would have steered the bus off the cliff.
Please keep mirroring those Twitter threads here, by the way; Twitter has again become invisible to non-registered users.
Hi there! You should check out the RECAP plugin, a browser plugin which allows PACER users to automatically share documents with one another. If another user has already purchased a document, that document will show up as a free download in your PACER searches. Conversely, if you purchase a PACER document, it will be automatically uploaded to the archive so other users don't need to pay for it. There's also a searchable archive available on the web. Here is the docket page for this case: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4542755/brigida-v-united-states-department-of-transportation/
Did many current Air Traffic Controllers surreptitiously take the biographical assessment and get rejected? (Yes)
Did the FAA tell people as late as October 2013 on their website the only way to become a controller was CTI or military despite having a change in plans in the works for months? (Yes)
Do you happen to have an archive link to those webpages? I’m about to dive around for them since I’ve seen that mentioned a few times, but thought I’d ask first.
It may have been on the defunct ctistudents.com page, not sure what I have saved anywhere but I did ghost write many questions that went to aviation subcommittee. Such as…
Were high school dropouts allowed to apply to become controllers? (YES. If you would like to dispute this point us to where graduating high school was a requirement to apply in 2014.)
Were resumes initially looked at prior to disqualifying applicants? (No)
Did the FAA stop hiring off the street candidates because they "just weren't working out" and didn't allow them to apply to any new bids in 2010 and 2011?
(Yes, Pubnat 8 was 2009. They hired from that list in fall 2010/Spring 2011. The last public hiring was in 2009. They gave AT-SAT's that fall. They would go on to look at these candidates fall 2010 and spring 2011. Where were all the public hire bids in 2010 and 2011? There was no reason for them to bring them back since the CTI schools were growing, diverse, and between them and VRA's they would crank out enough well qualified applicants. Public hires were supposed to be a last resort if the well was dry. FAA was constantly culling data on CTI's vs OTS, WQ vs Q etc. They saw they correlation and it kept growing. The amounts of CTI schools were hitting a pinnacle. These "Better qualified" candidates were so "better" the FAA didn't want them for years.)
Why wasn't the biographical questionnaire scored immediately upon closing of the vacancy announcement? How did applicants pass one version of the biographical questionnaire and not the other? (2014 vs 2015) Did applicants change how they answered? If so, how credible is the testing when applicants are gaming the test? If not, how can both tests be validated?
Thanks for digging into this. I'm confused about one thig. You say "In 2016, Congress passed Public Law 114-190, which among other things banned the use of biographical assessments as a first-line hiring tool for air traffic controllers. People snubbed by the process filed dozens of lawsuits as a result." Has the old process been restored entirely? Do the lawsuits related only to those candidates who were excluded in 2014-16?
I'd like to add some (slightly historical) perspective here: the college training initiative (CTI) is a *very weird* way to get a job. First you get a degree at a two year or four year college, then you take the AT-SAT and if all goes well, you get an offer.
What's weird here is that you invest first in a degree that has almost no other use other than air traffic control, in the hope that a single employer will be hiring. The FAA's hiring pipeline sometimes stops, and if this happens when it's your year, your degree might be useless. I don't know about some of the other, more expensive four year CTI programs, but my guess (based on how the program worked two decades ago) is that the only lateral move for a CTI grad if the FAA won't take you is to go back for more training to become a pilot, which would be expensive as a CTI grad targeting ATC would not have already paid for the expense of flight hours. (In the program I was in, there was course overlap between the ATC and commercial pilot track.)
My own experience: 20 years ago I already had a bachelors, so in one year I did the CTI coarse work at Mt Sac to qualify for ATC hiring. This was about the least expensive way to become qualified, but we all had two things hanging over us: (1) would we pass the ATSAT (I think almost everyone did) and (2) would the FAA be hiring.
We bore the risk of the degree before resolving either of those things, and there was a class or two of graduates ahead of us who were simply _stuck waiting_ because the FAA _just wasn't hiring that year_. We were all betting that, 23 years after Reagon fired the striking controllers, there'd be people looking to retire and slots opening up.
So when I read that story, I totally understood the frustration of CTI graduates who had gone part way through the pipeline and then been ejected for (1) an arbitrary test that (2) could have been administered before they took the time to get the degree. This is "even dumber but also kinda the same" in that CTI tracks are _never_ a guaranteed pipeline to hiring. This has been a design defect of the CTI program since forever.
When I was last involved the pipeline had additional wash-out points; students could get a CTI degree, pass the AT-SAT, and then wash out in OKC when they do FAA-designed specific training. Or worse, they could pass the OKC training and then wash-out when they are learning specific sectors in real facilities, especially if they are assigned a busy, complex air-space.
If you gave me a wand and asked me to design a better pipeline,I think I would (sorry Mt Sac) dump the CTI system entirely and always hire "off the street", with the goal of creating a simulator-based aptitude test that attempted to predict whether people would wash-out in facilities.
Then you could just throw potential hires at the aptitude test, and if the problem is diversity, you could throw _a lot of diverse candidates_ at the aptitude test, with the hope that the ones that make it through end up working.
Almost everyone who went to a CTI program in my OKC class (graduated or left early because they were picked up) passed the academy.
Small sample size but when OTS hires pass they love to cite the anecdotes, whispers when it’s CTI.
I want to see the data of CTI schools who mimic what the FAA Academy at their program and their odds of eventual CPC vs the general public. I’m willing to bet it’s not close.
Everyone loves anecdotes but the data is out there somewhere, pretty sure CAMI even asked us which CTI school we attended. Why do that…?
Also factor in the skill degradation some CTI grads had waiting 5+ years to be picked up. I didn’t leave Oklahoma City in tears and I have my CTI program to thank for that.
There’s is no one that can argue in good faith that anyone running exactly what the Academy does at their CTI school wouldn’t have a significant advantage of 1) passing the OKC academy screen and 2) eventually making it to CPC. This is blatant fraud waste and abuse. The CTI screwjob was so bad that it had bipartisan support to grandfather applicants in by Congress and make it so CTI grads were no longer subject to elimination by the BQ.
Many applicants were scared of reprisal that the FAA would have them washed out at the academy to discredit them. Valid concern? Not sure.
Also think of how delayed and removed eventual CTI grads were by the time they got to initial training…
If I am understanding correctly, what the FAA did was unjust, unethical, and illegal—but did not result in the acceptance of substandard air traffic controllers. The key point is that there is a vast pool of people with the interest and aptitude to do the job, much greater than the number of positions available. This means that there is going to be some luck involved in getting selected, even if you are good enough. The FAA decided to bias that "luck" towards their preferred groups, and that bias had to be heavy due to the disparity in aptitude test scores. So they developed an arbitrary and capricious screening step that could be gamed through back channel communications to ensure that the pool of applicants was extremely lopsided in favor of their preferred minority groups. Then they required them to pass the test that ensured they were smart enough to handle the job. You almost have the admire the evil genius of it—it's not a scheme that could be replicated in most other settings.
Thanks for compiling this, Trace. Very well-summed up!
My only question is this… “But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue.”
I either don’t buy that or don’t understand what you mean. This seems like the DEI/Affirmative Action chickens coming home to roost, right? Aside from the black CTI grads left out of the class action lawsuit.
At its core, it is the case of a very few members of a special interest group hijacking a process that nobody else was paying close attention to. Most Democrats, seeing the specific fact pattern, will agree that it is wrong. Most progressives want competent air traffic controllers. It is a case of ignorance and coalitional politics more than it is an example of fundamental antipathy towards excellence, and it should be understood that way. The more it is treated as a partisan issue, the less likely Democrats will progress on it.
You can say "everyone wants competent air traffic controlers," but you also note that those promoting diversity goals are "between a rock and a hard place in the impossible task of avoiding disparate impact while preserving objective standards."
No man can serve two masters, and it's clear which master the democratic coalition has chosen to serve. So I have to agree with Colin B.
The problem is those promoting diversity goals genuinely believe that there are just as many, and likely more, qualified nonwhite, non-male candidates for all possible jobs relative to their percentage of the population relative to the other side. They're worse than creationists, and significantly more powerful and influential.
>"Most Democrats, seeing the specific fact pattern, will agree that it is wrong."
Will they? The Congressional Black Caucus was part of the consultations that produced this travesty, and they actually aren't terribly out of step with nonblack Dems on racial issues affecting blacks.
"At its core, it is the case of a very few members of a special interest group hijacking a process that nobody else was paying close attention to."
To be fair, this how most actual policy change gets done. The big difference between the two sides of politics is which special interest groups they let get away with things.
"Most Democrats, seeing the specific fact pattern, will agree that it is wrong. Most progressives want competent air traffic controllers." How do you square that statement with the strong widespread support for diversity hiring among Democrats? (Genuine question.) Affirmative action by definition favours diversity over merit. Prima facie, it seems that even if supporters want competent professionals, they are willing to sacrifice some quality in exchange for more diversity. One counter-argument is that mandating diversity does not sacrifice quality because racism means that highly qualified minority applicants do not get hired even though they are just as good as white applicants. Is that what you mean by the 'specific fact pattern'? Do you think most Dems justify diversity hiring on that basis, and would think that diversity hiring is generally good, but that argument just happens not to fly on these facts? Or is it that they are willing to sacrifice quality for diversity in many areas, but just not in air traffic control? (I would have thought most people want competent doctors as well, but there is a widespread push to eliminate the MCAT and some schools have done that, at least in part.)
It varies. There are two broad sets of opinions about diversity hiring: the one most normal democrats espouse, and the one a few highly informed cynics quietly hold to:
The former proposes that it’s a mild edge between functionally identical people, particularly seeking out qualified people from circles they wouldn’t normally be found. This is what most normal Democrats support and believe. The latter is “it will lead to decline and that’s fine” racial spoils, which is a minority view. There’s some middle ground with “it will lead to a bit of short-term decline but long-term improvement,” which normal people can be persuaded towards. But again, the first school is the biggest.
OK, that makes sense. That seems to imply that the majority of Democrats do not support quotas because that goes beyond the 'mild edge / tie-breaker' position. Is that right? (Ie descriptively, most Democrats do not support quotas.) More broadly, you seem to be saying that in your view, Democrats will not support specific instances where it is clear on the facts that it goes beyond the 'mild edge' position. Presumably, to lose support for diversity hiring generally, the normal Democrat would have to be persuaded that diversity hiring typically and systematically goes substantially beyond the 'mild edge'. That will be difficult, as any individual instances can plausibly be explained as an aberration. Do you agree? (FWIW, at my institution we had for decades a formal tie-breaker provision in favour of women, which did in fact operate purely as a tie-breaker.)
Precisely.
Quota's could still work. If you were trying to staff people to work the register at McDonalds, you could certainly have a quota for 70% minority hires without a meaningful drop in the quality of the workforce. (I am not advocating for quotas)
"The former proposes that it’s a mild edge between functionally identical people, particularly seeking out qualified people from circles they wouldn’t normally be found. This is what most normal Democrats support and believe."
Most normal Democrats, and many other people support and believe this, because this is the way it's generally presented. But this isn't the way it operates in the real world.
You don't have to search very hard to find people (activists, consultants, HR professionals) who candidly state that his level of preference doesn't give significant results. The solution is that managers, bureaucrats, and admissions officers must take aggressive action focused only on achieving diversity statistics. Corporate executives are frank that some senior executive must be "accountable" for achieving diversity goals. Managers know how to achieve metrics; if the metric focuses on race or sex, and not aptitude or competence, the selection process will be adjusted accordingly.
>>"It is a case of ignorance and coalitional politics more than it is an example of fundamental antipathy towards excellence, and it should be understood that way.... I am confident that Buttigieg can see that just as well as the rest of us, that for many, it is simply the same neglect everybody else has shown towards the case that has led it to linger awkwardly unresolved for a decade. .<<
If these things are true, then this story will go viral among progressives, and Mayor Pete will do the right thing. Agreed?
It's been going on a lot longer than just the last couple years, though -- through multiple administrations.
That’s true, and I agree with Chase about Mayor Pete just being the guy holding the potato when the music stops.
But how did this approach to hiring start? I don’t think I’m crazy to see fingerprints of the progressive wing of the left here. It may be a step removed from workplace DEI trainings or affirmative action college admissions, but it’s not like you have to go all the way back and find the butterfly’s wing flap that causes things like this.
You're right, but it's also because not enough people called out the BS when it was first happening. We though the DEI stuff would remain in the universities....which seems completely naïve now, because where else could they go but into HR departments around the world?
And as Bill Gates knows, the best way to sell your product is to government - no matter if that product is software or "vaccines" or reverse racism.
I think part of that is due to the ideological capture of our institutions. A lot of legitimate concerns get brushed aside because of a reluctance to believe “your side” has some truly insidious shit going on. Most of the right’s media is batshit, and most of the left won’t look in the mirror. That’s the reason I’m uncomfortable with Chase’s framing of this as a bipartisan issue. I feel like that’s a little too generous.
Also, as someone working under a massive government contract, I can assure you that Bill Gates is correct.
"That’s the reason I’m uncomfortable with Chase’s framing of this as a bipartisan issue."
I don't want to put words in his mouth here, but I think he means that we can all agree it's a problem that needs fixing, not that both sides of the aisle are responsible for the problem. (Apologies if I'm way off the mark here.)
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"Also, as someone working under a massive government contract, I can assure you that Bill Gates is correct."
And a second important factor is that government is much much much much much much much slower at 'turning the ship around'. Real free market companies are cutting DEI programs left and right, but government isn't under the same financial pressure to perform........
“I don't want to put words in his mouth here, but I think he means that we can all agree it's a problem that needs fixing, not that both sides of the aisle are responsible for the problem.”
I may have misread him. If that’s what he meant, then I hope he’s right and that both parties are identifying the problems here.
I don't have the time to lurk in the comments anymore, but whenever I do I think it's a little strange that nobody goes around collecting people like you for fun and profit. The person who won the Freddie DeBoer book review contest last year comes to mind for her quote along the lines of "one day he can grow up to be like me, a prolific substack commenter". Trace and Freddie got his start in the trenches in the same way. Just look at the incredible surplus good that comes from the tiniest bit of funding to your local neighborhood high-verbal IQ autist.
You probably don't remember me, but Jesse would audibly sigh when he took my Callin call, because I would occasionally write giant reams of autistic conspiracy theories to him, including trying to get him to break the Evergreen campus blowup before it went mainstream. My last email (to him and Trace) was last week.
I remember you from call-in, sure. I think Jesse sighed when most of us started talking, lol.
Interesting
1. First, this is an excellent piece. Well done Trace.
2. While I could do the standard “this is why DEI/AA bad” post, I don’t think it will add much.
3. You mention in a different comment that Buttegieg is basically being pushed by a very loud but small portion of the Dem base. In your opinion, what is the best way to have normies (eg those not into racial identitarianism or disparitism) sideline the racial rent seekers?
4. Number 3, but for cases where it isn’t immediately obvious, such as the FAA?
5. Your previous article “the GOP is doomed” shows why the GOP will have trouble implementing its priorities. Assuming that a GOP administration would not stand for such racial rent seeking (from the parties in question here at least), what is the solution? Electing Dems means getting people sympathetic to the malefactors.
3. Speak openly and confidently about it while avoiding extreme political views in general. Normies, as it were, follow social cues. If social cues indicate that sidelining rent-seekers is viable, that is what people will do, particularly if stories of those harmed by the rent-seeking are made more salient.
4: Harder. Institutions are truly run by a very few people, and not always those at the top of the power structures. If the wrong person gets in there’s only so much that can be done. Not as sure here.
5: GOP admin is comfortable with other forms of rent-seeking; the question of politics is largely one of whose special interest groups will win out. The answer to political questions in general is to push the political upside of opposing something such that it’s higher than the downside, which can be done in both parties.
Interesting
Thanks as always Trace for doing the legwork and posting receipts. I will pay you the highest compliment I can think of: When I saw the long tweets, I thought "Hell yeah, a long Trace tweet."
My stance on most diversity quotas and such is, yeah it sucks, but if it stops you, you ought to reconsider. I agree this is a special interest story outside of the public eye, that would lose by supermajority in any vote.
That being said... did this really take a decade to get to federal court? It's shocking to me that something so open-and-shut, and also so crucial to public wellbeing, could just get run over by a guy who's emailing "This is to reduce competition" and "Do you see the pattern here". This is something that any supermajority of voters would destroy. It is obviously illegal. It is obviously bad, preposterously bad that it summons The Worst People You Know to Make a Good Point.
When people talk about the hazards of industry, they correctly worry about the future harms. There's something funny about the opposite harm in government: "Work in government to make a big impact, because no matter what you do it takes a decade to fix it if it's wrong."
Trace -- good article. But not sure I understand the relevance of your conclusion here:
"People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level . . . . But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it."
Seems like you're absolving someone of responsibility here. And maybe it is true that no one person is at fault; I agree with you that the current Secretary of DoT can hardly be responsible for changes that occurred in the Obama Administration.
But this debacle did not emerge out of thin air. It flourished in a certain kind of political climate that has in turn received tremendous support from one side of the ideological spectrum. Be their fruits ye shall know them.
This is probably one of the more absurd instances of a kind of affirmative action -- but I'd suggest it isn't exactly unique. Elevation of diversity over competence (or in this case, potential for competence) is a theme running through numerous private and public initiatives. And while some may harp that "we can have both, how dare you suggest otherwise," the proof seems to be in the pudding.
Few people think that it would be bad, all things taken together, to have more black doctors or air traffic controllers or software engineers. Or women, or disabled people or [insert preferred class here]. But the process-oriented liberal mind fixates on juking the stats at the end of the pipeline -- rather than abandoning these bizarre obsessions and focusing on substantive reforms.
ETA: In sum, sure, this isn't a partisan issue. But this problem is directly related to a certain, specific, obvious ideology.
Root causes be damned all of a sudden.
It's not on offer, but would you take the complete elimination of these programs in exchange for intellectual amnesty? Amnesty and memory-holing all the bad behavior? I'm not 100% sure I would, but I would definitely consider it.
Root cause analysis isn't worthless, but it is overrated. Identifying root causes can be interesting and valuable, but that isn't always true, and even when it is true, you can always do it separately.
I think this scandal is not likely confined to the specific case at hand here regarding hiring air traffic controllers. The most significant quote for me was the Team 7 document describing "multiple hurdles" as a known approach with the quote "research has demonstrated that this approach maximizes diversity". The implication is clear: this underhanded method of (a) screening out most candidates based on an upfront litmus test of select candidate characteristics that can favor members of desirable groups (with limited or no evidence of job relevance), followed by (b) screening on core aptitudes and qualifications with a now lowered standard, had already been implemented in other areas. Likely many times in federal government hiring, both before and after this change to the ATC process.
We are only hearing about this specific process because the unfairness to the CTI college grads cost them so much time and money that it has triggered a lawsuit, in addition to the biographical test being so blatantly absurd. And even then, non-conservative media cannot be bothered to report the story! Go digging, and I would bet you will find many similar hiring process changes over the last 15+ years that have perversely deprived the public of being served in government by many of the best applicants for these jobs or discouraged them from applying altogether. One might start by asking, which other agencies have Herbert Wong and associates ever advised?
We already know one other example of the two step screening tactic being implemented in recent years; the use of DEI statements in academic hiring works in exactly the same fashion. Multiple institutions are confirmed to use these statements as an upfront screen that must be passed before they even look at a candidate's resume. STEP 1: You rid your candidate pool of most of the wrong race, sex, etc., candidates through this farcically subjective DEI statement. As an added bonus, you also screen out some of "right" identity candidates that might not be quite onboard with your ideological program as revealed by their tone-deaf references to color blindness or other outdated concepts (in the ATC context, you drop some of those black candidates who didn't have the political instincts to become student members of NBCFAE). STEP 2: You evaluate research and teaching records of a smaller, less competitive, pool of remaining candidates (i.e., academic bar lowered). This nonsense is just as much as a scandal as the air traffic controller biographical test.
On a final note, I would observe that the FAA's astonishing clearance of NBCFAE and Snow of wrongdoing tells us that this behavior by identity based advocacy groups in the federal public service is considered unremarkable. It certainly is not in any way punished. So, we can be sure that sharing of inside information on hiring processes, rigging resume screens with keywords and blatant favoritism on in-person hiring "panels" are all happening in earnest in government hiring.
Excellent post, particularly on the issue of the defensiveness of the left on the effectiveness, risks, harms and trade-offs on various "DEI" initiatives as any critique of being "racist" (and often is trumpeted by very racist persons as you so well noted!) cedes the issue to the racist right. When more becomes publicly known and reported (assuming it will be reported!), that the FAA has been putting perhaps under-qualified applicants into air traffic control using a test specifically designed to seek out traits of "under-qualified-ness" as *actual qualifications*, with the coinciding reporting on the increases of near misses and incidents with air traffic control, where will the public side with? The "left" which has been running interference on these policies and at times, gaslighting the public about the trade-offs of merit to other considerations? Or the right, which, in this case, has been revealing the issue? And which side should a rational center want to trust more with resolving the issue? The racist right that will take this as evidence to move forward on a lot of other racist social engineering and policies? Or the center-left that *should* be more interested in less ham-fisted approaches to achieving diversity that doesn't eliminate completely "merit" from the equation (but which has been neglectfully absent in this role in the pursuit of "racial justice uber alles")?
The left is doing itself no favors in continuing to champion DEI bureaucratic "interventions" and policies that are increasingly being revealed as ineffective, harmful and quite frankly, unpopular - even within the groups they propose to champion. Guess what - Black people fly too! And I'm guessing they would feel better about ATC being staffed by the most qualified individuals and less concerned about the racial and gender percentages of!
Secondly though - why is the solution to improving and increasing diversity never to move the push back towards the education and training and preparation of targeted demographics in the first place? If "under-represented" demographics have a lower pass rate of the original screening exam, why not put the resources and effort into providing better training and preparation to produce more "diverse" applicants who can pass that screening when they're ready to take it? It's the same problem with "diversity quotas" at the career and higher education levels - at that point it is just a shuffling of the requirements to allow a larger proportion of applicants who would not meet the traditional bars of application a path to entry - but does nothing to ensure their actual success and competence.
If we truly want to see more diverse cohorts in these areas, the remedy is at the primary and secondary educational levels, let alone on addressing the myriad external factors that tend to produce disparate impacts of poverty and community and family dysfunction in mostly minority areas, or lack of access to rigorous education that has standards and expectations for personal conduct and achievement. Instead, minorities are not only subject to more dysfunctional communities and poverty, but the public schools they attend are often also spending a lot of time mis-educating them (the scandal around the reading education contrasting a program popular with teachers that yet failed to teach kids to actually read must have profound impacts on these disparities on the cohorts that came up under those programs - since the 90's until fairly recently in most states - so we're talking a lot of Millennials and older Gen Z's were taught barely literate reading skills which of course impacts the rest of their education - wealthier/stable household children had access to external options (tutoring, parental intervention, private schools that taught traditional reading pedagogy, etc) to correct what wasn't being taught properly in schools, poorer children did not have those alternatives and were instead failed, majorly, by the only educational systems they did have access to.
Basically, and TLDR - more time spent on addressing the roots of under-representation and under-performance on high stakes/high achievement exams and no more rigging at the point of the entry. And the "left" *and* "center" needs to get real about this - propose some real solutions and stop ceding the truth of the issue to the racist Right, or we will get "solutions" all right :(
"If we truly want to see more diverse cohorts in these areas, the remedy is at the primary and secondary educational level"
The thing is, we ARE doing this. Or trying to do it. We've been doing it for decades. And it is not working. We pour so much money and effort into trying to close the "achievement gap" and it never closes.
I think the time has come for radical honesty. Either some groups, like Asians and Ashkenazi Jews, are genetically more intellectually gifted than others, OR, their family cultures are better at inculcating the value of intellectual excellence.
Can we just start admitting this now? Or at least consider it and see what kind of policies we come up with?
The IQ differences, whatever they are, wouldn't be significant enough to cause the kind of economic and life-satisfaction differences we still see.
Cultural differences, however, are significant enough. The difference between a good school and a bad school has basically nothing to do with money(the difference between a good school and a great school might). It's almost entirely dependent on the culture of the students. If the students don't value discipline and education, it is a shitty school. And vice versa.
Well, for one, I wouldn't equate just putting funding money into schools with improving achievement and academic performance. For one, per-pupil funding doesn't necessarily mean that the greater the spending = the quality of the education and access to resources. A lot of times that funding differential is swallowed in the simple COL dollars where funding schools in large urban areas just costs more, period, than funding schools elsewhere, so you can't just look at the raw dollar amount and assume that means urban public school students have access to campus like schools with lots of high tech, electives and top notch teaching staff and curriculum, because reality tells us that's definitely not the case for schools that serve a large poverty population versus schools that don't, and whose per pupil funding in raw dollars is actually less. There's a lot of ways that money gets eaten up before it actually benefits individual students - and yes, administrative overhead, particularly in large districts is a problem.
But also as I mentioned, there's issues of what is being taught and how as well. For a good decade+ students in many/most public schools were taught with an inadequate reading program that not only produced very poor reading results, but also cost a grip to "support" (students who couldn't figure out the "cue based reading" were placed into very expensive intervention courses, which, given the difficulty of learning this way, meant a lot of students were placed into high dollar "intervention" courses that attempt to supplement what wasn't being taught "for free" to begin with). Wealthier students and students with supportive families were able to compensate for this - tutoring, parental intervention, access to private schools. But poorer students with less resources were stuck with this - and a large disproportionate number of those were minorities - and I can't believe this poor foundation in literacy doesn't account for a lot of the educational/disparities measured during and since. That's just one example, but I'm sure we can find a lot of other ways that modern public education curriculum and classroom management policies could be reformed to better serve especially higher poverty/higher dysfunction communities (charter schools that operate in some of these areas have often demonstrated results with stricter conduct codes "back to basics" curriculum, etc).
So I definitely wouldn't say just because some money has been thrown at the situation to varying degree of results means we've tried "everything" so now we get to resort back to a "preferred" explanation (of some), that of "racial intelligence". I do think the group variance has a lot more to do with family and cultural support than any inherent hereditary "IQ" (something that has not been proven is actually genetically based because it's almost impossible to separate environment/nurture from that equation) - and yes there is some onus on communities and individuals to create the sort of environments that foster achievement and success versus those that don't, but understanding some of these problems are very systemic and cyclical that it's hard to assign any "quick fix" that individuals can do beyond leaving those environments altogether.
Also, beyond just the primary/secondary school, what of setting up more training/education centers through local community colleges for things like training for the ATC certification and test? They could offer these programs with rigorous training and education that prepares candidates for the test, focused on areas they want to try to recruit from, and not everyone would get to take the test that didn't pass the course first, so still a merit/funneling process but one that recruits in targeted areas (as well as non!). That would still be a lot better than just eliminating the test and hoping the "math was hard" and long term unemployed applicants can handle vectors and trajectories in an extremely high stress "no fuck ups allowed" situation ;P
So, literally there's a TON of things we can be doing better probably before resorting to racial IQ stereotyping and dismissals - and yes, the "left" and many of the institutions currently dominated by left/progressive ideologies need to give up on "quick fix" DEI at the entry bar and focus much more on evidence based approaches for education and preparation instead - let alone setting expectations around the goals of "improving diversity" in these fields is likely going to have a long tail, maybe generational, in achieving if *done right* - including those around discipline and conduct expectations - the notion that it's somehow "racist" to expect Black students to attend class, do the work, not be disruptive or disrespectful, is actually what is "racist" - not only for those students but those are stuck in classrooms with a high proportion of disruptive students that ruin the school experience for those who do want to try and leave with "something".
I think there’s something to the cultural argument though. I don’t want that to sound disparaging, because culture is complicated and influenced by our systems and history.
But, coming from the Philadelphia area, there are some sharp cultural divides. My wife’s friend went from working in an education center on the Main Line ($$$) to taking a teaching job in west Philly (not $$$,) which was partly ideological. Her horror stories of locking her classroom doors because some of the older kids were trying to get into the classroom to attack the younger kids kinda stick with me. I don’t know how you learn in that environment, and I don’t know how closely related literacy is to that issue.
She ended up feeling kinda helpless. She was in a terrible situation but didn’t want to abandon the kids, and was just powerless to elevate them from their situation.
Yikes, was that in an elementary school??
Yeah I only mention the literacy issue as one issue, definitely the breakdown of discipline and even having discipline standards and expectations is a big part of it. Like why are older kids being allowed to even attempt such a thing? Would similar behavior be tolerated in a wealthier/whiter school - or just in general a complete sort of anarchy be allowed in the school? It's super harmful to the kids that have to learn under those circumstances obviously, but also harmful to the ones that are being given messages that anti-social behavior carries no consequences and really not preparing them for anything other than the ole' school to prison pipeline. I don't know how much of this stems from "progressive ideology" around notions of discipline and particularly as it applies to Black students, a lack of staff/resources to properly enforce the rules, as well as a breakdown in the community that is creating children with some severe behavioral problems :/
I believe it was a middle school.
There’s also this town named Paulsboro in New Jersey. I’m pretty familiar with the town and the school system there. The high school’s zone covers a big area that included my first home and my best friend’s first home. My sister also substituted there.
Paulsboro’s school district is very racially mixed (but also very segregated.) I knew a lot of graduates from the school, lots of black and white. The white students always came out of the same school in better shape, scholastically. Most of black graduates I knew were barely literate, while the white students on average just seemed to fare better. I don’t mean that disparagingly, these are all people I knew and cared about.
Now excluding any racial differences in intelligence, which I reject, what was going on here? They have the same teachers, the same funding. The middle schools the kids attended were usually different, maybe the white kids that went to middle school in nearby Gibbstown and then high school in Paulsboro better prepared than the black kids that lived in Paulsboro and went to the Paulsboro middle school? Could be.
What stuck out the most to me, though, was that out of the kids I knew, all the white kids’ parents were still married and all of the black families I knew were single parent households. Monocausal explanations are usually pretty flawed, but this situation was too glaring not to notice. Kinda inclines me toward cultural explanations.
Your second to last sentence is the critical one. It is probably partially genetic, but certainly more cultural than anything. I've seen it firsthand too many times. Some kids, depending on their background and friends, take their future seriously. Some don't.
THOUGHT-CRIME! BIG BROTHER I HAVE FOUND THOUGHT-CRIME!
Incredible. Thanks for covering this despite the sensitivity.
Wow, 10/10 investigative work! I too would have lost my bets on this if I had made any. I expected the diversity push to be a consequence of their personnel shortage, not the reason thereof. And I had expected that some time during the 8 years that this has been happening, someone in charge would have steered the bus off the cliff.
Please keep mirroring those Twitter threads here, by the way; Twitter has again become invisible to non-registered users.
Hi there! You should check out the RECAP plugin, a browser plugin which allows PACER users to automatically share documents with one another. If another user has already purchased a document, that document will show up as a free download in your PACER searches. Conversely, if you purchase a PACER document, it will be automatically uploaded to the archive so other users don't need to pay for it. There's also a searchable archive available on the web. Here is the docket page for this case: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4542755/brigida-v-united-states-department-of-transportation/
RECAP is great! I actually mention it in this essay.
Oh sorry reading comprehension fail. 🤦♂️
Did many current Air Traffic Controllers surreptitiously take the biographical assessment and get rejected? (Yes)
Did the FAA tell people as late as October 2013 on their website the only way to become a controller was CTI or military despite having a change in plans in the works for months? (Yes)
Do you happen to have an archive link to those webpages? I’m about to dive around for them since I’ve seen that mentioned a few times, but thought I’d ask first.
It may have been on the defunct ctistudents.com page, not sure what I have saved anywhere but I did ghost write many questions that went to aviation subcommittee. Such as…
Were high school dropouts allowed to apply to become controllers? (YES. If you would like to dispute this point us to where graduating high school was a requirement to apply in 2014.)
Were resumes initially looked at prior to disqualifying applicants? (No)
Did the FAA stop hiring off the street candidates because they "just weren't working out" and didn't allow them to apply to any new bids in 2010 and 2011?
(Yes, Pubnat 8 was 2009. They hired from that list in fall 2010/Spring 2011. The last public hiring was in 2009. They gave AT-SAT's that fall. They would go on to look at these candidates fall 2010 and spring 2011. Where were all the public hire bids in 2010 and 2011? There was no reason for them to bring them back since the CTI schools were growing, diverse, and between them and VRA's they would crank out enough well qualified applicants. Public hires were supposed to be a last resort if the well was dry. FAA was constantly culling data on CTI's vs OTS, WQ vs Q etc. They saw they correlation and it kept growing. The amounts of CTI schools were hitting a pinnacle. These "Better qualified" candidates were so "better" the FAA didn't want them for years.)
Why wasn't the biographical questionnaire scored immediately upon closing of the vacancy announcement? How did applicants pass one version of the biographical questionnaire and not the other? (2014 vs 2015) Did applicants change how they answered? If so, how credible is the testing when applicants are gaming the test? If not, how can both tests be validated?
Try the Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20141007224418/http://www.ctistudents.com
Thanks for digging into this. I'm confused about one thig. You say "In 2016, Congress passed Public Law 114-190, which among other things banned the use of biographical assessments as a first-line hiring tool for air traffic controllers. People snubbed by the process filed dozens of lawsuits as a result." Has the old process been restored entirely? Do the lawsuits related only to those candidates who were excluded in 2014-16?
The latter, at least for the big class action. I’m not yet certain what the current hiring process looks like in full.
Probably doing the same racist/sexist anti-white-male hiring, but with a little more tact and nuance...
This was covered in Fox News Business for a few months when this occurred in 2014 , then again in 2018 so again now in 2024 . Not a new revelation
Oh wow you're on Substack already! Great article, very well done! Sharing as a note!
READ THIS ARTICLE, EVERYBODY!
I'd like to add some (slightly historical) perspective here: the college training initiative (CTI) is a *very weird* way to get a job. First you get a degree at a two year or four year college, then you take the AT-SAT and if all goes well, you get an offer.
What's weird here is that you invest first in a degree that has almost no other use other than air traffic control, in the hope that a single employer will be hiring. The FAA's hiring pipeline sometimes stops, and if this happens when it's your year, your degree might be useless. I don't know about some of the other, more expensive four year CTI programs, but my guess (based on how the program worked two decades ago) is that the only lateral move for a CTI grad if the FAA won't take you is to go back for more training to become a pilot, which would be expensive as a CTI grad targeting ATC would not have already paid for the expense of flight hours. (In the program I was in, there was course overlap between the ATC and commercial pilot track.)
My own experience: 20 years ago I already had a bachelors, so in one year I did the CTI coarse work at Mt Sac to qualify for ATC hiring. This was about the least expensive way to become qualified, but we all had two things hanging over us: (1) would we pass the ATSAT (I think almost everyone did) and (2) would the FAA be hiring.
We bore the risk of the degree before resolving either of those things, and there was a class or two of graduates ahead of us who were simply _stuck waiting_ because the FAA _just wasn't hiring that year_. We were all betting that, 23 years after Reagon fired the striking controllers, there'd be people looking to retire and slots opening up.
So when I read that story, I totally understood the frustration of CTI graduates who had gone part way through the pipeline and then been ejected for (1) an arbitrary test that (2) could have been administered before they took the time to get the degree. This is "even dumber but also kinda the same" in that CTI tracks are _never_ a guaranteed pipeline to hiring. This has been a design defect of the CTI program since forever.
When I was last involved the pipeline had additional wash-out points; students could get a CTI degree, pass the AT-SAT, and then wash out in OKC when they do FAA-designed specific training. Or worse, they could pass the OKC training and then wash-out when they are learning specific sectors in real facilities, especially if they are assigned a busy, complex air-space.
If you gave me a wand and asked me to design a better pipeline,I think I would (sorry Mt Sac) dump the CTI system entirely and always hire "off the street", with the goal of creating a simulator-based aptitude test that attempted to predict whether people would wash-out in facilities.
Then you could just throw potential hires at the aptitude test, and if the problem is diversity, you could throw _a lot of diverse candidates_ at the aptitude test, with the hope that the ones that make it through end up working.
Almost everyone who went to a CTI program in my OKC class (graduated or left early because they were picked up) passed the academy.
Small sample size but when OTS hires pass they love to cite the anecdotes, whispers when it’s CTI.
I want to see the data of CTI schools who mimic what the FAA Academy at their program and their odds of eventual CPC vs the general public. I’m willing to bet it’s not close.
Everyone loves anecdotes but the data is out there somewhere, pretty sure CAMI even asked us which CTI school we attended. Why do that…?
Also factor in the skill degradation some CTI grads had waiting 5+ years to be picked up. I didn’t leave Oklahoma City in tears and I have my CTI program to thank for that.
There’s is no one that can argue in good faith that anyone running exactly what the Academy does at their CTI school wouldn’t have a significant advantage of 1) passing the OKC academy screen and 2) eventually making it to CPC. This is blatant fraud waste and abuse. The CTI screwjob was so bad that it had bipartisan support to grandfather applicants in by Congress and make it so CTI grads were no longer subject to elimination by the BQ.
Many applicants were scared of reprisal that the FAA would have them washed out at the academy to discredit them. Valid concern? Not sure.
Also think of how delayed and removed eventual CTI grads were by the time they got to initial training…
If I am understanding correctly, what the FAA did was unjust, unethical, and illegal—but did not result in the acceptance of substandard air traffic controllers. The key point is that there is a vast pool of people with the interest and aptitude to do the job, much greater than the number of positions available. This means that there is going to be some luck involved in getting selected, even if you are good enough. The FAA decided to bias that "luck" towards their preferred groups, and that bias had to be heavy due to the disparity in aptitude test scores. So they developed an arbitrary and capricious screening step that could be gamed through back channel communications to ensure that the pool of applicants was extremely lopsided in favor of their preferred minority groups. Then they required them to pass the test that ensured they were smart enough to handle the job. You almost have the admire the evil genius of it—it's not a scheme that could be replicated in most other settings.
Bio-Q wasn’t proctored, a lot of FAA shills immediately flooded social media to downplay CTI grads.