{"id":91124,"date":"2016-03-24T08:32:22","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T16:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91124"},"modified":"2016-03-24T08:32:22","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T16:32:22","slug":"affirmative-action-lands-in-the-air-traffic-control-tower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91124","title":{"rendered":"Affirmative Action Lands in the Air Traffic Control Tower"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason Riley writes for the WSJ<\/a>: When a plane starts its final descent, are the passengers more concerned about the competence or about the skin color of the air-traffic controllers on the ground who will help the pilot land safely? The answer may be obvious to readers, if not to the Obama administration.<\/p>\n

A recently completed six-month investigation by Fox Business Network found that the Federal Aviation Administration has quietly moved away from merit-based hiring criteria in order to increase the number of women and minorities who staff airport control towers. The changes come despite the fact that the FAA\u2019s own internal reports describe the evidence for changing the hiring process as \u201cweak.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until 2013, the FAA gave hiring preference to controller applicants who earned a degree from one of its Collegiate Training Initiative schools and scored high enough on an eight-hour screening test called the Air Traffic Selection and Training exam, or AT-SAT, which measures cognitive skills. The Obama administration, however, determined that the process excluded too many from minority groups. In May 2013, the FAA\u2019s civil rights administrator issued \u201cbarrier analyses\u201d of the agency\u2019s employment procedures, which recommended \u201crevising how the AT-SAT is used in establishing best-qualified lists.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the start of last year, the FAA was using a biographical questionnaire (BQ) to initially vet potential hires. The questions\u2014\u201cHow many sports did you play in high school?\u201d, \u201cWhat has been the major cause of your failures?\u201d\u2014seem designed to elicit stories of personal disadvantage or family hardship rather than determine success on the job.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe FAA says it created the BQ to promote diversity among its workforce,\u201d reported Adam Shapiro of Fox Business. \u201cAll air traffic control applicants are required to take it. Those who pass are deemed eligible and those who fail are ruled ineligible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The FAA would not tell Fox Business what the biographical test is trying to measure and did not return my phone calls. But an FAA report released in October, \u201cUsing Biodata to Select Air Traffic Controllers,\u201d concluded that the AT-SAT exam, not the biographical questionnaire, is a much better predictor of performance. \u201cThe biodata items assessed did little to improve our ability to select applicants most likely\u201d to complete training successfully, said the study. \u201cIf biodata are to be used to select controllers, additional research is required to identify those biodata items that will add to the prediction of controller training performance over and above the effect of AT-SAT score.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given that training an air-traffic controller can cost more than $400,000 on average, selecting candidates based on who is likely to complete the process makes economic sense. Hans Bader, a legal scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes that the FAA\u2019s focus on diversity is not only inefficient but may be a violation of the Civil Rights Act. \u201cThe FAA\u2019s jettisoning of merit-based hiring criteria violated the Supreme Court\u2019s Ricci decision, [Ricci v. DeStefano, 2009] which limits agencies\u2019 ability to discard hiring criteria in order to increase minority representation, especially when there is no strong evidence that the criteria are not job-related,\u201d said Mr. Bader.<\/p>\n

After the FAA changed its screening process in 2014, thousands of applicants who were already in the pipeline\u2014people who had obtained an FAA-accredited degree, taken the AT-SAT exam and had been designated \u201cwell-qualified\u201d to become air-traffic controllers\u2014were told by the government that they would have to start the process again. \u201cBut this time, when they applied for a job, their college degrees and previous military experience would mean nothing,\u201d reported Fox Business. \u201cThey would now compete with thousands of people the agency calls \u2018off the street hires\u2019; anyone who wants to, can walk in off the street without any previous training and apply for an air traffic control job.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Riley writes for the WSJ: When a plane starts its final descent, are the passengers more concerned about the competence or about the skin color of the air-traffic controllers on the ground who will help the pilot land safely? … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29728],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-affirmative-action"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91125,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91124\/revisions\/91125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}