"Racist" math?

Virginia Beach has reached an agreement with the US Justice Dept. regarding allegations that its police dept. discriminated against black and Hispanic recruits. Here's what happened:

The Justice Department had complained that the math portion of the exam had an adverse effect on minority applicants and unfairly excluded them from being hired.

Tha math portion?? In one of the better movies of the last decade, "Boyz 'n the Hood," Laurence Fishburn's character, "Furious" Styles, tells his son and his friends about the "cultural bias" of the SAT -- but that only its math portion is universal.

The city will offer to let 124 black and Hispanic former applicants resume the hiring process. Those recruits failed the math test between 2002 and 2005 but would have passed under the new standards.

In the 27-page settlement, the Justice Department states that the city did not intentionally discriminate against blacks and Hispanics.

"The Department of Justice has alleged that the testing component disproportionately disqualified minority applicants," Deputy City Attorney Mark Stiles said. "They don't allege that we engaged in that conduct with the intent of discrimination, but rather that the disparate impact was found to have occurred by our simply using the test."

Ah, that old "disparate impact" scenario that somehow translates into "discrimination." Of course, the solution then is to lower standards so that this does not occur -- instead of assisting those "impacted" to do better on the exam!

The whole premise is politically correct nonsense. If the minority scores were better, there wouldn't even be a concern about what is actually the legitimate point in this entire situation:

The Justice Department questioned whether math is relevant to the daily duties of a police officer. The city agreed to eliminate the 70 percent cutoff score for the math part of the test.

And this is a good question. How much math does a police officer need to know? Basic math? Probably. Algebra? Unlikely. I'd be curious to see exactly what sorts of problems were on the exam.

However, the Justice Dept. didn't have any qualms about the reading and grammar portions of the test. Weren't these "culturally biased"? And how important is a cop's grammar? If he's talking to regular citizens, who cares if he uses double negatives -- or knows the difference between "your" and "you're"?

The city has created a $160,000 fund to "compensate" the former applicants who failed the old version of the math test. In the new version, "an applicant must score at least 70 percent on the reading and grammar parts of the test and score an average of at least 60 percent on all three parts of the exam."

Posted by Hube at April 7, 2006 05:17 PM | TrackBack