Comment by DangitBobby
3 months ago
It truly boggles my mind that Trump may have a legitimate basis for alleging that DEI policies have contributed to issues with ATC staffing.
> First, to liberals:
> I dislike Trump as much as anyone. Maybe I’m not supposed to play my hand like that while reporting a news article, but it’s true. I’ve wanted him out of politics since he entered the scene a decade ago, I voted against him three elections in a row, and I think he’s had a uniquely destructive effect within US politics. So I understand—please believe, I understand—just how disquieting it is to watch him stand up and blame DEI after a major tragedy.
> But Democrats did not handle it. The scandal occurred under the Obama administration. The FAA minimized it, obscured it, fought FOIA requests through multiple lawsuits, and stonewalled the public for years as the class action lawsuit rolled forward. The Trump administration missed it, too, for a term, and it’s likely most officials simply didn’t hear about it through the first few years of the Biden administration. No outlets left of Fox Business bothered to provide more than a cursory examination of it, and it never made much of a dent on the official record. Even when the New York Times ran a thoroughly reported article on air traffic controller shortages late last year, it never touched the scandal. It was possible to miss it.
Either he's a broken clock that's right twice a day, or a Stallman equivalent who was just dismissed as crazy until the truth was too big to ignore.
Seems like bad news for minorities either way. Even if the lawsuit is dismissed, who would want to take on one of the most stressful jobs now knowing that if something goes wrong, millions of racist white people (including the president) will feel emboldened to blame you because of your skin color?
Yes, this is why anything like affirmative action was always a terrible idea.
If relevant to who gets hired, you are literally discriminating against candidates on the basis of race. If irrelevant, you still have the "maybe they're just an affirmative action hire" pall hanging over those people. Nobody wins.
So how do you address structural discrimination in American society, including the workplace? (If your answer is "it doesn't exist", please flag me and move on.)
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The article does not imply that they reduced standards in order to let DEI student pass.
Rather they added an insane biographical test that only DEI students could pass, with the net effect of dramatically reducing the availability of ATC's.
i.e. a minority ATC is just as qualified, but there are far fewer white ATC than there should be.
They did indeed reduce standards. From the article:
> Throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s, the FAA faced pressure to diversify its field of air traffic controllers, historically a profession that has been primarily white men, notably from the NBCFAE.4 In the early 2000s, this pressure focused on the newly developed air traffic control qualification test, the AT-SAT, which the NBCFAE hired Dr. Outtz to critique from an adverse impact standpoint. As originally scored, the test was intended to pass 60% of applicants, but predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass.5 In response, the FAA reweighted the scoring to make the test easier to pass, reducing its correlation with job performance as they did so.6 In its final form, some 95% of applicants passed the test.7
> This was a bit of a shell game. In practice, they divided it into a “well qualified” band (with scores between 85 and 100 on the test, met by around 60% of applicants) and a “qualified” band (with scores between 70 and 84), and drew some 87% of selections from that “well qualified” band.8 Large racial disparities remained in the “well qualified” band. As a result, facing continued pressure, the FAA began to investigate ways to deprioritize the test.
> Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” outperforming “most other strategies in predicting mean performance,” and it was low cost and low time commitment. On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9
> The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss.10 They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?” There is a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes. How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?
The relevant question is whether this issue affected the absolute number of filled ATC positions, not just who got them.
Though the facts on the latter are Not Great, and nuance is not exactly abundant right now.
They mention that extended offers declined year-over-year after the policy. The implication to me (though it is left unsaid) is that the treatment of students, colleges, etc. by the FAA led to fewer people interested in spending their own time and money for ATC training since the FAA fucked them over so badly.
> Per Fischer, applicants declined year-over-year from 2014 onward. In 2016, hiring was divided into two pools: Pool 1, veterans and CTI students (4021 applicants, 1451 offer letters) and Pool 2, for general population (25,156 applicants, 6799 who passed the biographical questionnaire, 1500 offer letters). By 2019, only 9265 applied, with 6419 (923 from Pool 1, 5496 from Pool 2), with 234 Pool 1 offer letters and 680 in Pool 2.16
Both of those questions are relevant.
How is the composition of the ATC workforce independently relevant, except as mediated through staffing levels?
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