Comment by legitster
2 months ago
This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.
Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.
> when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.
Respectfully, thats not accurate.
The article actually shows that dei considerations were central to the original changes, not just recent framing. The FOIA requests show explicit discussions about "diversity vs performance tradeoffs" from the beginning. The NBCFAE role and the "barrier analysis" were both explicitly focused on diversity outcomes in 2013.
The article provides primary sources (internal FAA documents, recorded messages, investigation reports) showing that racial considerations were explicitly part of the decision making process from the start. This is documented in realtime communications.
The scandal involved both improper hiring practices (cheating) AND questionable DEI implementation. These aren't mutually exclusive; they're interrelated aspects of the same event.
> Taking old, resolved scandals
In what way do you consider this resolved?
The class action lawsuit hasn't even gone to trial yet (2026).
The FAA is still dealing with controller shortages. (facilities are operating understaffed,controllers are working 6-day weeks due to staffing shortages, training pipelines remain backed up)
The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.
Congress stopped the shitty behavior quiz 9 years ago
> The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.
> The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.
Separate from the above posts, the FAA continued their discriminatory policies. For example, setting several DEIA initiatives and only one target for hiring more Air Traffic controllers. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/office_org/hea...
Was deeply aware of it at the time - was not really a DEI issue even then - it was pure cronyism.
The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI.
For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"):
https://archive.ph/Qgjy5
The evidence in this source does not discuss cronyism, although I believe you that it could have been relevant to your personal experience; it's just false to claim the issue as a whole was unrelated to DEI.
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If we step away from the traffic controllers nonsense for a moment, the actual problem sounded like a military pilot to me. It's my understanding that people who have a family line of pilots go into that funnel knowing a specific nepotism related result occurs such that when it comes time to become a commercial pilot you are probably from such a family.
I have no idea if helicopter pilots work the same way or are starting to work the same way, but whenever I see a BS move like this I think that there's probably an opposite interpretation that doesn't fit what their demographic wants to hear.
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The Brigida lawsuit, from which we get a lot of the documents in the article, was filed in 2016 and has framed this as a DEI discrimination issue from the get-go.
With a grain of salt - any hiring lawsuit by its nature is going to be a discrimination case.
The fact that everyone is really quick to just throw around DEI = discrimination is kind of my point. Even the text of the Brigida lawsuit clearly points out that nobody would have a problem with the FAA increasing minority representation in other ways.
If I deliberately hire whites more than other races nobody would deny that is discrimination. If I deliberately hire more minorities than whites, that is not discrimination?
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Could you please elaborate how DEI is not discrimination? Is hiring based on someone's RACE ever not discrimination?
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> Taking old, resolved scandals
The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.
Yes, the scandal is not over because the FAA continued to conflate diversity with performance.
In 2023, the FAA set several, major goals for DEIA initiatives and only one target for hiring more Air Traffic controllers. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/FY23%20OSI-M%20and%2...
Or from 2021, where they wrote "Diversity + Inclusion = Better Performance" https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/office_org/hea...
Too many examples. Compared to 2016, the FAA of the 2020s was better at hiding their written bias. Nonetheless, they failed to attract the talent they needed.
No, but the problematic assessment in question was eliminated by congress in 2016. That would not explain the FAA's current recruitment problems.
ATC training and dropout rate is so long and high, that mistakes made 8-9 years ago could still be impactful.
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Framed as a cheating and recruiting scandal by who? Is it truly resolved if the racial discrimination element was never addressed?
[flagged]
That's a misreading of the article. This scandal was not just "cheating and recruitment" but forcing "Diversity" with a side of "Equity". To quote the facts:
> 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. 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?”
This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the spirit did not.
That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and now to a memory hole.
Right, if you look at the documents there was clear racial discrimination involved.
It's bizarre to see people say that since the media initially didn't report on the full story, telling people the full story is similar to "state-sponsored propoganda." That mindset appears to be saying that once the media has made up a narrative for the story, people should be hostile to other pertinent information, even when it's uncovering major aspects of the story that the media didn't report on.
That kind of attitude runs counter to anyone interested in finding out the truth.
Edit: Also worth pointing out the author's original article on this scandal was written a year ago, and a followup was recently written to clarify things in response to increased discussion about that article. They're a law student who initially wrote about it after coming across court documents and being surprised that there had been almost no coverage regarding what actually had happened.
> How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?
The key part though is that the FAA was worried about the job performance of diverse candidates they brought in. They did not see a trade off between their staffing levels.
There are two separate arguments happening:
Did changing their application process create less qualified ATC controllers? Maybe! But no one seems to be arguing this.
Did changing their application process create a shortage of ATC controllers? Probably not! If anything, the evidence points to the FAA being worried they were going to get too many mediocre candidates.
>Probably not!
The linked article explicitly disagrees with this opinion. In fact it comes to almost literally the opposition conclusions:
>Not only that, it shattered the pipeline the FAA had built with CTI schools, making the process towards becoming an air traffic controller less certain, undercutting many of the most passionate people working to train prospective controllers, and leading to a tense and unclear relationship between the FAA and feeder organizations.
>Did anyone truly unqualified make it all the way through the pipeline? There's no reason to think so. Did average candidate quality decrease? There's every reason to think so. Would that lead to staffing issues? Unambiguously yes.
That's not to say that you are wrong and the article is correct, but in a discussion that is started by an article, and when the article addresses exactly the points you are making, I feel that it is helpful to give explicit reasons why you think the article is mistaken.
The thing I keep looking for is dropout/failure rate. If their change in hiring procedure resulted in higher dropout/failure rate, then yes, this impacting ATC staffing but it would have been slow burn.
ATC staffing is bottlenecked by the training dropout/failure rate. 1000 people a year go in, pretty sizable dropout or fail so you are left with 500. If 700 are retiring, that's -200 overall. At some point, that -200 year over year becomes impactful.
So, if you need more people, you have two options. Increase the class size but obviously that's expensive and makes the problem slightly worse up front as you are pulling qualified people into instructor roles.
Or try to filter out those who will drop/fail in hiring process so they don't occupy class slots. One of the ways FAA had done that is CTI college courses because those graduates had lower drop/fail rate.
Yeah nobody is arguing it because even the FAA admits it's true. When you talk about a "tradeoff" between quality and diversity that is an admission that DEI lowers quality.
I don't think I even know what "DEI" is anymore. Political pundits have turned it into a generic slur, a boogeyman that vaguely means "I have to work with minorities now??"
I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out." At least that's how all of my training sessions at work frame it. But, like everything, the term has become politically charged, and everyone now wants to overload it to mean all sorts of things they simply don't like.
I'll try to assume good faith, but this is the sort of framing often used in the waning days of unpopular ideas.
That's not what DEI ever was. It fundamentally came down to evaluating disparate impact and then setting targets based on it. The underlying idea is that if a given pool (in the US, generally national- or state-level statistics) has a racial breakdown like so:
But your company or organization had a breakdown of:
You are institutionally racist and need to pay money to various DEI firms in order to get the right ratios, where 'right' means matching (or exceeding) the population for certain ethnic minorities. The 'certain ethnic minorities' value changed over time depending on who you would ask.
The methods to get 'the right ratios' varied from things like colorblind hiring (which had a nil or opposite effect), to giving ATS-bypassing keywords to minority industry groups (what the FAA did here).
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>including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out
I think that is the crux of the issue right there. It's taken as a "sky-is-blue" level fact that everyone is equal in all regards, and therefore any inequality in outcome is a function of bigoted policy at some level. This is despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, which kind of elevates DEI to an ideological position rather than a logical one, and arguably undermines the confidence of people who would ostensibly be considered "DEI Hires".
Companies have largely side-stepped this however, because underneath it all, they still want the most productive workers, regardless of their labels. So they implement a farcical DEI to keep up appearances, while still allowing hiring of whoever is deemed the most productive for a team.
DEI: Diversity Equity Inclusion
Diversity of race (encouraging racism), equity of income (encouraging envy), inclusion of "the marginalized" (discouraging free association)
Except, as a government program, this turns from mere encouragement to forcing the issues, under threat of fines, imprisonment, and ultimately death.
In the words of famous actor Morgan Freeman; "If you want to end racism, stop talking about it." (1)
1) https://atlantablackstar.com/2024/06/16/morgan-freeman-doubl...
>>I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out."
I don't think anyone objects to that, but the unspoken part that seemed to be enforced was "...even if it means lowering standards and overlooking the best qualified candidates for the job, as long as we get kudos for meeting our diversity targets."
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> then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda,
I don't know that it is limited to, or even most prevalent, in state-sponsored propaganda. Private individuals, media, etc. do this too without any state sponsorship.
Sure, I wasn't even insinuating that this was state-sponsored, just highlighting that it's known to be a super effective way to manipulate stories.
> I wasn't even insinuating that this was state-sponsored, just highlighting that it's known to be a super effective way to manipulate stories
And yet, although this is a fact, the choice and the phrasing paints a particular story.
From an external (not US) PoV, it might also be that DEI was too much of a sacred cow before to call a spade a spade.
Maybe! But in this case, the bulk of the mistakes by the FAA happened in the 2012-2014. In the middle of the Obama administration, but well before the bulk of the really controversial post-BLM DEI stuff that the current administration is largely attacking.
DEI quotas have been around for decades. We just used to call it affirmative action and it was far less aggressive and blatant.
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It's all connected, DEI(B) is just the latest revision of the beast.
From an internal US pov, yes you are correct that's exactly what the culture is here. Call out the obviously lowered standards for women and minority candidates and expect severe consequences to your career.
> to call a spade a spade
intentional? one of the dumber virtue-signaling "no-nos" from the worst of DEI.
Yes. It was also often career suicide to criticize DEI indicatives.
Even if the criticism was intended to be constructive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...
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like the n word?
The problem is it hasn’t been resolved, there is a big lawsuit about it still working its way through the courts.
> "... slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal..."
Astounding level of misdirection/cope here, bordering on non-factual. Did we just read the same article? This is the textbook example of a DEI scandal and was so from the very beginning. I mean the "textbook" part literally, employment discrimination law textbooks will dedicate whole chapters to this scandal for decades at a minimum.
"Students understood that the FAA hired virtually everyone who completed the program and passed the assessment."
It sounds like they couldn't hire enough people to fill vacancies. The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation.
It litterally has plaintiffs that weren't hired with 100% scores, and tons of experience. Not only that, sometimes they were minorities, just not the "in" minority. I believe, the second major plaintiff is a Native American.
> The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation.
Except it was demonstrably of the opposite of this. The bigraphical questionnaire rejected 90% of applicants for no justifiable reason.
In practice, diversity is much easier to achieve by reducing the opportunities of the undesirable demographics. This is one such example.
How it's "resolved"? Just because it happened a while ago (and continued in some different form since then pretty much until now - a lot of "we love DEI" stuff from FAA that I've seen are pretty recent) does not make it "resolved". Also, people still remember and discuss stuff that happened decades ago, including on HN, all the time. I don't see why the exception must be made for this story, so that since it started a while ago, it must never be mentioned again.
Your reference to "state-sponsored propoganda" is very strange too - if you accuse the author of being the agent of some state, say it openly - and bring the receipts to prove it. Otherwise, this kind of innuendo should not have a place anywhere.
> But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.
Did we read the same article? I didn't see this as a "reframing" but rather an investigative expose into the history and most importantly "why".
And it's pretty clear that at the time the cheating scandal came out, the FAA wasn't interested in implicating themselves.
"The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation."
The cheating element is only _part_ of it, and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology...like a sacred cow. Litigating "disparate impact" cases across any category became a successful attack vector against capitalist structures, and supported by Democratic leadership.
This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Both pieces are relevant.
> and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology
In the eye of the beholder. The current regime is upplaying the DEI elements because of their ideology.
The difference though is, unless everyone involved has a time machine, using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation.
> using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation.
I'm as blue as they come, but let's not mince words.
This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists.
Much like the elite college admissions lawsuit, we don't need to guess at people's ideology - they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disadvantaged" black applicants and so a biographical questionnaire was needed to re-advantage them.
When Trump opened his mouth to blame DEI for the crash, about 95% of what he said was hateful, totally-made-up bullshit. Despite that and speaking practically, DEI had a significant role to play in the ATC understaffing during the crash.
I really wish that our party was better at calling out crazy people within our ranks, ESPECIALLY when they do stuff that's guaranteed to alienate a solid chunk of the country just based on if "their worst subject in school was science" or whatever other deranged, racist proxy for race they come up with.
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> This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed.
Our Blessed Homeland vs. Their Barbarous Wastes
Their Blessed Homeland vs. Our Barbarous Wastes
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If I had to blame anything on the Democrats it is this:
Valuing competence is one thing. Valuing diversity is another thing. You can have neither, either one, or both. The democrats make a conspicuous show of not valuing competence in addition to making some noises about diversity.
Nobody said Barack Obama was an affirmative action case, no, he was one of the greatest politicians of the first quarter-century. On the other hand I feel that many left-leaning politicians make conspicuous displays of incompetence, I'd particularly call out Karen Bass, who would fall for whatever Scientology was selling and then make excuses for it. I think they want donors to know that whatever they are they aren't capable, smart and ambitious like Ralph Nader but rather they don't connect the dots between serving donors and what effect it has on their constituents.
When Bass was running for mayor of L.A. in a contested election for which she had to serve the whole community she went through a stunning transformation and really seemed to "get it", all the duckspeak aimed at reconciling a lefty constituency and rightist donors went away.
Nowhere is this disregard for competence more conspicuous in the elections where a senile or disabled white man is running against a lunatic. Fetterman beat Oz (they said, it's nothing, he just has aphasia, except his job is to speak for Pennsylvania) but they held on to Biden until the last minute against Trump and his replacement lost.
Democrats need to make it clear that you can have both, but shows of competence increase the conflict between being a party that is a favorite of donors and being a party that has mass appeal. Being just a little sheepish and stupid is the easy way to reconcile those but we see how that went in 2024.
> When Bass was running for mayor of L.A. ... she went through a stunning transformation and really seemed to "get it"....
This is what always happens to politicians. Their mumbles become coherent. Shyness fades. Vague dithering words transform to bold calls to action. Infirm display vitality.
This is what politicians do. Otherwise they would be school teachers and programmers.
But you also have MTG who literally believes “they” control the weather so I’m not sure exactly why you single democrats out here or even the it to any kind of ideology specific consequence.
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I would more likely say that the qualities that make one popular or wanting to deal with the bullshit of managing Americans disputes are in opposition to the qualities that make one qualified. See: almost every politician that’s not a Democrat. Incompetence is staggeringly bipartisan.
Resolved? By whom?
You're suggesting DEI wasn't the problem then? Using a new colloquial term doesn't suddenly change the foundation of the concern.
> be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.
I'm wary of all stories. This is Hacker News. Why wouldn't "critical analysis" be the default?
Sometimes people share a tech thing they thought was interesting
The FAA worked with a race advocacy group to create a screening test blatantly calculated to give preferences to that race. That’s not an isolated incident. Harvard was smacked down by the Supreme Court for racially discriminating in admissions. Biden was smack down by courts for racially discriminating in small business loans. A court just smacked down NASDAQ for diversity quotas on corporate board. Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.
> Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.
I am not seeped in all the cases you mention here. You have not drawn a picture for me though to see that all of these are the same issue and that should all be treated the same way rather than be dealt with individually.
Add to that the effort to repeal California’s ban on affirmative action: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/prop-16-failed-in-californ...
It’s all the same issue and has been since the 1970s. Many people believe you need explicit racial references in hiring, government programs. This is a deeply unpopular idea, so it gets hidden behind various labels. Though there was a “masks off” moment starting in 2020 when people were openly subscribing to Ibram Kendi thought (who lays out his view clearly that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination).
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Spot on for this guy.
From the article:
> Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes.
This was a terrible conclusion. Ask any ATC person what's up with staffing and "COVID training and hiring disruptions" will be in the first few sentences they say.
The fact this article goes on and on without a single mention of the impact COVID has had gives me all the stock I need to place in it.
Some folks may find it hard to believe, but the 1-2 year interruption in hiring pipelines can cause large ripples that take years-to-decades to resolve.
Slapping a DEI strawman up and trying to tie it to a tragedy reflects on the changes some seek.
This article is not talking about COVID, it's talking about the absurd changes to the hiring process that disadvantaged qualified candidates in favor of people who said science was their worst subject in high school (15 points). How could this not have an impact on hiring?
Because COVID happened much sooner and has likely had a bigger impact than the hiring practices from a decade ago - notice we don't have a concrete number of "disadvantaged qualified candidates" from this article. Whereas, I can point COVID with actual numbers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42952695
If we're going to say "Did that contribute to a shortage of qualified ATC..?" then you have to considering all inputs into what is a current conversation rather than extrapolate your already asserted points from the article.
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> Likely yes.
Love the in-depth analysis they use to answer that question...
That is the frustrating part - the article had it's lane and just had to stick in it.
Instead, we get someone extrapolating and guessing when we have actual data from COVID on class delays/size reduction(as well as more controllers retiring earlier) coupled with lower training intensity while air traffic was depressed.
A thing I wonder about like the nature of government and power is why does it feel like going back and forth between ridiculous policies. Like I’m sure 10 years from now, we’ll be uncovering crazy things the Trump administration did that were racist or sexist or whatever and it won’t make any sense! You’ll look at it and go why would a reasonable person have decided that approach! Talk about a footgun. And then maybe there’s a New Democrat administration that creates a new catchphrase that replaces DEI and we get familiar excesses again.
If you look at the articles on this blog, it’s clear the author has an agenda. The site is filed away as “view with suspicion” for me
Worse, it doesn't prove what it asserts. The assertion is that the quality of hires obviously got impacted. But, not once does it look at performance of hires.
This narrative also doesn't expand the look at hiring numbers over the years, where it would be seen that the last 4 years are the only growth years in the organization going back even before this scandal.
Nor does it look at any other problems. Sequestration is mentioned in passing, but the impact it had was sizeable. By the numbers, it is almost certainly more impactful than even the scandal that is focused on.
What this does is appeal to the public court for justice on an old scandal. And right now, the public court is dominated by Trump and his supporters. One can try and couch ideas by "guys, I'm not an extreme Republican" all one wants, but that doesn't change that this feeds their narrative far more than it does to help any progress on the actual court case that is ostensibly being highlighted.
So, now instead of getting quantitative analysis in a rigorous court with investigations, we get people carrying water for Trump as he blames DEI.
Hiring people who are responsible for the safety of people lives on anything but merit is a problem no matter how you frame it. Not only is it racism, it is dangerous.
You are begging the question that they were hired on anything other than merit. Do you have hard evidence that the people that were hired did not pass qualifications?
The main evidence of the scandal is that the recruitment funnel prioritized on things that were bad. And, make no mistake, that was a scandal. It does not, however, even attempt to show that recruitment forced hiring to accept people that lacked merit.
That is, it does show there is a good chance RECRUITING rejected qualified people. But that is not enough to show that HIRING was necessarily lowering the bar.
There is a begging of the question where we assume that they must have. But show the performance numbers! Without those, you don't know.
And again, in context of the current debate, realize that the last 4 years are the only growth years in that agency. Such that the last 4 years are the only ones that made ANY progress on helping understaffed towers.
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In 2021, the Al Jezeera documentary on Boeing’s airframes was commented in Yt as a DEI scandal.
Post-reframing consists in telling people it wasn’t introduced as this, which may be true for journalists but clearly understood by the audience as a DEI issue, then claiming the DEI issue is slapped upon an existing problem.
Agressive DEI has been uniformly contested since it was introduced, by (practically) everyone who has ever lost a promotion on non-skills criteria. It’s just that today, the good side has finally won.
Not yet. The SC has ruled it illegal for university admissions but it somehow still remains allowed for corporate hiring. Even then, just because the court has ruled on it doesn't mean it will actually stop. The DEI people are snakes and will continue to find more sneaky ways to implement their illegal racist quotas and more newspeak to describe it in a "legal" way.
It’s also still deeply embedded in education. DEI might be less popular in the workforce but in primary and secondary education stuff like lowering standards, ignoring test failures, removing gifted classes, merging special needs classes in mainline, changing classroom conflict resolution to not remove disruptive kids from classrooms, etc are all still going strong and increasing in prevalence. That will have a ripple effect in the workforce for decades after the Overton window has shifted back.
And in the US the federal government can’t stop it as it’s mostly defined in local and state gov (which is many times larger than the federal workforce). Dept of Education would only have limited influence there.
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> Even then, just because the court has ruled on it doesn't mean it will actually stop.
See California public universities still practicing affirmative action despite it being made illegal decades ago for a good example of this