Sometime around 1980 civil rights radicals working within the government, with the assistance of outside activists, launched an all-out clandestine attack on the principles of equal rights and workplace competency. Secretly, the Labor Department began using a technique called “race norming” to adjust the standardized test scores of minorities who had taken the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB), which is used as a basis for government job referrals. More than 38 states relied on this data.
Under a race-norming regime the test scores of minorities are compared with scores of other test takers within their own racial or ethnic group, but are never compared with those of people in other groups. Each test taker is given a percentile ranking within his own group and then the percentile rankings of all of the test takers are intermingled on one big list. Employers who were relying on this final list of blended scores were never told that the people on the list had never competed with one another in a free and open general competition to achieve their percentile rankings.
For example: all applicants for employment take the same test. The name of every white person who’s test score ranked in the top third of the white test takers is put on a list titled “The Top Third”. Then the name of every black person who’s score was in the top third of the black test takers is also placed on the same list with the names of the white test takers. Finally, the list titled “The Top Third” is given to government department managers. What the managers were never told is that the black applicants on the list would only have scored in the bottom six percent if they had been openly competing against the white test takers. In other words, the clandestine practice of race norming flooded our government with a legion of incompetent workers.
The civil rights bureaucrats surreptitiously added bonus points to minority test scores. The worse a group performed on the test, the more bonus points were added to the test scores of the individuals in that group.
This method of cooking the books subverted the purpose of administering a standardized test in the first place, but it had the appeal of allowing the liberals a respite from the troubling reality of the manifest, documented and persistent differences in group performance.
Not only did race norming cheat countless qualified applicants of the employment of their choice, but it is costing American taxpayers a fortune today. The dummies who were race-normed into government employment were never told that they weren’t as capable as their white coworkers. Decades after joining the government many of these minority workers have concluded that their slow upward advancement compared to whites is the result of white racism. They are now filing anti-discrimination lawsuits against the government. The government knows the truth but fears the uproar that would follow any honest disclosure that these complainers should never have been hired in the first place. Rather than argue this impolitic point in court, the government is simply handing each of them the $300,000 maximum compensation allowed by law. That’s $300,000 of your tax money.
Federal workers are seven times more likely to file a civil rights complaint than private-sector employees because government is where the race-normed dummies are employed. From 1990 to 1997, the government spent $378 million on counselors, judges and investigators to handle these complaints. Another $488 million went to complaining employees as “compensation”. The true price is much higher because of other costs and confidential settlements. From 1990 to 1997 complaints shot up 70 percent from 17,000 to 29,000 cases. Official findings of discrimination were found in only 4 percent of the cases.
It’s no mystery why The New York Times, The Nation, and the black press are silent about this outrage, but why haven’t Rush and the other conservative radio commentators evened mentioned it? Why is The National Review silent? Why is this lone wedsite doing the job they should be doing? Why don’t you ask them?
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Thomas Clough
Copyright 2001