Your Dept. of Justice: Busy Putting Out Fires Putting Down Fire Departments In Virginia

Back in March the Department of Justice settled a lawsuit against the Portsmouth, Virginia, fire department for allegedly discriminating black applicants for entry-level firefighter positions. (I missed this when it happened, and would have continued to miss it if the ever-watchful Roger Clegg had not brought it to my attention.)

According to the Justice Department’s complaint,

African American applicants passed the written examination at a rate of approximately 42 percent, while the corresponding pass rate for white applicants was approximately 86 percent….

According to this report, the complaint also alleges that,

[w]hile African Americans made up about 29 percent of the applicant pool, they represented only 17.9 percent of the applicants who passed the test, according to the complaint.

I suppose another way to say the above would be that while whites and Hispanics made up 71% of the applicant pool, they were (only?) 82.1% of the applicants who passed. A “disparate impact,” to be sure, but worth a federal case?

Nor was the Justice Department’s desire to stamp out what it must regard as the fires of discrimination raging across Virginia limited to the Portsmouth Fire Department. As the source just quoted notes,

In 2006, the Justice Department determined that Chesapeake and Virginia Beach discriminated against black and Hispanic applicants on the math portion of their entrance exams. Both cities also reached settlements with the Justice Department.

Now I am certainly no expert on testing, but even a brief look at this issue suggests that the Justice Department (and cities like New Haven, cited above) regard any test in which black applicants do not pass in proportion to their numbers as discriminatory. Nor is it at all clear how the math section, the primary villain, of the test discriminates against blacks. Is there some black form of math that the test does not test?

As it happens, the National Firefighter Selection Test, and its companion, the National Police Officer Selection Test, are widely used across the country. Florida is typical:

The Florida Police Chiefs Association now provides the National Police Officer Selection Test (POST), the National First and Second-Line Supervisor Tests, and the National Dispatcher Selection Test (NDST). In addition we offer the National Firefighter Selection Test (NFST), an exam similar to the POST, but for entry-level firefighters.

Tests such as these have often been validated, such as in this study. And the producers of the tests respond to the complains here.

Finally, if disproportionate fail rates, alone, proves to the Department of Justice’s satisfaction that a test is discriminatory, why not simply file a discrimination complaint against all the Virginia Department of Education?

VIRGINIA GRADUATION RATES SHOW NEED FOR IMPROVEMENT

Virginia’s Class of 2008 had an on-time graduation rate of 82.1 percent, and a dropout rate of 8.7 percent, according to new data from the Virginia Department of Education. The worse news is that the dropout rate for black students is twice the rate for white students, and the dropout rate for Latino students – 20 percent statewide – is three times that for white students.

If the Department of Justice knows of a math test that black firefighter and police applicants pass at the same rate as whites, why is it keeping that test’s identity a secret? If it doesn’t know of one, perhaps its lawyers could devise one and share it fire and police departments everywhere.

Say What?