Their candidate success rate would probably be higher if they weren’t rejecting the vast majority of their most-qualified applicants for reasons that are clearly pretextual: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
DEI might have contributed to this, but we wouldn't be hiring unqualified people in the first place if America could naturally compete for talent. The lesson learned seems to be less about the dangers of diversity and more about how the feds aren't paying the industry rate for professionals.
Per that article, candidates who accepted the pay terms and wanted to become ATCs were /rejected/ explicitly because they were not minorities or otherwise able to produce a biographical or demographic reason for acceptance, even when they scored a perfect score on the standardized aptitude assessment.
If you have something to refute the article the person above me linked, I'd love to see it because I'm incredibly disappointed in what I read about in that article.
Except that none of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit actually bothered to apply for jobs with the FAA (see this blog post from their own legal team crowing about winning a procedural matter over whether they had standing to sue given that they never applied for a job and thus were never actually rejected by the FAA https://mslegal.org/press-releases/mslf-prevails-over-faas-a... )...
What actually happened was that the FAA invalidated a bunch of AT-SAT[1] scores to align with its new diversity policy, and a bunch of people who barely passed the first time didn't want to re-take the test again and risk failing. So they did the American thing and sued instead.
The FAA has not rejected qualified candidates on the grounds of "diversity." And at any rate, the controller in the DC tower last night was hired during the Trump administration and the Blackhawk pilot that caused the crash wasn't the kind of candidate who would have been selected on DEI grounds...
[1] it's like the SAT, but for controller jobs instead of college admissions
Your own link has the court opinion confirming my understanding of the article. The fact they won the case on procedural grounds is not relevant to the fact the court is opining in the case that the evidence supports a conclusion that the FAA discriminated against "non-diverse" candidates who were otherwise qualified.
I think we can all agree that for a role like ATC, the most important thing is that candidates are competent and capable, because it is literally life or death. I have the strong belief that minority candidates are also competent and capable, so discriminatory against "non-diverse" candidates is reprehensible in the strongest terms. I don't think my position here is unusual, unreasonable, or in any way objectionable, and it turns out Congress agreed and made this practice explicitly illegal.
You're misreading both links. They didn't win the case, it's still going. They won a procedural issue that prevented them from automatically losing the case, and recast not losing as true victory. And the importance of my link was that it proves my point not yours: that the plaintiffs were not actually affected by the alleged FAA diversity hiring practices because...again...they never applied for a job in the first place.
Everybody railing against the assessment fundamentally misunderstood the test. There are no DEI questions. The test does not ask you what your ethnicity is, or your sex. It's basically just a personality test with biographical data: what is your preferred learning method? how do you respond to high-stress situations? what have you studied? what is your relevant flying/airport experience? how did you learn about the ATCS role?
The experience questions alone can get you a of a "passing" score (answers are not weighted equally, but despite popular claims online, all questions are worth at least some points...there are no purely informational questions https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/ATC%20Hiring%20R...). The OIG report also states the Biographical Assessment was tested on existing controllers to validate the scoring rubric and refined accordingly, meaning that nobody actually employed as an ATC could fail the BA. And importantly: the validation cohort was overwhelmingly white and male... (And the report also notes that in the 3 years that the BA was in use, there was no change in the ethnic or gender makeup of new ATCS hires.)
The plaintiff in the original post you linked supposedly got a 100% on the original test but somehow managed to "fail" a biography test in which more than half of the questions are about their experience in the field or relevant education. If they were being honest about their qualifications, they should have gotten a passing score with plenty of points to spare. Because again...the scoring rubric was validated by testing it on the existing staff of overwhelmingly white male employees...who all passed...
The issue is the correct answers were intentionally leaked to a black ATC union
In other words... fraud. If you get caught you lose the job and spend some free time in a cell.
You're really stretching to turn this into a scandal. Nobody complained that the answers to the previous test had been leaked.
That's not what happened, and that isn't what the test questions were about at all:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
>You're really stretching to turn this into a scandal. Nobody complained that the answers to the previous test had been leaked.
There hadn't been such a test previously, the black ATC union lobbied for it to be created in the first place.
The best source you can cite is a series of twitter posts that gets basic facts wrong, like the timeline and "test" contents?
The link claims the new "test" was implemented in 2014. It makes this claim repeatedly. But the BA was implemented in 2013 after years of being refined (including, as discussed by the OIG, by having current ATC staff take it). It was not intended to increase DEI-style diversity; Fox News ran a report in 2015 about a (tribal) Native American candidate who would have aced the BA if DEI-style diversity had been the goal. The original goal was to vastly expand the pool of candidates, because the FAA had a serious shortfall of candidates willing to work in all of the locations where ATCs were required and the hope was that they by bringing in more applicants, including so-called less qualified candidates, this would yield candidates willing to work at difficult-to-staff smaller airports where candidates wouldn't need to be as highly qualified to adequately perform the job.
The claim that the "correct" answers were leaked to the black ATC union (while true) is irrelevant. The "test" was a biographical questionnaire. The only way to cheat was to lie. And notably, members of the NBCFAE who supposedly had copies of the "correct" answers...didn't score any better than the people in the lawsuit suing over the test. Because again...the only way to cheat was to lie... (Unless those of you railing against the BA are suggesting that someone actually needs to be told that having more experience and expressing more enthusiasm about work is better than having less experience and not caring about your job?)
And one final important point: after Congress eliminated the BA in 2018, in 2019 Trump's FAA implemented the diversity hiring program he spent most of yesterday railing against.
Yep, that's right. The evil DEI program that Trump is mad about is his own program.
I thought Trump instantly blaming DEI was ridiculous in this case but I’m somewhat reconsidering.
How much less of a shortage of ATCs would we have now if it wasn’t for that debacle?
Probably not much, considering the biggest constraining factor is pay. For example, San Carlos airport is shutting down ATC entirely because they can't pay anyone enough to live locally to the tower: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/bay-area-airport-losing-...
There would be no problem filling the seats if the compensation was handsome and attractive. But we all know how federal workers are compensated, even when lives are on the line.
I could see this maybe being an issue in the bay area but outside of that area that pretty good pay.