The Smart Culture. Robert L. Hayman Jr.Читать онлайн книгу.
keep our forests more beautiful
c. raise funds from the sale of hunting licenses
d. prevent complete destruction of certain kinds of animals
e. preserve certain game for eating purposes
BECAUSE is related to REASON as THEREFORE is related to
a. result
b. heretofore
c. instinct
d. logic
e. antecedent
BOUNTY means most nearly
a. generosity
b. limit
c. service
d. fine
e. duty
(Reading) “Adhering to old traditions, old methods, and old policies at a time when circumstances demand a new course of action may be praiseworthy from a sentimental point of view, but success is won most frequently by facing the facts and acting in accordance with the logic of the facts.” The quotation best supports the statement that success is best attained through
a. recognizing necessity and adjusting to it
b. using methods that have proved successful
c. exercising will power
d. remaining on a job until it is completed
e. considering each new problem separately
PROMONTORY means most nearly
a. marsh
b. monument
c. headland
d. boundary
e. plateau
The police department had determined that a raw score of forty on Test 21 was required for entrance into Recruit School; applicants who failed to attain that score were summarily rejected.
George Harley and John Sellers failed to score at least a forty on Test 21 when they took the test in the early 1970s; as a consequence, they were denied admission into Recruit School. Both Harley and Sellers are black, and it turned out that they were not the only black applicants to “fail” Test 21. From 1968 to 1971, the failure rate for black applicants was 57 percent; in the same time frame, by contrast, 13 percent of the white applicants failed Test 21.
In 1972 Harley and Sellers joined a lawsuit challenging the hiring and promotion practices of the Metropolitan Police Department. They contended, among other things, that reliance on Test 21 amounted to discrimination against black applicants in violation of the Constitution and federal civil rights laws. Test 21, they noted, had never been validated as a predictor of job performance: it was true that high scores on Test 21 were positively correlated with high scores on the Recruit School final examination, but neither Test 21 nor the final examination had been validated with reference to the Recruit School curriculum or the requirements of the job. Neither test, in short, bore any necessary relationship to police training or police work.
But the trial judge, Gerhard Gesell, of the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, rejected Harley and Sellers’s claim. Judge Gesell ruled, first, that “reasoning and verbal and literacy skills” were significant aspects of work in law enforcement: “[t]he ability to swing a nightstick no longer measures a policeman’s competency for his exacting role in this city.” Gesell then rejected the argument that Test 21 was an inappropriate measure of those skills. “There is no proof,” he wrote, that Test 21 is “culturally slanted to favor whites. . . . The Court is satisfied that the undisputable facts prove the test to be reasonably and directly related to the requirements of the police recruit training program and that it is neither so designed nor operates to discriminate against otherwise qualified blacks.”
It was true, Gesell granted, that “blacks and whites with low test scores may often turn in a high job performance.” But “[t]he lack of job performance validation does not defeat the Test, given its direct relationship to recruiting and the valid part it plays in this process.” The police department, he concluded, “should not be required on this showing to lower standards or to abandon efforts to achieve excellence.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals reversed Gesell’s decision. It was clear, the court first held, that the use of Test 21 did amount to racial discrimination. The statistical disparity was itself enough to establish that claim; moreover, it arose amid a growing body of evidence suggesting that, as a general rule, “blacks are test-rejected more frequently than whites.” “This phenomenon,” the court noted, “is the result of the long history of educational deprivation, primarily due to segregated schools, for blacks. Until arrival of the day when the effects of that deprivation have been completely dissipated, comparable performance on such tests can hardly be expected.”
The court also rejected the suggestion that the use of the test—and its racially discriminatory effects—could be justified by some objective job-related requirements, that, in legal terms, the discrimination was necessary to advance a “compelling governmental interest.” “The assertion of predictive value of Test 21 for achievement in Recruit School is based upon a correlation between Test 21 scores and scores on written examinations given during a 17-week training course,” the court noted. “We think this evidence tends to prove nothing more than that a written aptitude test will accurately predict performance on a second round of written examinations, and nothing to counter this hypothesis has been presented to us.” “As long as no one with a score below 40 enters Recruit School,” the court concluded,
as long as all recruits pass Recruit School, as long as the Department’s actions concede that Recruit School average has little value in predicting job performance, and as long as there is no evidence of any correlation between the Recruit School average and job performance, we entertain grave doubts whether any of this type of evidence could be strengthened to the point of satisfying the heavy burden imposed by [the law].
In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed yet again, reinstating Judge Gesell’s decision. In an opinion that altered the basic fabric of constitutional law—and impossibly hindered, in some views, the legal struggle for equality—the Court held that racially discriminatory effects were not enough to establish a constitutional violation. Rather, the guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” was abridged only by intentional discrimination. Only “purposeful discrimination” could create the type of inequality that required some compelling justification; discriminatory effects required no justification at all. There was, then, no constitutional inequality when black applicants failed Test 21 at four times the rate of their white counterparts; in the absence of proof that the Metropolitan Police Department intended this result, the Constitution was not implicated at all.
Justice Byron White wrote the opinion for the Court. Justice White was the valedictorian of the class of 1938 at the University of Colorado, a Rhodes scholar, and a graduate with high honors from Yale Law School. He was—and is—a very smart man. But Harley and Sellers’s claim, he wrote, left him befuddled: “[W]e have difficulty understanding how a law establishing a racially neutral qualification for employment is nevertheless racially discriminatory and denies ‘any person . . . equal protection of the laws’ simply because a greater proportion of Negroes fail to qualify than members of other racial or ethnic groups.”
Nowhere in his opinion did White explain how he knew that Test 21 was “racially neutral.”
Near the close of his opinion for the Court, White did explain why evidence of a racially disparate impact could not suffice to establish a constitutional claim:
A rule that a statute designed to serve neutral ends is nevertheless invalid, absent compelling justification, if in practice it benefits or burdens one race more than another would be far reaching and would raise serious questions about, and perhaps invalidate, a whole range of tax, welfare, public service, regulatory, and licensing statutes that may be more burdensome to the poor and to the average black than to the more affluent white.
There are, in short, too many racial disparities