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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > March > 18 > Entry
Editorial: Lower test standard was least-worst option
Lowering the threshold for passing scores on an exam may be about the worst way to achieve racial diversity in a workforce.
But Dayton had little choice. And the change isn’t as significant as some make it out to be. It doesn’t put unqualified police on the streets.
It puts more people in the police academy.
The situation: In a city that is 43 percent black, the police department is about 10 percent black. That’s a problem. It invites bad race relations. When a racial incident happens, it puts the police department on the defensive. And the lack of diversity deprives the police department of views the organization needs to hear.
Several city administrations have genuinely tried to recruit more minorities, but haven’t found the way. A couple of years ago, the U.S. Justice Department, enforcing a 40-year-old civil rights act, fined the city $600,000 and told it to get another test for police and fire applicants. The money went to people who failed the test previously, on the grounds that it was a flawed test.
The city gave a new police test last November. About 25 percent of the black applicants passed, about the same as last time.
At this stage, the Department of Justice could again tell the city to get another test. But the city is in a hurry to hire new officers, because the force is dwindling dramatically below what city officials want. And fining the city again would not move the city toward diversity.
So Justice might have given up. But it has seen minority hiring rise in other cities under its pressure, with few indications that the new hires are unqualified. So it was skeptical that Dayton had found the best way to proceed.
Justice opted for something between giving up and requiring a new test. To keep the process moving, it called for lowering the passing score on the tests to 58 percent on one part and 63 percent on the other (down from 66 percent and 72 percent).
Cries have gone up all over. Even people who have pushed for diversity said this was an insult to blacks. As for people who have always opposed pushes for diversity — don’t even ask. The story has won national attention.
But the city’s only alternative to agreeing to a lower passing score was to tempt the Justice Department to take it to court. That would be another delay that nobody wants.
The written tests are just part of the hiring process. There’s an interview and, of course, another serious hurdle: the police academy. (And that’s not to mention the background check, lie-detector check and such).
Moreover, written tests are not best viewed as holy script. Professor Kimberly West-Faulkin teaches a course in testing and the law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and comments for the African-American Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank. She is a believer that testing has its place.
But “they don’t tell us everything,” she says, noting that testing has seen little progress over the years in its ability to predict how well a person will do a job. She says that employers are generally not asked to prove that their tests are good until somebody raises an issue.
In civil service, tests came to have a central role as an alternative to reliance on political influence in hiring decisions. That was a major step forward. However, when tests become a hindrance to the accomplishment of common-sense goals, it’s time to worry about excessive rigidity.
Under exceptional circumstances, the lowering of standards by a few points on one aspect of a complex hiring process ought not be considered unthinkable.
Still, Dayton needs to search for a better way, a way that doesn’t raise as many questions. As Dayton Fraternal Order of Police President Randy Beane and others have said, the city needs to be reaching into local schools early, developing relationships, planting the idea of a police career in young minds.
Achieving racial balance on the police department is still in the interest of the whole city.
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