Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Jesse Saffron, writing in National Review Online:
Before the early 1970s, many employers did not require that applicants have college degrees – even for well-paying jobs necessitating advanced skills and intelligence. A high school diploma and a passing score on an employee aptitude test were, in many instances, enough for a worker to advance in a rewarding and lucrative career. Unfortunately, as George Leef points out in today’s Pope Center feature, the Supreme Court’s decision in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971) effectively precluded employers from basing hiring decisions on aptitude test results. The reverberations of that decision are still being felt today.
In Griggs, the Court deferred to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) interpretation of section 703(h) of the Civil Rights Act (CRA), which permitted employers to use a “professionally designed ability test” so long as the test was not “designed, intended or used to discriminate…” The EEOC, which enforced the CRA, had promulgated a broad interpretation of that provision, making it illegal for a test to have a “disparate impact” on minorities. For example, if an employee aptitude test disproportionately weeded out black applicants, it would be considered illegal.
As Leef makes clear, the end result of the Griggs decision was that employers became paranoid about using aptitude tests, for fear of potential litigation costs. Instead, they began to use the college diploma as the new employee screening device. “We probably have a college ‘bubble’ just from the effects of easy federal college aid and the push by politicians for educational attainment, but by making employee testing legally dangerous, the Griggs decision helped inflate it,” he writes.
From the Leef article that was mentioned & linked above,
The justices ignored the legislative history and gave deference to the federal agency charged with enforcing the law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
The EEOC had promulgated guidelines on employment testing. Those guidelines advanced the idea that had been rejected in the debate over the Civil Rights Act, that tests would be illegal if they had a “disparate impact” on minority groups. Furthermore, the EEOC declared that if a test had a disparate impact (that is, minority workers were disproportionately affected), the employer would bear the burden of proving that it had a “business necessity” for using the test.
Chief Justice Burger’s opinion deferred to the EEOC’s reinterpretation of the law. Duke Power was in violation because its educational and testing requirements had a disparate impact on minority workers. The law, he wrote, required “the removal of artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment where the barriers operate invidiously to discriminate on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification.”
Requiring either a high school diploma or ability to pass the two tests seemed to be artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary, so out they went.
The full Griggs opinion is here.
The decision, with the ramifications defined above, is — was — a continuation from a regrettable trend that had become pronounced during the Earl Warren era of the Supreme Court: The burden of expectation shifting toward anticipation of what will happen next when someone says “I’ll see you in court.” Progressives, and they are not alone in this, think that makes the Supreme Court decisions great decisions. They make the Supreme Court more powerful, don’t they? So they’re “landmark” decisions. Trouble with that is, there was a reason that people who made these on-the-job judgment calls were forced to reckon with what the Supreme Court would say, should litigation follow: There wasn’t any other way to predict what would happen. SCOTUS became more and more nonsensical, and so “common sense” became unequal to the task of prediction.
And so, “testing” became all about not-testing, just as enforcing the law became all about not enforcing the law. Might as well let the bad guy go, the courts are going to toss the case out anyhow.
An interesting, if unanticipated, side effect of this is that all these years later even a high school diploma isn’t good enough. Not even for picking up dog crap in a park or sweeping leaves off a sidewalk. The history shows that this isn’t due to high school graduates having done an inadequate job of sweeping sidewalks, but rather a power struggle between common sense, and the power lust & overreach of federal agencies.
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