Is Requiring Basic Competence by Teachers Racially Discriminatory?
If you are tempted to wonder at why our public schools operate at such a disadvantage, two recent decisions by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit help illustrate the problem. In the first, Gulino v. New York State Education Department (2d Cir. Aug. 17, 2006), the Second Circuit reinstated a race discrimination suit against the New York State Education Department based on the theory that a test of “basic college-level content” that asks applicants to get just two-thirds of the questions right is racially discriminatory because it has a “disparate impact” on African-American and Latino teachers. The test, developed in response to a 1988 task force report on problems with teacher quality, is described at pages 11-13 of the opinion. Read on … There are two immediate things that rub me the wrong way about this notion. First of all, isn’t it racial bigotry to assume that lower pass rates for African-American and Latino teachers are because they are African-American a
