[aesh2Xa1]

The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI.

For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"):

https://archive.ph/Qgjy5

The evidence in this source does not discuss cronyism, although I believe you that it could have been relevant to your personal experience; it's just false to claim the issue as a whole was unrelated to DEI.

[alcima]

Actually the source article is quite clear about the implementation of cronyism - friends were emailed the answers to the bizarre hiring test and others were not. It is typical behavior of machine politics - give good jobs to those who support you and block others from having them. Certainly the FAA did have DEI goals, but you can't attribute this patronage to them.

[WillPostForFood]

I think might be misreading the article.

It says the answers were sent from the FAA to members of the "National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees". It went to all of them, not just friends. It was DEI, not cronyism.

Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:

You might be confused by this line:

As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees

That may or not be cronyism, but once she joined, the whole org got the answers, so clearly it was aimed at getting more Blacks through the process.

[philwelch]

It can be both.

[malaise]

I get that you’re trying to contribute to the conversation, but you do realize that what you’re saying sounds racist?

In addition, this is a diversion from the elephant in the room, which is that right after some dramatic executive action, many people died within a short amount of time due to a crash that had nothing to do with race and everything to do with chaotic governance.

[ConradJarret]

Oh no, what he said sounds racist! He shouldn’t contribute to the conversation then.

[like_any_other]

"Friends" here means members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.

[th0ma5]

... You concede that it was cronyism here. Unless you want to expand on what you are saying.

[XCabbage]

He concedes no such thing. Reserving jobs for members of a "black coalition" that any black person can join is obviously DEI, not cronyism. It's a de facto race-based filter, not one based on favour-trading or past links to the applicant.

[lazide]

Why not both? Near as I can tell, Cronyism goes hand in hand. Someone has to gatekeep who counts in what bracket, someone has to represent the bracket, etc.

And the beauty is, the more brackets, the more true this is, and the more can be extracted from the system.

[handoflixue]

You're asking the wrong person there. "Both" concedes that it was "DEI"

But to actually answer the question: while it can absolutely be both, you need to provide proof of the additional claim. "People cheated for DEI reasons" and "People cheated for cronyism reasons" are two separate claims. The article provides plenty of evidence for the former and not much for the latter.

[1oooqooq]

give up. you won't convince anyone. if corruption have any minority scape goat, it's "them".

[intended]

I found one thing odd, which was outside of the scope over the zero sum game being fought here.

If you are understaffed, AND you are hiring traditionally, it would make sense that recruiting people would go up. That would mean diverse hires anyway - based on the article, it seems that even increasing diversity was not between undeserving candidates and ideal candidates (the second band section of the article)

Is the third variable at play here a lack of funding from congress for recruitment?

[skellington]

If you are trying to reach race/gender based quotas, you simply cannot hire white men anymore when they are 90% of the applicants. Or at least, you must attempt to minimize it as much as possible. Math.

[intended]

Yeah but thats not how any quota based system works. Thats the strawman of quota systems. The article itself showed that the quota is some fraction of total applicants that results in minimal impact to performance.

Also I heard "math" with a youtube overlay.

[AnthonyMouse]

The quota issue isn't that you have an explicit hiring quota for each race -- which might even be illegal. It's that if, at the end of the year, the number of people you hired had a large racial disparity, that's bad optics and you'll get in trouble, which you know so you fudge things to change it however you can.

So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. Worse, if you hire based on highest test scores you'd only hire 2 of the black applicants and end up with 99.6% white hires. The obvious thing to do to improve the optics is to figure out how to hire all 10 of the qualified black applicants, which is the thing that would have "minimal impact to performance", but you have two problems. First, picking them explicitly because of their race is illegal, so you have to manufacture some convoluted system to do it in a roundabout way. Second, even if you do that you're still screwed, because even hiring all 10 of them leaves you with 98% white hires and that's still bad optics.

Their workaround was to use a BS biographical test to exclude most of the white applicants while giving the black applicants the answers. If you do that you can get 90 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. That'll certainly improve the optics, but then you have 400 unfilled slots.

[immibis]

> So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants

What you're supposed to do is go to places with more black people and start advertising to people in general they can become air traffic controllers. Then take them through air traffic controller training school and at the end, you *don't* have only 10 qualified black applicants.

[thaumasiotes]

There are only so many black people in the country. Every skilled job has this problem; poaching can make you look slightly better but it does nothing overall and will make wherever you poached your qualified black applicants from look worse.

[harvey9]

The article specifically talks about how the college courses were in community colleges, not bastions of privilege of any kind.

[AnthonyMouse]

Ah yes, but that isn't guaranteed to work, and if someone is going to get in trouble if they don't make their numbers then they start making contingencies.

[sneedle]

Or you stop trying to force blacks into the job and hire whoever applies and is the most qualified. This way people don't die just so leftists can feel satisfied.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

There seems to be implication of confusion of what a qualified applicant means in your example above.

If there's a test used as the basis of consideration, and some process has decided that any score over X makes the candidate qualified, but then you are later going to claim that actually, given that there were candidates with a score of X+Y, a score of just X does not really constitute "qualified" and the higher scoring candidates should have been chosen, then the whole nature of the test and the ranking becomes rather suspect.

So either everyone who is judged to be qualified really is qualified, and it makes no difference that they were not necessarily the highest scoring candidates ... or ... the test for "qualified" is not suitable for purpose.

[AnthonyMouse]

Suppose you have a test which is a decent proxy for how well someone will do a job. The median person currently doing the job scored 85 and their range is 70-99. If you put someone who scored a 4 in the job, people will die almost immediately. If you put someone who scored a 50 there, people will be at a higher risk of death and you'd be better off passing on that candidate and waiting for a better one. From this we might come up with a threshold of 70 for the minimum score and call this "qualified". Then if you have to fill 5 slots and you got candidates scoring 50, 75 and 95, you should hire the latter two and keep the other slots unfilled until you get better candidates.

But if you have to fill 5 slots and you have 10 candidates who all scored above 70, you now have to choose between them somehow. And the candidates who scored 95 are legitimately expected to perform the job better than the ones who scored 75, even though the ones who scored 75 would have been better than an unfilled position.

[cyberax]

> AND you are hiring traditionally

And the FAA stopped doing that. They revamped the hiring process to screen against the White applicants. The way they did it, is also highly insulting to Black people, btw.

[drjasonharrison]

By "hiring traditionally" they may have meant "posting a job description and application instructions". They definitely didn't continue to interact with the CTI schools.

What they didn't appear to do, at least it is not discussed, is targeted advertising towards underrepresented groups.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

The answer to the question you've quoted is important, since it could be "none", "a little bit", "a lot", "any amount", each of which has very different ramifications. There is no answer on the slide ...

[varloid]

They decided that at least some amount was acceptable - the minimum score on the AT-SAT was changed so that 95% of test takers would pass because the original threshold where 60% passed excluded too many black applicants. This was despite previous studies showing that a higher score on the AT-SAT was correlated with better job performance.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

No, that's not an answer to that specific question.

Performance on the AT-SAT is not job performance.

If you have a qualification test that feels useful but also turns out to be highly non-predictive of job performance (as, for example, most college entrance exams turn out to be for college performance), you could change the qualification threshold for the test without any particular expectation of losing job performance.

In fact, it is precisely this logic that led many universities to stop using admissions tests - they just failed to predict actual performance very well at all.

[varloid]

> Performance on the AT-SAT is not job performance.

No, but it was the best predictor of job performance and academy pass rate there was.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA566825.pdf

https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/data_research/resear... (page 41)

There are a fixed number of seats at the ATC academy in OKC, so it's critical to get the highest quality applicants possible to ensure that the pass rate is as high as possible, especially given that the ATC system has been understaffed for decades.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

That is NOT what the first study you've cited says at all:

> "The empirically-keyed, response-option scored biodata scale demonstrated incremental validity over the computerized aptitude test battery in predicting scores representing the core technical skills of en route controllers."

I.e the aptitude test battery is WORSE than the biodata scale.

The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.

I'd also say at a higher level that both of those papers absolutely reek of non-reproduceability and low N problems that plague social and psychological research. I'm not saying they're wrong. They are just not obviously definitive.

[burnerthrow008]

> The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.

How is that a criticism? It is always possible that someone could invent a better test.

In any case, the second citation directly refutes your point in another sub-thread with AnthonyMouse, the assertion that higher-performing applicants above the cutoff do not perform better on the job:

"If all applicants scoring 70 or above on the AT-SAT are selected, slightly over one-third would be expected to be high performers. With slightly greater selectivity, taking only applicants scoring 75.1 or above, the proportion of high performers could be increased to nearly half."

Also:

"The primary point is that applicants who score very high (at 90) on the AT-SAT are expected to perform near the top of the distribution of current controllers (at the 86th percentile)."

[varloid]

> I.e the aptitude test battery is WORSE than the biodata scale.

You're mistaken, it's the opposite. The first one found that AT-SAT performance was the best measure, with the biodata providing a small enhancement:

> AT-SAT scores accounted for 27% of variance in the criterion measure (β=0.520, adjusted R2=.271,p<.001). Biodata accounted for an additional 2% of the variance in CBPM (β=0.134; adjusted ΔR2=0.016,ΔF=5.040, p<.05).

> In other words, after taking AT-SAT into account, CBAS accounted for just a bit more of the variance in the criterion measure

Hence, "incremental validity."

> The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.

You're right, and I can't remember which study it was that explicitly said that it was the best measure. I'll post it here if I find it. However, given that each failed applicant costs the FAA hundreds of thousands of dollars, we can safely assume that there was no better measure readily available at the time, or it would have been used instead of the AT-SAT. Currently they use the ATSA instead of the AT-SAT, which is supposed to be a better predictor, and they're planning on replacing the AT-SAT in a year or two; it's an ongoing problem with ongoing research.

> I'd also say at a higher level that both of those papers absolutely reek of non-reproduceability and low N problems that plague social and psychological research. I'm not saying they're wrong. They are just not obviously definitive.

Given the limited number of controllers, this is going to be an issue in any study you find on the topic. You can only pull so many people off the boards to take these tests, so you're never going to have an enormous sample size.