Read The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life Online
Authors: Richard J. Herrnstein,Charles A. Murray
Tags: #History, #Science, #General, #Psychology, #Sociology, #Genetics & Genomics, #Life Sciences, #Social Science, #Educational Psychology, #Intelligence Levels - United States, #Nature and Nurture, #United States, #Education, #Political Science, #Intelligence Levels - Social Aspects - United States, #Intellect, #Intelligence Levels
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (82 page)
These are not cognitive ability scores or scores that are being used to select people for further education but competency scores achieved by people who are heading into the nation’s classrooms. According to the institutions that have graduated these applicants for teacher certification (in some cases, the scores are for teachers already on the job), all of them have met the requirements for a college degree, and they presumably can read, write, and do basic math. The scores are on tests that make no pretense to seek excellence but to weed out the most obviously unsuited.
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With differences ranging upwards of 1 standard deviation, the inescapable conclusion is that a large gap separates black and white teachers in basic skills.
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The Compensating Skills Fallacy
One of the most common arguments about the current practice of affirmative action might be called the compensating skills fallacy. It is commonly applied to any profession under discussion, but teachers provide an especially good example. The argument goes like this:
There are many skills and qualities that go into being a good teacher besides test scores. The ability to inspire confidence, to create an eagerness to learn, to listen to children are all part of the wide repertoire of skills that go into being a good teacher that have nothing to do with the traits measured by a cognitive ability or academic skills test.
The statement itself is correct. Most professions involve a number of important nonintellectual attributes. The fallacy lies in assuming that people who have lower cognitive test scores will, on average, be better endowed in these other areas than people with higher scores.
Suppose that the teacher competency exams consisted of several parts, each of which measured one of these nonintellectual skills. It would be possible to defend hiring teachers with marginal grades on the intellectual skills
if
these teachers were hired from the top of the list on the tests of the other qualities. But the way affirmative action programs actually work, these other qualities are not tested or compared. The minority candidate with the best score on the test of intellectual qualities is selected. As for the other qualities, not measured by the test, there is no reason to assume that they are any higher than average.
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Because affirmative action has been practiced most aggressively in public employment—police, firefighters, social welfare agencies, departments of motor vehicles, and the like—they are logical places to look if indeed job performance has been compromised.
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The Washington, D.C., Police Department is a case in point, as described by journalist Tucker Carlson.
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In the mid-1970s, the Washington, D.C., Police Department installed a residency requirement for police. Washington’s white population is densely concentrated among white-collar and professional groups, with no significant white working-class neighborhoods. The residency requirement thereby severely restricted the pool of potential white applicants. By 1982, 40 percent of the candidates who took the police admissions test failed it, and the department was having a hard time filling positions. A new test was introduced in 1985, normed to favor minority applicants. Standards in the police academy were lowered to the point at which not one student flunked out of the training course in 1983 (despite the lower cognitive ability of the candidates being admitted). In 1988, the academy abolished its final comprehensive pencil-and-paper examination after 40 percent of graduating recruits failed it. The former head of the Fraternal Order of Police and a veteran of twenty-two years on the force reported that, at about that time, he began hearing “about people at the academy who could not read or write.”
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A former academy instructor says that “I saw people who were practically illiterate. I’ve seen people diagnosed as borderline retarded graduate from the police academy.”
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This degradation of intellectual requirements translates into police performance on the street. For example, the paperwork that follows an arrest has been a bane of police everywhere for many years, but when police can do the work, it is mainly an inconvenience, not a barrier. An officer who
cannot
do the paperwork or who finds that it pushes the limits of his abilities may forgo making arrests in marginal cases. The arrests that are made are often botched. Between 1986 and 1990, about a third of all the murder cases brought to the U.S. attorney’s office in the District were dismissed, historically an unusually high rate, often because the prosecutors were unable to make sense of the arrest reports.
The basic features of Carlson’s account are confirmed by a variety of other journalistic accounts, most conspicuously a 1993 investigative series by the
Washington Post
on police performance.
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Two facts about the Washington Police Department seem clear: Recruitment and training standards deteriorated markedly in recent decades, and the performance of the department, once considered a national model, has also deteriorated badly.
Washington is not unique. In Miami in 1985, the police department was rocked by the discovery and seizure of hundreds of pounds of cocaine hidden by police officers working in cahoots with smugglers. We have the results of the intense self-examination that resulted. The main conclusion was that this crime, as well as the many others that were straining community-police relations at the time, could be traced in part to the relaxation of hiring standards mandated by affirmative action regulations. Almost 90 percent of the officers who were dismissed or suspended within a few years of the initiation of aggressive affirmative action policies at the beginning of the 1980s were officers with marginal qualifications, hired because of those policies.
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Such stories are common among people who have worked in, or been a client of, organizations that practice aggressive affirmative action, and the link they ascribe to affirmative action is usually explicit and emphatic.
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There is a great deal of smoke emanating from such accounts. We urge that people start checking out whether there is any fire.
Economist Eugene Silberberg systematically compared the experience of blacks who were admitted to craft unions (electricians, plumbers, and pipefitters) in Seattle at the end of the 1970s under a court order and whites who were admitted under ordinary selection procedures at the same time.
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Silberberg assembled data on performance in apprentice school, on-the-job ratings, and educational background, then was given access to a variety of job performance measures over an eighteen-month follow-up period: hours worked, number of employees who quit, jobs turned down, failures to respond to a dispatch, and being listed by an employer as not eligible for rehire. The table below shows the combined differences, expressed in standard deviations, for the pipefitters and plumbers.
| Job Performance of Black Affirmative Action Plumbers and Pipefitters Compared to White Regular Hirees | |
|---|---|
| | Black-White Difference in SDs |
| Source: Silberberg 1985, Table 2. | |
| Note: The table combines data on apprentices and journeyman for both crafts using weighted standard deviations. | |
| Job performance measures | |
| Quits or no rehire | +.6 |
| Termination for cause | +.5 |
| Nonresponse to job call | +.6 |
| Hours worked | −.9 |
| IQ-related measures | |
| GPA in apprentice school | −1.3 |
| GPA in on-the-job training | −8 |
Comparing the blacks admitted under the court order with whites admitted under the ordinary procedures at the same time, the blacks quit at more than six times the rate for whites, were terminated for cause at more than three times the rate for whites, and did not respond to a job dispatch at more than six times the rate for whites. Similar results were obtained for the electricians. The results track closely with the larger literature on IQ and job productivity. The differences in the job performance measures are what might be expected from the discussion in Chapter 3. Furthermore, the size of the difference in job performance is economically important. Silberberg discusses the possibility that the differences are themselves a result of bias among the dispatchers and supervisors. Given the procedures for assigning jobs in the Seattle unions, he concludes that it is extremely difficult to explain away the differences in such terms.
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Having reviewed the less than plentiful data at hand about ethnic differences in job performance, we are reminded of a passage by Andrew Hacker, one of the stoutly “pro” voices in the affirmative action debate:
A favorite question of affirmative action’s opponents is whether you would want to be operated on by a surgeon who had been admitted to medical school under a racial dispensation. As it happens, few posing this kind of question have any knowledge of what makes
for surgical skill. In fact, there are no known correlations between good grades or high scores and subsequent success with a scalpel. If we mean to debate this subject seriously, we should rely on hard data rather than scare tactics.
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We cannot agree with Hacker’s characterization of the state of knowledge, but we enthusiastically subscribe to his concluding sentence. By all means, let people on all sides of this issue assemble hard data. The purpose of the foregoing examples is to make two points: (1) the scattered evidence about job performance and affirmative action—indirect and direct, soft and hard—suggests large and pervasive effects, and (2) there is no excuse for not having many more hard-data studies of the type that Silberberg conducted. Job performance is important, it is measurable, and the issue of affirmative action and its effects on job performance has been on many people’s minds for years. Many corporations routinely conduct studies of job performance and have databases that could be reanalyzed to assess the effects of affirmative action on job performance.
The request we make of Hacker and other proponents of affirmative action is that they join us in encouraging such work. Confident that group differences in job performance are not an important problem, they can try to prove their case. Our own conclusion is that they cannot do so. If this is so, the debate about affirmative action must shift to another level: How much degradation of job performance is acceptable in pursuit of the other goals of affirmative action? And that in turn brings us to first questions. What, after all, is the nation trying to accomplish with affirmative action in the workplace? What are the right measures of success?
In thinking about affirmative action in the workplace, more than psychometric realities or efficiency in the workplace must be considered. To avoid misunderstanding, this is a good time to lay out our perspective on these other matters.
- As of the 1950s, minorities, especially blacks, in many parts of the country were systematically and unjustly excluded from entering skilled and professional occupations of all kinds.
- At least since the 1950s, changes in white attitudes, as expressed in the civil rights movement and in myriad other events in race
relations, the removal of Jim Crow restrictions in the South, and affirmative action requirements opened up opportunities for minorities. Progress was made. - In the 1990s, racial hostility continues to be a significant problem in American life.
- Affirmative action has an internally consistent rationale even if it is at odds with the maximum efficiency in hiring productive workers.
This last remark calls for some elaboration. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we are sure that a history of unfair discrimination has handicapped some people so that they fare less well in the job market than they otherwise would. Their handicaps may handicap their descendants, so that past unfairness is propagated indefinitely into the future, unless we do something about it. A properly constructed affirmative action policy may then be temporarily less efficient but more efficient in the long run. If it achieves long-run efficiency by breaking the cycle of past discrimination, it is arguably fair. And even if the long run is indefinitely far off, many people are willing to pay some price in lost productivity for a large enough gain in group equality.
Or suppose that we knew that the inequality in employment that we observe arises for reasons we consider inherently unfair. Perhaps blacks are, for example, not being hired to be shop clerks in neighborhoods because the customers (or the other workers) are bigoted.
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It may be efficient to hire fewer clerks who will be discriminated against, but it is not fair. Many people would be willing, again, to lose some efficiency in return for greater equality.
In short, we sympathize with some of the imaginable reasons for affirmative action in the workplace and are under no illusions about the ways in which perceptions of racial differences still affect employers’ hiring decisions. But affirmative action does not mean just wanting good things. It means specific and often substantial constraints on the employer’s ability to make use of the most qualified people. What should we make of such policies as of the 1990s?
It is possible for an advocate of current affirmative action policies to concede all the factual points we have made in this discussion and still be in favor of continuing and even stronger affirmative action policies.
For such advocates, it makes no difference if the tests are reliable and valid predictors of job performance. If a disadvantaged group performs at a lower level, to these advocates, it is self-evidently society’s fault, and government must take whatever steps are necessary to bring the disadvantaged group up to the level of other groups, ensuring equal employment and income in the meantime. Sometimes this argument is couched specifically in terms of the black experience in the United States, sometimes as part of a broader argument for an egalitarian agenda.
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