Can you scrap the results of a job qualification test if you discover after administering it that the test may be racially biased? The U.S. Supreme Court is considering this issue right now.
The case, Ricci v. DeStefano, involves firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut. They took a civil service test in order to determine who was eligible for promotion, and to rank the promotion candidates. Upon reviewing the exam results, the city discovered that white firefighters did substantially better on the test than African American and Latino firefighters.
The city had the test reviewed by a third-party company, which found that the test questions could have been designed in a way that wouldn’t have resulted in such a big score disparity along racial lines. The city then refused to certify the test results or make promotions based on the test scores. The white firefighters sued, claiming that the city was unlawfully making a race-based decision not to promote them.
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At oral arguments before the Supreme Court earlier this month, justices commented on the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position that New Haven was in. On the one hand, the city’s refusal to certify the test results because white firefighters generally had higher scores could arguably be an illegal race-based decision. On the other hand, if the city certified test scores that resulted from a racially biased exam, the city could open itself up to being sued by the African American and Latino firefighters for race discrimination.
We’ll give you all the details on this important case—including the Supreme Court’s decision, when it’s released—in an upcoming issue of CEA.