Sure, but at what point does the city need to realize it is up to its individual workers to better their own situation?

Ideally it should be, yes. But, if my theory above holds -- that the whites have an advantage due to the fact that the department was historically white -- then you are saying that the black firefighters need to work harder than the white ones. In general, there's nothing really wrong with that. But in the specific case of black and white, in our country, we have agreed that we need to correct for the clearly unfair treatment of blacks by whites in the recent past.

I'm not sure paying tons of tax dollars for mandatory training for everybody in the event that a few workers may want to raise their career stature is a good thing for the city taxpayers.

Again, this is the price we are paying for our past. I wish it wasn't the case, but it is. And, in any case, the worst side-effect of this is that we have over-trained firefighters. That's not the worst of all possible downsides.

-milo-

but the one they had to rule on was faulted by every SCOTUS member.

You keep saying that, but was it really?  The 4 justice minority agreed that the standard the district court (and by extension the appellate court, when it upheld the district court) applied was incorrect, but that was hardly a condemnation of the affirmation.  On what, exactly, are you basing your assertion that the minority was unhappy with the quality of the appellate decision? (as opposed to disagreeing with it's content)

An activist ruling would likely have settled the issue on 14th Amendment grounds (and obviated Scalia's concurrence).

So you're admitting Scalia's concurrence was "activist"?  Interesting.

Ce n'est pas une pipe. C'est une signature.

The secret clue that this was a change of direction by the Supreme Court is their opposite view in Griggs v. Duke Power, which the majority just about ignored, but which was pointed out by Ginsburg's dissent.  From Ginsburg's dissent:

Congress, the landmark decision recognized, aimed beyond "disparate treatment"; it targeted "disparate impact" as well. Title VII's original text, it was plain to the Court, "proscribe[d]not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation." Id., at 431.2

Yacht is to Regatta as Bobsled is to ...?

If you know the answer, the allegation is that you are a white upper class person likely familiar with white-dominated sported. If I asked you to pick 3 animals likely to be found in the bush, you might have problems unless you were an Aussie Aborigine

...tests are not race neutral

After reviewing bids from various consultants, the Cityhired Industrial/Organizational Solutions, Inc. (IOS) todevelop and administer the examinations, at a cost to theCity of $100,000. IOS is an Illinois company that special-izes in designing entry-level and promotional examina-tions for fire and police departments. In order to fit the examinations to the New Haven Department, IOS began the test-design process by performing job analyses to identify the tasks, knowledge, skills, and abilities that are essential for the lieutenant and captain positions. IOS representatives interviewed incumbent captains and lieutenants and their supervisors. They rode with and observed other on-duty officers. Using information fromthose interviews and ride-alongs, IOS wrote job-analysis questionnaires and administered them to most of the incumbent battalion chiefs, captains, and lieutenants inthe Department. At every stage of the job analyses, IOS, by deliberate choice, oversampled minority firefighters to ensure that the results--which IOS would use to develop the examinations--would not unintentionally favor white candidates...

...IOS assembled a pool of 30 assessors who were superior in rank to the positions being tested. At the City's insistence (because of controversy surrounding previous ex-aminations), all the assessors came from outside Connecti-cut. IOS submitted the assessors' resumes to City officials for approval. They were battalion chiefs, assistant chiefs,and chiefs from departments of similar sizes to New Ha-ven's throughout the country. Sixty-six percent of the panelists were minorities, and each of the nine three-member assessment panels contained two minority members.

I could score higher than Australian Aborigines on a written test of knowledge directly relevant to Australian Aborigines.

So doesn't dumbing the exam down hurt the poorly educated people in the first place? If you have a guy who passed high school and another guy who failed out of 9th grade taking an exam it won't help the drop out very much to dumb it down to an 8th grade level. The high school graduate will just kill the test even more. Perhaps the better way to solve the problem is to encourage people to work hard in school and life.

On a side note, the "diversity" thing sort of bothers me. We should be concerned with ensuring the best people are hired for a given job. I was at a conference a few months ago and sat in a seminar on career development. We had speakers from the government come talk about careers. The same with education administration, private business, etc. The woman from the CDC gave mere lip service to "diversity" at the end ("The H&HS & CDC encourage minority applicants"), same with the business entrepreneur (her schtick was just "Bust your ass and become successful.")

The dude who just became a dean at a major US research institution? I'd say 25% of his speech was related to how important it is to hire and promote people of various skin colors to make sure you have a "diverse" place of work. What got me was that he never actually explained why you needed to have "diversity." He never explained what benefit the company, college or institution could get from "diversity." He never explained how it would get more papers out, drugs discovered, students trained, etc. Just that you had to have it for some nebulous reason. Then, at the end where he talked about keeping a personal life in balance he said he found it "Important" to make sure he had people "like him" to hang out with in an after work social group. It disgusted me to hear a supposedly highly educated guy argue in public that "diversity" was important enough to mandate on his subordinates and everybody else in the world but that he had the right to segregate himself into friendships by skin color for his own "comfort." Ick. Gross. I'm not sure that is what people like MLK Jr had in mind during the civil rights rallies.

Here's a more recent anecdote: I'm currently an adjunct faculty at a local college. They pay me well. I teach the kids well. The school specializes in turning high school dropouts, career retrainees, adults returning to school, etc into professional business or medical types. For example, people go here to get an RN and degree and after a few years hard work make a metric buttload of money (more than I ever will). They go here to learn how to run a small business and get a loan. They get free job placements often into places that have agreements that repay loans after so many years of employment. It's not a bad deal.

The other day I walked in on a meeting where some local woman was demanding administrators "We need to determine how well you reach out to people of color to make sure they can be lifted up and what else you can do" or somesuch crap. Apparently building a university that charges absurdly reasonable tuition in a high crime city, offering class sizes of under 10 for that low rate, and offering fast graduation into careers that pay a ton aren't enough. WTF? This college smothers every single bus, train, bill board with advertisements. It's not like they aren't trying. So what's the problem?

Perhaps the problem is some people just don't have the desire to do well --- across all races, colors, creeds, sex orientations, etc. When they finally decide to get it together, there will be resources to help out. Until then you can't blame the imagined racism of others for the failure of random third parties.  

♫You's a superstar boy, why you still up in the hood?♫

By the way, I forgot to thank you for your post in my reply. I think this is an important issue we should have a discussion about.

♫You's a superstar boy, why you still up in the hood?♫

That article notes that in 1978:

"The College Board set up a fairness-review process that subjected every potential SAT question to close examination for racial stereotypes, loaded words, inappropriate assumptions, or anything else that might put minority students at a disadvantage. Questions dealing with subjects beyond the experience of a typical inner-city student, such as yachting or debutante balls, were thrown out."

And yet racial "gaps" in the SAT persist.

Freedle's analysis is a joke, as that article describes if you read it to the end.

But I'll give you a real answer anyway.  The test is not race neutral if it tests things that are contextually more likely to be known by people who are white.

So non-whites don't have access to libraries or other books? They don't have the ability to review texts related to their job? Really? When I was younger I picked up a lot of words I might not normally know simply by reading various texts from the library. I'm assuming these firefighters have access to not only libraries, the internet but also firefighting manuals.

Read a book. Work hard. Study. Get a better job. It's not that hard.

♫You's a superstar boy, why you still up in the hood?♫

"at each level of ability, but particularly in the lower-scoring groups, white students on average did better than blacks on the easier items, whereas blacks on average did better than whites on the harder ones."

That's a study I'd like to see the numbers for. I mean, we're already talking about the low-scoring set of a multiple-choice test, which is going to skew towards random selection anyway. Depending upon how closely Freedle's result findings hew to that regression, there might be other hypotheses than racial bias. (The one I'm wondering about in specific: if, for example, poor-scoring white kids are exposed to a greater number/difficulty of words, but all poor-scoring kids are learning from context -- and not very well.)

She thinks there should be more minorities but if she thinks there should be fewer Jews she's never gotten around to mentioning it.

Should the number of Jews at Ivy League schools be capped at 2%, to match the demographics of the general population? Or does that principle only apply to fire departments?

Findings... that's another story.

No, it isn't.  "Findings" here are not findings of fact.

The various positions taken by SCOTUS in the dissent and concurrence reveal that there was a large number of unexamined issues relating to this case....

Were they somehow negligently ignored or where they not talked about because they had nothing to do with the reasoning behind the lower courts' opinion?

Q: What do you think of western civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.