April 21, 2004
Where's the fire?
Much ado in a Baltimore Sun article (April 20, 2004) about the firefighters' test that resulted in an all-white cadet class in Baltimore.
"The department, from the division chief of personnel on down, was concerned something like this would happen," said James Gardner, a department spokesman. "It was just one of those anomalies where a great number of minorities did not take the test and, number two, a great number of them did not score high on the test."
The article presents the views of retired black firefighters that essentially demand that the process of advertising the test, the test itself and hiring be manipulated until more minorities become part of the department.
In other words, let's start with the skin color results we want, and work backwards.
The current system seems to reward applicants with experience gained in other jurisdictions, to which one can only say bravo. The one somewhat grey area is that hearing about the test seems to require having an inside track, i.e., firefighting friends already "in the club."
Gee ... reminds me of journalism! You have to be part of the club to even know where the jobs are. This happens all the time.
You read the article top to bottom waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the first inkling that for some nefarious reason, the fire department is unfairly screening out minority applicants. And that other shoe never drops. It looks like this year, the same process that in the past produced mixed groups of cadets this time did not.
The problem, one suspects, lies right under our noses, in a crippled school system and crime-riddled city that per usual does not produce graduates able to do much of anything.
It is especially alarming to contemplate that "the Fire Department interviewed several black candidates who had passed the entrance exam but in nearly every case the person was disqualified for failing either a criminal background check or drug screening." One wonders about less care being taken in the future with the criminal background check, and the stage being set for the kind of problems seen a decade ago in Washington, D.C., when the city waved in a group of criminals into the ranks of its police.
Some sense appears in Gregory Kane's column (April 21, 2004, Baltimore Sun) on the flap, wherein he quotes the current fire chief, William J. Goodwin Jr.:
But by Goodwin's own admission, that same process worked for the eight black and six white command staffers standing behind him. When I suggested that the process that resulted in an all-white class was completely color-blind and in accordance with the law of the land, Goodwin couldn't disagree."Was [the process] fair?" Goodwin asked. "It was absolutely fair. Did we follow all the civil service laws? Absolutely. But the process has to be something we need to do better at. Up front, the process is flawed."
No chief, the process isn't flawed. You are tumbling in Wonderland, like Alice, where fair means not fair, where colorblind means color obsessed, and where schools can continue to fail because society will rig all jobs everywhere to camouflage its failures of education.
- posted by jbelliveau at 10:14 AM in The Neighborhood
