Posted on 05/01/2002 5:57:50 AM PDT by LurkedLongEnough
DANBURY — Responding to complaints that the city has not hired more minority teachers, at least one school board member wants to know whether the district should switch its hiring approach from equal opportunity to affirmative action.
Some local educators said the issue is more about ensuring that all candidates are given a fair opportunity to be interviewed and considered.
Board member J.R. Mitchell said the board needs to know if the community wants to move toward affirmative action instead of hiring the top candidates regardless of race.
“I see affirmative action as allowing you to set aside a spot for a minority candidate that is qualified versus hiring the person with the highest qualifications regardless of their race,” Mitchell said Monday.
“Is the minority community saying they want us to give greater weight to a minority candidate? I would look forward to hearing what direction they want us to go in.’’
Fellow board member Daryle Dennis, a member of the Concerned Black Men for Youth and former president of the local NAACP, disagreed the issue was centered on affirmative action versus equal opportunity.
“I think affirmative action is providing a level playing field for equal access to equal opportunity,” Dennis said Monday. “That’s all the community wants, that all the best candidates are together.”
Generally, affirmative action means taking steps to recruit, hire and promote individuals from groups that traditionally have been discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, disability, or other characteristics. In this sense, affirmative action goes beyond equal employment opportunity, which demands employers eliminate discriminatory conditions, inadvertent or intentional, and treat all employees equally in the workplace.
Dennis said he thinks the district’s hiring procedures aren’t getting the job done, and he supports a review by the board of the district’s hiring policy.
“I’m still not convinced our recruitment plan is built to overcome obstacles but rather that it’s using the obstacles as an excuse,’’ Dennis said.
The small pool of minority educators around the country makes it a challenge for districts to diversify their staff. In Danbury, about 9 percent of the professional staff come from minority communities.
Dennis said Human Resources director James Daniels helped clarify misconceptions about the district’s hiring procedures at a recent board meeting.
Daniels explained that people who submit resumes are sent applications that must be completed along with recommendations before being put on file.
Then, when a principal or department chair has an opening, they pull out applications of the best qualified candidates and a district-wide panel of educators reviews them and interviews the finalists.
Dennis said he thought the school board policy committee should evaluate the screening process from the initial selection to the interviews to end the perception that not all candidates are treated equally.
“My concern is to be sure that we aren’t predetermining who the most qualified are,” Dennis said.
Superintendent Timothy Connors said he agreed with Dennis that the issue is about making sure all candidates are treated fairly.
“There is a minimum floor for qualifications to begin with. Then the applicants need to put their best foot forward in the interview,’’ Connors said. “Then when we do the screening, we need to ensure we have a cross-section of the community so we can increase the number of members of all communities .”
School board chairman Bobby Poole directed the policy committee to look at the issue.
“What I would like to request as we look at things in the process,” Poole said, “is what type of change would you recommend to significantly impact the diversity across the board.”
Poole said the school board and community needs to work together.
“The question is how do we work together collaboratively to achieve what I think the community and the Board of Education would like to achieve,” Poole said.
Contact Eileen FitzGerald at eileenf@newstimes.com or (203) 731-3333.
This is one of the usual methods the left uses to justify violating the Constitution, to wit: lower the minimum requirements for a teacher, an applicant for college, or a contractor seeking a state job. Once the minimums are set, treat everyone who achieves such a minimum as equal,i.e., make the minimum a threshhold and all who surpass it are the same. Here's how the "logic" works in practice:
College entrance administrators often use a combined score to rank prospective applicants. This score is a mathematical combination of high school grades and SAT results. Using the combined score, each candidate is given a rating from 1 to 100. Suppose the majority of white and Asian applicants are ranked between 95 and 98, and the majority of black, Hispanic, and Native American applicants are ranked between 82 and 85. In the interests of the great God of diversity, the admissions committee merely has to agree that all students with a weighted score of 82 or higher will have passed the first cutoff. From that point, they can use "other" criteria to determine who actually gets admitted. The other criteria invariably includes a racial component, which allows about 10 to 15% of the entering class to be comprised of blacks and Hispanics, nearly all of whom had inferior qualifications to whites and Asians who were denied admission. This is democracy in action. </sarcasm>
Better get comfortable :^)
If any one would like to be removed from my CT Bump list, please let me know and it will be done ASAP. Conversely, if you would like to be added the same holds true.
Before that idiotic "one man, one vote" ruling, I have been told that the Connecticut state constitution allowed each town a maximum of three representatives. As a result, the legislature used to be about 70% Republican at times when voter registration was 65% Democrat.
Good move, actually. Mitchell is throwing down the gauntlet and daring the black leaders and the liberals to come out and admit they want affirmative action instead of a fair, quality-based hiring system. They'll get it and suffer the degradation of the school system's quality but hey, everyone involved will feeeeel soooo much better and the kids? Tough luck, junior. It's skin color that counts, get it? He will.
This is Connecticut, folks.
“Is the minority community saying they want us to give greater weight to a minority candidate? I would look forward to hearing what direction they want us to go in.’’
HAHAHAAA!
Dr. Martin Luther King would be very proud, LOL!!!
Actually, it's only Connecticut and that place is pretty much down the scumbag liberal toilet anyway, isn't it? They may as well hire nothing but minority teachers - - why hire only the best? Skin color, after all, is far more important than the "highest qualifications". It's perfectly okay to discriminate against white teachers, because they are - - white.
Yes, Dr. King would be very proud indeed. What a proud, proud group they have there in Connecticut. Hahahahaa...
The rough part is that this will affect a HUGE percentage of the minorities going to college. Those who didn't belong at the upper echelon schools (MIT, Harvard, Cal Tech, etc) but got in under the 'new system' have left spots open in the middle tier schools (where they would be more appropriately placed). Those spots will be filled by Affirmative Action appointments of those who would be best served in smaller colleges or community colleges. They also will have a tough time competing. The community colleges and Tech schools now have to pick from candidates that really haven't yet acquired the skills necessary for post-secondary education.
Minorities (who are working hard and trying to achieve!) at every level are harmed... all thanks to those same liberals who say they are "just trying to help." To me, it seems the real race hustlers and racists are on the Left side of the aisle.
Fortuantely, our local schools here on the Fairfield County Gold Coast will have none of this.
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