Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 27, 1990 TAG: 9007270568
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: G. STEVEN AGEE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
As the year 1984 came and passed, the prospect of an Orwellian government - that is, one where the government thinks and acts for its citizens without their knowledge or consent - seemed fictional. But the continuing growth of power in non-elected, self-perpetuating bureaucracies such as the Virginia Employment Commission gives unsettling credence to Orwell's predictions.
In the age of the bureaucratic welfare state, which accurately describes the America of the late 20th century, the events of our lives are increasingly affected on a daily basis by the actions of government. Most contacts between government and the citizenry are administered from afar by a faceless bureaucracy principally bent on perpetuating its own existence.
An example is the secret program begun by the VEC of manipulating the employment of Virginia citizens by falsifying results of standard aptitude tests.
In the early 1980s, the VEC decided to alter results of the General Aptitude Test Battery for those job applicants who take it. Many Virginia employers, including the commonwealth and local municipalities, have used the GATB as the primary means of screening prospective employees. Employers considered the GATB a race-neutral means of testing a job applicant's abilities in a multitude of job classifications.
Nevertheless, the VEC ordained by secret oracle that the thousands of Virginia job applicants who had to take the GATB in order to be considered for a job - at least count, about 37,000 annually - would not be told how they really scored on the test.
Assume three citizens wanted the same job, say to be copy editor for a newspaper, and were required by the newspaper to go to the VEC and take the GATB for that job classification. On this particular GATB, they could score as high as 400; assume each of the three citizens scored 300.
Before about 1983, the applicants and the newspaper were given the actual test score, 300 out of 400, and the employer would see them as equally qualified. Since then, the VEC hasn't given the real test scores to either employee or employer. Instead, the VEC has sent each applicant an official report describing his or her score as a percentage by rank "of the people nationwide who have taken the test."
You thought that if your test report showed you scored in the 57th percentile, you did better than 57 percent of all Americans who took the test. Your prospective employer thought so, too. Both you and your prospective employer were wrong.
If the three test-takers to be copy editors were a black citizen, a Hispanic citizen and either an Oriental, Arabic or white citizen, and if each had a raw score of 300, the black was told he or she scored better than 87 percent of the nation as a whole. The VEC's official report of the test result told the Hispanic citizen that he or she placed in the 74th percentile. And if you were born of Arabic, Asian or European parents, the VEC told you and your prospective employer that you only scored in the 47th percentile.
All three had the same test score. How could this be?
The VEC "adjusted" the scores with a conversion table solely on the basis of race. The fact that the scores were racially adjusted was not revealed to the three citizens who took the test.
When I first found out about this practice, I thought it couldn't possibly be true. No Virginia agency would intentionally lie to more than 150,000 job applicants and make it more difficult for employers to hire on the basis of merit. I was wrong. The VEC regularly practiced, with tax dollars, blatant racial discrimination.
Think how the VEC would administer the test for a driver's license, the bar exam, or your child's college entrance exam. Frightening thought, isn't it?
Why did the VEC do this and how could it have gotten away with it? Is this a harbinger of how the Bureaucratic Welfare State is strangling free and open government by making the citizens the servant of Government instead of government the servant of the Citizens?
Perhaps there was an Orwell cult within the VEC. Perhaps the VEC's executives saw this as an opportunity to remake their part of the world, with public funds, as they thought it ought to be. For whatever reason the VEC policy of intentional, publicly funded racial discrimination was birthed, it should frighten and anger all Virginians to learn their government undertook a secret policy undermining due process of law, fundamental fairness, and plain old honesty and common decency.
Apparently, no one in the General Assembly was aware of the VEC practice, and neither were those in decision-making authority of the executive branch in the Robb or Baliles administrations. This Oliver North aspect of the VEC saga made it all the more dangeorus. If the VEC's practice of racial discrimination came about uncontrolled and undirected, how many other such practices exist in other state agencies that we don't know about?
My hope is there are fairly few. But six months ago, I would have said to anyone who told me the VEC story to stop reading Orwell.
After the recent hue and cry, the VEC announced - under cover of a U.S. Department of Labor study of the GATB - that it would no longer use the test battery for job placement. While this meant a stop to racial discrimination paid for with public funds through the VEC, it raised even more questions of public policy and the credibility of state government.
Employers and job applicants need a means to match job skills with the job. What will they use in place of the GATB?
All the VEC needed to do was stop the racial adjustment of test scores. It did not need to discard the job-aptitude test. The federal government didn't require the VEC to racially adjust the test scores and certainly didn't cause the VEC to deceive job applicants. Nor did the federal government require the VEC to stop its secret policy of racial adjustments by canceling the whole test process, instead of just dropping the conversion tables in the trash.
Perhaps this scandal will foster enough public outrage to prod the General Assembly to ensure that this type of government-organized and publicly-financed racial discrimination does not occur again. From that standpoint, there is good that can come of this mess.
But perhaps not for the thousands of Virginians whose jobs were lost or whose hopes were crushed by false reports of their ability to work. Those Virginians are still waiting for an apology from the VEC for deceiving and discriminating against them with their own tax dollars, and still waiting for their true test scores.
They deserve both.
by CNB