the holiday.
I did not get to stay in section C all that long. I spent half a day with some other principal-type person taking a slew of tests; a week later, I was in section A. In section A, we seldom talked about current events, and we hardly ever drew. Instead, we diagrammed sentences (kind of like turning numbers into animals, but with correct answers), learned the periodic table (there really is a krypton), bisected triangles (with compasses and protractors), argued about who started the War of 1812 (it was the British, of course), and even wrote and performed a play (based on Romeo and Juliet, to every boy’s dismay). We had lots of tests in section A, and some were like the ones I took in the principal’s office, multiple-choice tests with separate answer sheets where you had to be careful not to mark outside the little circles with your number 2 pencil. Sometimes kids would leave sectign A, and sometimes new kids would arrive, and always we kept taking the tests.
I did not do all that great my first few weeks in section A, but I eventually got the hang of things and, with help from my teacher, once again started getting As. I made friends in section A, and some of them would be friends clear through high school. I sometimes missed the kids in section B, and also the kids in section C, but I lost touch with all of them. From time to time I wonder what happened to them, and to the kids in section D, whom I never even knew.
I learned a lot in section A, acquired a lot of new skills, gained a lot of new knowledge. We didn’t get to draw much or talk about current events, but we learned to think and to write, and we learned lots of new concepts and new words and new phrases. Maybe it was in section A that I learned the meaning of “self-fulfilling prophecy.”
George Harley and John Sellers wanted to be police officers. In the District of Columbia, applicants for positions in the Metropolitan Police Department were required to pass a physical exam, satisfy character requirements, have a high school diploma or its equivalent, and pass a written examination. Successful applicants were then admitted into Recruit School, a seventeen-week training course. Upon the completion of their training, recruits were required to pass a written final examination; those who failed the final examination were given assistance until they eventually passed.
The initial examination given to all Department applicants was known as Test 21, an eighty-question multiple-choice test prepared by the U.S. Civil Service Commission. The test purported to measure “verbal ability”; a few sample items follow:
Laws restricting hunting to certain regions and to a specific time of the year were passed chiefly to
a. prevent people from endangering their lives by hunting
b. keep our forests more beautiful
c. raise funds from the sale of hunting licenses
d. prevent complete destruction of certain kinds of animals
e. preserve certain game for eating purposes
BECAUSE is related to REASON as THEREFORE is related to
a. result
b. heretofore
c. instinct
d. logic
e. antecedent
BOUNTY means most nearly
a. generosity
b. limit
c. service
d. fine
e. duty
(Reading) “Adhering to old traditions, old methods, and old policies at a time when circumstances demand a new course of action may be praiseworthy from a sentimental point of view, but success is won most frequently by facing the facts and acting in accordance with the logic of the facts.” The quotation best supports the statement that success is best attained through
a. recognizing necessity and adjusting to it
b. using methods that have proved successful
c. exercising will power
d. remaining on a job until it is completed
e. considering each new problem separately
PROMONTORY means most nearly
a. marsh
b. monument
c. headland
d. boundary
e. plateau
The police department had determined that a raw score of forty on Test 21 was required for entrance into Recruit School; applicants who failed to attain that score were summarily rejected.
George Harley and John Sellers failed to score at least a forty on Test 21 when they took the test in the early 1970s; as a consequence, they were denied admission into Recruit School. Both Harley and Sellers are black, and it turned out that they were not the only black applicants to “fail” Test 21. From 1968 to 1971, the failure rate for black applicants was 57 percent; in the same time frame, by contrast, 13 percent of the white applicants failed Test 21.
In 1972 Harley and Sellers joined a lawsuit challenging the hiring and promotion practices of the Metropolitan Police Department. They contended, among other things, that reliance on Test 21 amounted to discrimination against black applicants in violation of the Constitution and federal civil rights laws. Test 21, they noted, had never been validated as a predictor of job performance: it was true that high scores on Test 21 were positively correlated with high scores on the Recruit School final examination, but neither Test 21 nor the final examination had been validated with reference to the Recruit School curriculum or the requirements of the job. Neither test, in short, bore any necessary relationship to police training or police work.
But the trial judge, Gerhard Gesell, of the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, rejected Harley and Sellers’s claim. Judge Gesell ruled, first, that “reasoning and verbal and literacy skills” were significant aspects of work in law enforcement: “[t]he ability to swing a nightstick no longer measures a policeman’s competency for his exacting role in this city.” Gesell then rejected the argument that Test 21 was an inappropriate measure of those skills. “There is no proof,” he wrote, that Test 21 is “culturally slanted to favor whites. . . . The Court is satisfied that the undisputable facts prove the test to be reasonably and directly related to the requirements of the police recruit training program and that it is neither so designed nor operates to discriminate against otherwise qualified blacks.”
It was true, Gesell granted, that “blacks and whites with low test scores may often turn in a high job performance.” But “[t]he lack of job performance validation does not defeat the Test, given its direct relationship to recruiting and the valid part it plays in this process.” The police department, he concluded, “should not be required on this showing to lower standards or to abandon efforts to achieve excellence.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals reversed Gesell’s decision. It was clear, the court first held, that the use of Test 21 did amount to racial discrimination. The statistical disparity was itself enough to establish that claim; moreover, it arose amid a growing body of evidence suggesting that, as a general rule, “blacks are test-rejected more frequently than whites.” “This phenomenon,” the court noted, “is the result of the long history of educational deprivation, primarily due
