Liberal policies systematically dumb down the U.S., even at the expense of public safety, in order to achieve their perception of an ideal racial parity.
Scrapping New York High School Admission Standards
The most recent example is New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s crusade to trash the admissions test from the city’s most prestigious high schools. He reasoned that there were not enough black and Hispanic students who made the grade.
The mayor argued his case in a Chalkbeat op-ed, "Our Specialized Schools Have a Diversity Problem. Let’s Fix It."
Mayor de Blasio indicated that a mere 172 black students and 298 Latinos were offered one of the 5,000 seats available at the city’s specialized high schools, including Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Technical High School and Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School. "This happened in a city where two out of every three eighth-graders in our public schools are Latino or black," the mayor wrote.
"Can anyone look the parent of a Latino or black child in the eye and tell them their precious daughter or son has an equal chance to get into one of their city’s best high schools?" he asked.
His solution? Beginning next school year, de Blasio would set aside 20 percent of the seats at the city’s eight elite high schools for students from low-income families, arguing the "system we’re fighting for will raise the bar at the specialized high schools in every way."
But de Blasio has it backwards. Lowering admission standards doesn’t "raise the bar" — it lowers it, and makes the diplomas from the elite schools worth no more than those from the rest.
Also, if there’s "a diversity problem," within the school system, the fault doesn’t rest with the admissions procedure — it lies within the city’s inadequate public school system at the primary level. Raise those standards and there will be no "diversity problem."
Lowering Standards at the FAA
When the Obama administration decided there weren’t enough minority air traffic controllers, it dumbed down admission standards and thereby jeopardized public safety.
For the sake of diversity, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) changed its rigorous and long-established hiring standards and added a personality test it called the Biographical Questionnaire as the first hurdle in its hiring process.
Although this happened years ago, it received little attention until Fox News host Tucker Carlson addressed it last week while interviewing an attorney who filed a lawsuit against the FAA over its revised hiring practices. "A group within the FAA, including the human resources function within the FAA — the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees — determined that the workforce was too white," attorney Michael Pearson told Carlson. "They had a concerted effort through the Department of Transportation in the Obama administration to change that."
Under the new standards, candidates who have been unemployed for three years or more and did poorly in high school science scored appreciably higher than licensed pilots and those with post-high school air traffic controller training, Carlson reported.
"This is insane, it’s dangerous and it’s indefensible," he said.
An air traffic controller’s job is among the most demanding, stress-filled positions imaginable. They’re responsible for the continuous safe and orderly arrival and departure of numerous aircraft flying at over 100 miles per hour and carrying hundred of passengers, each vying for the same limited airspace.
Yet the Obama administration would rather have had a chronically unemployed candidate with no understanding of either the physics of airfoil, drag, lift, and airspeed that make flight possible, or the spatial three-dimension chessboard of arriving and departing aircraft.
"It’s the safety of the national airspace that’s at risk here," said Pearson, who has 27 years experience as an air traffic controller at four of America’s busiest airports.
Airline executives reported that President Donald Trump was "extraordinarily positive" when they urged him to remove the air traffic control system from the FAA and privatize it. Those plans have since been met with bipartisan pushback from lawmakers.
Conclusion
Lowering admission standards doesn’t raise the bar of educational opportunities for minorities — it lowers it for everyone.
And when the standards are lowered for those responsible for our security, it’s not just the bar that’s lowered — public safety plummets as well.
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to BizPac Review and Liberty Unyielding. He’s also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and an enthusiastic Second Amendment supporter, who can often be found honing his skills at the range. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.