Fine. If you can teach, you can teach. I don’t care that you’re blue.

How much, I wonder, will American society be willing to distort its values, reality and duties to the public in order to accommodate false standards of racial justice? How many innocent people will be harmed before this destructive trend dissolves as the truth suddenly dawns, and we ask, “What were we thinking?” If a computer program was designed to invent the perfect example of a court decision that shows how divorced public policy regarding race has become from anything approaching logic, it could not come up with better than this.

Judge Kimba M. Wood (Remember her?) of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled last week that the New York’s teachers  exam was racially discriminatory, and the results had to be thrown out.  The exam, the second incarnation of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, called the LAST-2, was administered to New York teaching candidates from 2004 through 2012 and was designed to test an applicant’s knowledge of liberal arts and science.  Now, the exam was not found discriminatory because anyone could show, or suggested, that certain questions favored one race’s experience over the other. It was not found discriminatory like those infamous Jim Crow exams, or because experts were able to show how African Americans were uniquely unable to do well on particular questions for identifiable reasons. No, the test was found to be discriminatory because minority teaching candidates failed at a higher rate than white candidates, and that’s the only reason.

In order to eliminate the gap, those questions on which minority applicants did significantly worse will have to be eliminated. Wrote Wood:

“Instead of beginning with ascertaining the job tasks of New York teachers, the two LAST examinations began with the premise that all New York teachers should be required to demonstrate an understanding of the liberal arts.”

We are supposed to immediately grasp that this is a bad thing.

The decision exposes the logical disconnect and magical thinking inherent in the “disparate impact” approach to discrimination, which the Obama Administration and Eric Holder’s Justice Department have championed. The theory of disparate impact holds that “facially neutral” practices in employment, housing, or other areas may still have an illegally  disproportionate “adverse impact” on persons in a protected class such as race, color, religion, national origin, and gender as protected traits, and even disability status and age.

Thus a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act may be proven by showing that an otherwise reasonable employment practice or policy has a disproportionately adverse effect on members of a protected class as compared with non-members of the protected class. The approach holds that Title VII prohibits employers from using an employment practice that has the adverse effect of placing minorities at a disadvantage, no matter how reasonable, logical, or otherwise fair that practice may be. It will be considered per se discriminatory because of its effect. Using a reductio ad absurdum argument, the logic of disparate impact could require the military to lower all fitness standards to accommodate the average woman, since current standards require more upper body strength than most women can muster. This requires a perverse value judgment that meeting a diversity quota is more important than doing the actual task involved in a particular profession or job, and, sadly, a large number of progressives really believe that.

We can hope and pray that eventually the Supreme Court will narrow “disparate impact” and declare such applications unconstitutional as well as ridiculous, but so far, it hasn’t done so. Rational people can take heart from Justice Scalia’s impassioned response to disparate impact cant during the oral argument of  Texas Dept. of Housing vs. The Inclusive Communities Project in January, when he said, “No, no, no, no. Racial disparity is not racial discrimination.  The fact that the NFL is ­­ is largely black players is not discrimination.  Discrimination requires intentionally excluding people of a certain race.” But the Supreme Court has approved the use of statistics as part of the process of demonstrating discrimination. That’s reasonable. Judge Wood’s use of them is not.

Her emphasis on “ascertaining the job tasks of New York teachers” is designed to make the point that New York has not met the requirements of the so-called “business necessity” defense, in which an employer can avoid a disparate action ruling by showing that the practice or policy in question has a demonstrable relationship to the requirements of the job in question. In the case of the teacher exams, Wood is essentially saying that the state has not shown that the job of teaching school children requires an educated teacher.

That is what she is saying. In order to swell the ranks of minority teachers, Wood is declaring that society’s not only reasonable but indisputably vital interest in finding teachers who have a broad knowledge of areas beyond the particular subject matter that they teach is illegal, because it results in fewer minority teachers. In doing so, she is rejecting, or showing stunning ignorance of, the essence of teaching as society has defined it and understood it for centuries.  Indeed, Wood is disputing the entire concept of general education.

Teachers are not computers or on-line programs. They are human beings whose societal function is  to impart not merely facts but broadly applicable life skills, such as critical thinking, perspective, logic, communications and ethics, to the children in their charge. This requires depth of experience and knowledge, and the more of it a teacher has, the better job that teacher will do, and the more valuable the education will be that he or she imparts to students.This is the long-accepted theory behind liberal education generally, that a good, broad, liberal arts education is not merely important to developing specific job skills, but is also crucial to developing productive, happy, intellectually active human beings who will be better at everything they do because of their mastery of wide range of knowledge and analytical skills.

One can argue—one would be wrong, but one could argue—that  a minimal knowledge of the liberal arts isn’t essential to a plumber, jockey, or a toll-taker—but to make that argument in relation to teaching is indefensible. No matter what the specific topic being taught in a class, the teacher’s over-all educational achievements will affect the quality of the student’s education, and more importantly, the teacher’s trustworthiness. I don’t want my child taught literature by a teacher who thinks cave men rode dinosaurs, thinks “Titanic” was about a fictional ship and that FDR was President during the Civil War. I don’t want that because such ignorance of subjects that informed, educated, productive citizens should know and want to know about means that the teacher  1) possesses no intellectual curiosity, 2) is poorly educated, 3) is ignorant, 4) doesn’t value education and 5) quite possibly is an idiot. I don’t want my children taught by idiots, and New York is absolutely justified in constructing its teaching tests to make it difficult for idiots to make more idiots through incompetent teaching. In short, a teacher who can’t, in Wood’s words, “understand the liberal arts” to some minimal degree can’t be a competent teacher.

The state has an interest in recruiting the smartest, most educated, clearest thinking, most articulate and culturally literate teachers it can find. The race of those teachers should be a secondary issue. Of course it would be ideal to have a teaching force that is roughly distributed across demographic categories like the community it serves, but it is far more important that the teaching force can teach. If 100 per cent of the most promising teachers according to the test, credentials and an interview were black, then New York should have an all black teaching force. If every single teacher who passed the test was white, then the teachers should be white.

If the Earth had some race of interstellar immigrants (legal, of course)–let’s call them  the Ding-Dongs—whose communities developed the best school teachers in the world, in which every child aspired to be a teacher and every family taught that teaching was the highest calling, and these 4 foot tall, blue, one-eyed slug-like aliens so excelled at teaching that their test scores were twice those of every native Earthing, then the Ding-Dongs should have all the teaching jobs, because they did it better than anyone else.

The pass rate for African-American and Latino candidates on the LAST-2 was between 54 percent and 75 percent of the pass rate for white candidates.The solution to the problem, whatever that problem is, is not to reduce the test to such simple questions that everyone scores 100%, and students are subjected to being taught by semi-literate instructors.  This is not a race problem, it is an education problem. It is also a teaching problem to the extent that perhaps there are too many ignorant and incompetent Hispanic and African American teachers making Hispanic and African American students into poorly educated citizens who can’t pass a reasonable teachers test. It is not, however, a discrimination problem.

More under-qualified teachers is not a reasonable solution to anything, but that is the thrust of Kimba Wood’s ruling. This absurd result is what comes of accepting the premise that race trumps all other considerations, even the obligation to educate African Americans.

UPDATE: A few minutes after this was posted, Prof Glenn Reynolds posted this on Instapundit—“So having a well-rounded understanding of liberal arts is no longer  a reasonable indicia of a qualified teacher any longer.  But if  a well-rounded education isn’t an appropriate assessment of teacher qualification, what is? Breathing? Holding a (worthless) degree? Counting to 100? How far we have come–which just goes to show that the progressive motto “forward” isn’t always a positive thing for society. No wonder public schools generally are such cesspits of ennui and incompetence.”

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Facts: New York Times, Forbes, V-Dare