Bad Leadership Drove Schools into Crisis

COVID-19 exposed how important teachers are to students and families—but politicians and policy leaders are still not listening to them.

BY JEFF BRYANT

Michael Barbour, a professor at Touro University California and an expert on K-12 online learning, believes that more than half of the nation’s school superintendents “should be fired.”

His blistering criticism stems from the Pawlewicz, an education policy historian fact that, deep into the 2020–2021 school and author of Blaming Teachers, on the year, many schools are still struggling with debacle of fall school reopenings. virtual learning during the pandemic. This disregard is all the more galling

Stories of school districts’ online given the #Red4Ed wave of teacher relearning systems crashing are widespread. bellions that took place in 2018–2019, Teachers complain about being excluded when educators—mostly in politically from decisions regarding online curricu- red states—held sickouts, walkouts, and lum and pedagogy. Alarming numbers of street demonstrations to protest a lack of students are not engaged or not showing funding, attacks on teacher professionup, especially in low-income areas and alism, and threats to close and privatize among communities of color. public schools.

The chaos is especially concerning The teachers’ actions led to increased given that 76 percent of parents say their teacher pay, smaller class sizes, and more children are attending school remotely, nurses and counselors in schools. But either full or part time. “Any school lead- during the pandemic, when support for er who didn’t reach out to teachers to ask teachers would seem to matter most, their what had worked well and what didn’t and wisdom has too often been overlooked. then use that [to prepare for the fall re- “In the spring, we had to come up with opening],” Barbour tells me, “committed creative ways to support our families,” says a dereliction of duty.” Milwaukee, Wisconsin, educator Glenn

Barbour’s ire might be justified. In Carson. He describes an intense effort to California, for example, fewer than 10 deliver devices and hotspots to homes, percent of school districts offered more learn new technologies, and conduct famthan sixteen hours of training for teachers ily outreach. during the summer, when schools could “I video-recorded my lessons and arhave been preparing to reopen with online ranged one-on-one virtual meetings with learning. students,” says Kathy Dorman, a high

Improving remote learning, many ex- school teacher in Providence, Rhode perts agree, would mean creating spaces Island. for teachers to collaborate and share mod- Despite these innovations, online els of effective online instruction and les- learning has never been as effective as son planning. in-person classes. The rapid switch to

“The disregard of teachers’ shared pro- going virtual made that mode of instrucfessional expertise and practical knowl- tion even more challenging, especially for edge is no accident,” wrote Diana D’Amico low-income, Black, and Latinx students.

And at least seven million students with disabilities and learning impairments were being left behind due to school closures. This is on top of the nearly sixteen million students who had no reliable Internet connection when the pandemic began.

But school superintendents aren’t solely to blame—policy leaders have also completely failed schools, teachers, and families.

In March, when Congress passed the CARES Act with $13.2 billion for schools, it was widelyacknowledged that it was insufficient to meet most schools’ needs. It wasn’t enough to pay for free broadband access and laptops for students, hire more teachers and school staff, and overcome school budget cuts.

Yet President Donald Trump and the Republican-led Senate spent months doing nothing. Most of these top-down failures, in turn, trickled down to teachers. And now, in schools that have decided to reopen in-person (either full time or partially), 86 percent of teachers say they must purchase their own personal protective equipment, and 11 percent buy it for their students.

What the pandemic revealed about public education is that schools have become the essential safety nets for families, that access to education services is grossly unequal, and that the education process, at its very core, is about the relationships between teachers and their students.

If education policy leaders want to improve the way they run schools during a pandemic, maybe they should start with that. ◆

For Whom the Bell Curves

Major U.S. companies routinely rely on racist personality tests to assess job applicants.

BY DAVID LAMB

A former book editor at Scribner and Hachette Books, David Lamb is a Minnesota-based writer who focuses on corporate and government misconduct. He is also the editor of St. Paul’s Community Reporter newspaper. Steve Karraker pulled into Chicago’s Midway Airport, twenty minutes early. He took a long drink of water, wondering what he was missing at his stores. Karraker oversaw ten Renters Choice locations across Illinois, ensuring the store managers met sales targets in the cutthroat rent-to-own furniture industry.

In practice, that meant shepherding some four dozen people as they hurtled from crisis to calamity. He terminated employees who stole from the company, riding a roller coaster with revenue that spiked and dove like a peregrine falcon. Karraker was a friend to those under him going through divorces and other personal struggles. After five years at the company in a management role, confronting those challenges was second nature.

The part of the job that still made Karraker sweat was what brought him to the airport so early on this blistering August morning. He was picking up his boss, Bill Nitt, a regional vice president from Renters Choice’s corporate headquarters, for his quarterly tour of Karraker’s stores.

The man who eventually emerged through automatic doors, wearing a fitted wool suit and one of his trademark paisley ties, was almost jogging.

“I need you to take us to the Roadhouse restaurant in Aurora,” Karraker recalls Nitt saying, as he climbed into the car. “But first, I need you to tell all the managers in the region to get their butts there for a meeting. And then we need to get to O’Hare to pick two people up.”

As they carved their halting path across the gridlocked city, possibilities shot through Karraker’s mind. He was being fired; no, they were all being fired. His boss explained that they were picking up two others for a big announcement. Karraker had no idea who those people were and what they would announce.

Finally, about ninety minutes later, in a crowded private meeting room in a restaurant outside Chicago, Nitt shared the news. He told a group of the state’s store and regional managers, including Karraker, that the company had merged with Rent-A-Center to create the nation’s largest rent-to-own retailer. It would dominate the furniture market for those with low incomes.

Nitt produced packets, passing them around to the workers. They were personality tests for every store and regional manager, something Rent-A-Center required to evaluate new hires as well as existing employees’ potential for higher roles. Karraker and his colleagues were told to find a place to fill them out. He recognized the test as one he had taken two years before, scoring badly.

Months later, Karraker learned that he had more than twelve deviations on the test, the maximum they allowed for workers to be considered for promotion. Some of his highest-performing store managers fared even worse, and Karraker wondered if the stress from being suddenly compelled to complete these highstakes evaluations had affected the outcomes.

After the test, Karraker, who had risen steadily through the ranks at the Aurora store to become the regional manager, would not receive another promotion.

Karraker hated having to rely on an algorithm he didn’t trust for hiring decisions. He became disturbed by conversations he had with the psychologist who oversaw the testing program about potential hires Karraker brought forward. The psychologist, he later recalled, made oddly specific predictions, in one case mentioning that a job applicant’s test results suggested he might be a sexual deviant who could pose liability risks.

In 2002, Karraker and his two brothers filed a lawsuit against Rent-A-Center, the name that the post-merger company took on, in federal court. It would be three years before Karraker won a summary disposition, with the judge citing “attitudinal barriers resulting from unfounded stereotypes and prejudice,” and then another two years of litigation before he would finally triumph.

In that time, Karraker would return to a former career as a property manager, earning less than half what his salary at Rent-A-Center had been while he helped raise his fourth child. He would also coach baseball, football, and wrestling. He says he received two offers for settlements, declining each without consideration, as settling would forbid him from talking about the company’s misconduct.

In 2004, three years into his new life and three years before he prevailed in court, Karraker filed for bankruptcy. When it was all over, Rent-A-Center was forced to overhaul its hiring procedures to comply with the law and pay Karraker’s legal bills, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. As the victorious complainant, he was awarded $5,000 in damages.

The 2005 Karraker v. Rent-A-Center case, a landmark decision in employment law, is one of several in recent decades that sparked a group of industrial and organizational psychologists at the University of Georgia and Western Kentucky University to last year declare their concern regarding the use of workplace personality tests.

Considering recent breakthroughs in psychology, the study said, “the ‘line in the sand’ between normal and abnormal personality models may be nonexistent,” potentially making such evaluations medical examinations, and therefore ADA violations. “As scientific understanding of personality progresses,” the researchers noted, “practitioners will need to exercise evermore caution when choosing personality measures.”

In 2015, Target Corporation agreed to pay $2.8 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that alleged its use of personality testing to gauge fitness for different roles discriminated based on race and sex.

In 2018, Best Buy agreed to stop using personality tests in its hiring processes in a deal that ended an investigation into the discriminatory effects of its testing by the federal body charged with enforcing fair hiring practices. That same year, this same body, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, settled a case alleging that the drugstore chain

CVS Pharmacy had used personality tests in a way that “adversely impacted applicants based on race and national origin.”

It is impossible to know the names or even the numbers of people who have been discriminated against by personality tests. Perhaps because of the length of the fight and the meagerness of the award in Karraker’s case, no one has opted to follow his lead.

Today Karraker is fifty-two and living in Kankakee, Illinois, where he likes to play flag football with his grandchildren. He says in an interview that he does not regret refusing the settlement offers Rent-A-Center extended to him. “The most important thing,” he says, “was that they got their black eye.”

Nationally, the personality testing industry is marching past $500 million in annual revenue. The tools it sells pervade hiring and promotion practices across the nation’s largest companies, even as psychologists have questioned the tests’ validity.

Now, as the titans of corporate America squawk about wanting to diversify their workforces, they are using tests that may present an obstacle to that goal— or could even be the reason that large businesses have failed to meet previous targets.

Connections between race and life experiences underlie the discriminatory potential of personality tests. Elizabeth Brondolo, a psychology professor who runs the St. John’s University Social Stress and Health Research Unit, explains that repeated exposure to racism can become a stress that surfaces in answers to personality test questions.

“Navigating experiences in which others mistreat you because of their racist perceptions is a frequent occurrence for Black people in America,” Brondolo tells The Progressive. “I imagine that most Black people have developed a range of coping resources to deal with internal concerns about mistrust.”

When tests evaluate people based on dimensions such as “adjustment”—measured as part of the “Big Five” personality traits on which most of today’s tests are based—the skills that Black job candidates have been forced to develop to survive could become liabilities flagged in their personality profiles. A 1991 paper published by the American Psychological Association found that “adjustment” tends to reflect whether subjects are “anxious, unhappy, and emotionally unstable,” but what adjustment to one’s circumstances looks like in reality depends on those circumstances.

If one candidate grew up having mostly positive experiences with strangers and another grew up at times the target of strangers’ racist prejudice, it is easy to understand why the candidates might bring different amounts of anxiety to interactions with people they don’t know.

Other dimensions measured may also be keeping Black employees out of companies’ executive ranks, despite perennial vows to diversify upper management. One of the metrics on the Hogan Assessment, a Big Five-based test that its owners claim is “trusted” by 75 percent of the Fortune 500, is “intellect,” a trait said to predict success at leadership jobs.

According to the creator of the test, the psychologist Robert Hogan, one can assess a test-taker’s level of “intellect” by measuring “the degree to which a person enjoys chess, opera, and trendy cuisine.” In other

words, if Wagner isn’t a hallmark of your background, perhaps you would be a better fit for the register.

Hogan, founder and president of the company that makes the personality test most commonly used in hiring, has made other statements that raise questions about whether corporate America should solicit his social engineering. For instance, his theory of personality builds from what he referred to in his 2001 magnum opus, Personality: Theories and Applications, as the “important contributions to the study of personality” of Franz Joseph Gall, the racist skull-measurer who founded the pseudoscience of phrenology.

The history of categorizing people through standardized tests—and structuring society in the process—begins with ambitious intentions and ends, all too often, with discrimination run amok.

Carl Brigham, a eugenics enthusiast and psychology professor at Princeton, was celebrated for finding a way to adapt a U.S. army intelligence test to apply to high school graduates seeking admission to college. In 1924, Brigham published a paper called “A Study of American Intelligence,” a far-reaching social analysis

Mock-up of applicant questions used by CVS prior to a 2011 settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island.

lamenting that “American intelligence is declining, the SAT had been teaching Black students for generaand will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial tions: That the American economy, with a gifted white admixture becomes more and more extensive.” elite calling the shots and a dull but diverse workforce

Two years later, he released his test for objective- of manual laborers and pencil pushers powering their ly measuring the intelligence of students across the ideas, was the natural order, the way it was supposed nation that he feared nonwhite races were debasing. to be. Brigham called it the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), The Bell Curve transformed its authors from litand it is still administered in its current form to more tle-known professors into icons, reviled by many, if than two million students each year. admired by some. They were disowned by much of

Like other standardized tests, the SAT has been academia, with a visit from Charles Murray to Midrepeatedly criticized for racial bias. Recent research dlebury College to discuss an entirely different book has shown that not only do white and Asian Ameri- twenty-three years after the publication of The Bell can students outperform those of other groups by 14 Curve inspiring protests so violent that administrators percent on the test but scores overall correlate strongly canceled the event. And The New Republic’s editor, with family income, leading many to wonder whether Andrew Sullivan, who had overruled his writers’ proit should be used at all. tests to publish excerpts from the book in 1994, could

Two 2019 lawsuits filed by California’s Compton not salvage his relationships with his colleagues. Less Unified School District, which is less than 1 percent than two years later he left the magazine where he had white, allege that the University of California sys- spent his career. tem violates civil rights laws by requiring the SAT or But the book found a dependable contingent of ACT for admission. The lawsuits claim that standard- fans among experts whose careers relied on standardized tests “unlawfully discriminate against disabled, ized testing. One such group of professors in intellow-income, multilingual, and underrepresented ligence and related fields published a full-throated minority students.” defense of The Bell Curve’s central conclusions.

One of those lawsuits won a preliminary injunc- Among the article’s fifty-two signatories was Robert tion in court on August 31, requiring all schools with- Hogan, creator of the eponymous test that has become in the largest state college system in the country to a ubiquitous tool for hiring and promotion at compaimmediately suspend use of the tests. Mark Rosen- nies small and large. baum, a lawyer prosecuting the case, proclaimed that the “racist tests that deprived countless California students of color . . . of a fair shot” were “dead and gone.” In the weeks after George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police and the renewed focus on

The SAT’s owner, the College Board, had attempt- racist violence that resulted, the CEO of the eponyed last year to address discriminatory problems with a mous testing company Hogan founded, also called so-called adversity score, which the testing company Hogan, grew reflective about the connection besuggested would capture a student’s socioeconomic tween Hogan tests and discrimination. He seemed background. But the effort disintegrated amid contro- to decide that if racism was the problem, Hogan versy over whether it is possible to reduce to a number tests were the solution, perhaps the only means of the impact of hardship experienced over the course measuring job candidates and employees with true of a lifetime. objectivity.

Still, even after the SAT’s sordid history and more In the CEO’s June blog post on the Hogan comparecent troubles have been weighed, the best-known ny website, he outlined the company’s commitment racism scandal in the world of testing remains that of to “social justice, antiracism, and equal opportunity psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and social scientist for all,” stretching back to its founder. He argued that Charles Murray’s 1994 book, The Bell Curve. The 845- standardized tests are not discriminatory in their efpage lightning rod argues that low intelligence has fects, but instead, a weapon to be wielded in an epic caused many of America’s social ills, from involve- quest against racial bias in the workforce. The blog ment in crime to children born to unmarried parents post highlighted Robert Hogan’s lifelong “focus on to financial struggles. research to improve social justice.”

Among other things, the book analyzed the aver- In response to inquiries for this article, the comage intelligence of Americans across racial lines, using pany’s chief science officer, Ryne Sherman, also conIQ test results that purport to show the average white tended that recent findings questioning the validity of American to be more intelligent than the average personality traits across diverse groups are “directly Black one. For many outraged critics, the implication refute[d]” by the company’s own research, which uses seemed to be the same one that standardized tests like larger samples of people from more countries and

Who’s Doing It?

Companies reported to use standardized testing in hiring as recently as last year, according to JobTestPrep:

Personality tests Listed as companies that Hogan is “Trusted by” on its website:

Personality tests used for tellers Hogan personality test required for “General Manager” positions Personality tests used as part of hiring process

Personality test for customer service associate and brand specialist position Cognitive ability test for system administrator positions

is “free from a host of methodological inadequacies.” He argued in an email that the research from psychologists who declared “concern” over workplace personality tests “is contradicted by the data” as well. He sent The Progressive a non-peer-reviewed and unpublished paper he had co-authored as a response to the findings, which you can link to from this article on our website.

Other research, however, tells a dramatically different story. A 1975 article, co-authored by Hogan in The Journal of Psychology,claimed to suss out the characteristics shared by good police officers in Oakland, California. Among the nine traits it identified was “masculinity.” One can only imagine the kind of discrimination that finding could have justified in a department that was in the process of giving women the full rank of “officer” for the first time in decades.

On August 11, twenty-seven CEOs from the nation’s largest companies, including JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Amazon, and Google, came together to announce plans to work with New York City’s public colleges to recruit 100,000 people from low-income and minority communities by 2030. They call themselves the New York Jobs CEO Council, and their announcement was hailed as a victory in “confronting [an] injustice” by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Yet in ignoring the testing question, the CEOs’ statement echoes so many similar initiatives that have failed. Four years after Intel’s 2015 pledge to spend $300 million to recruit a more diverse workforce, the percentage of employees from underrepresented groups at the firm had ticked up by just 3 percent. And while Apple pledged in 2015 to commit $50 million toward increasing the pipeline for underrepresented groups in tech, its share of technical workers who are Black remains unchanged at 6 percent, less than half the percentage of African Americans in the U.S. population.

As venture capitalist Freada Kapor Klein observed in response to the latest round of pledges trumpeted across Silicon Valley, the companies’ failures at diversity are astonishing given their organizational prowess. “Despite all the words, despite all the money, despite all the platitudes and initiatives,” she told Wired magazine, “it’s hard to say that the companies are really taking it seriously.”

Like the fish that got away, the companies’ promises seem to grow with every passing year. But given that nearly all of the twenty-seven companies that make up the New York Jobs CEO Council still rely on standardized tests—including Hogan’s—to evaluate candidates, is it even possible that this time could be different? ◆