Blaming DEI is a dog-whistle for 'people should know their place' The Free Beacon, Fox News, and the other last four you listed are in the business of telling old white people to be afraid of everything.
It's the same as denying someone a job because they are not culture fit for a company. It's because the people doing the hiring only want to hire people from their background, college, etc.
The safety issues and staffing levels have been an issue since Reagan fired the PATCO ATC workers. It's getting worse because traffic loads are increasing and it is getting harder to staff for a stressful safety-critical job.
> Blaming DEI is a dog-whistle for 'people should know their place'
This is a very common trope: claim to have dog-level hearing for detecting what people really mean. Very often, including likely this time, it's totally inaccurate, and just means no discussion can be done as one of the parties relentlessly ad hominems the other.
It took 10 years after Reagan fired the controllers to get the workforce back to pre-1981 levels. This caused a ripple effect because the people that were hired were around the same age. The result was the FAA had to deal with large sections of the ATSC workforce retiring at 56(the legal maximum for an air traffic controller) in bunches. The FAA has struggled since this to maintain adequate staffing levels due to high stress nature of the job.
> The staffing issue at FAA dates back to 1981 when air traffic controllers went on strike and President Reagan fired them en masse. Subsequent hiring created a retirement wave around 2005 that the agency has long struggled to address.
The retirement wave just means that they didn't hire to plan for succession properly. That's not a union task. And many presidents have come and gone between Reagan and now; it seems strange not to mention that and talk as though he set in motion an unswervable chain of events.
Air traffic is up this year only 4%, would that naturally correspond to a 65% increase in significant incidents?
The issue isn't whether or not people are tacitly insisting certain people "deserve" to be in certain positions due to their race/background, and those against DEI are lamenting the loss of the soft apartheid we had in the US that gradually eroded with the civil rights movement. The issue is: in chasing demographic targets, are jobs lowering their standards for employment, and are those lowered standards causing a hazard for those impacted by the performance of those who work those jobs?
The load on the National Airspace System (NAS) has been growing each year, with slight a dip due to COVID.
The FAA has provides 20-year outlooks for a set of metrics, including the number of operations performed with the NAS.
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-06/FY2022_42_FA...
See Page 33 and 34 for a breakdown in the numbers. We're looking at 50 million to 62 million operations per year within the NAS.
The question asking if DEI is lowering standards is bunk because it is pre-loading the assumption that the best qualified workers are the what was there traditional (straight white males) and that somehow allowing others in requires lowering some standards.
For the purposes of the FAA air traffic control specialists, everyone who applies must go to the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, OK and pass the the courses and tests provided there.
They are then transferred to their home facilities where they must become certified for the position that they have been hired in. This requires additional tests, training, simulations, shadowing, and fully supervised workloads. If you become certified for a position and sector, it means that you can safely manage air traffic. Failure at any step along the way means that you wash out. The FAA does not lower standards for ATCS.
See the following research paper on ATCS failure rates, rationales, and percentages.
https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi...
>The question asking if DEI is lowering standards is bunk
>The FAA does not lower standards for ATCS.
What's your take on this then?
>The hiring process for aspiring federal air traffic controllers from approved Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI) institutions has undergone several revisions in recent years. Prior to 2014, graduates from AT-CTI programs were given preferential hiring from the FAA. In 2014, the FAA announced that AT-CTI graduates would equally compete with thousands of people the FAA calls “off the street hires”--anyone can literally walk in off the street without any previous training and apply for a federal air traffic control job. To apply, the FAA requires that a candidate has United States (U.S.) citizenship, a high school diploma, speaks English, and passes the FAA’s new Biographical Questionnaire (BQ).
>Another concerning perspective from AT-CTI administrators is that CTI graduates are at an employment disadvantage with the new hiring initiatives. One of the responding administrators expressed concern that off the street applicants have increased odds of employment over CTI applicants because CTI students are combined in track one with Veteran’s Readjustment Appointment (VRA) applicants putting CTI students second while all off the street applicants are grouped as one and have an equal opportunity for selection.
>The new FAA hiring protocol for federal air traffic controllers that was implemented in February 2014 included several significant changes. In particular, the FAA reduced the role of the CTI-approved program; therefore, the only remaining advantage for CTI graduates is that they are eligible to bypass the Air Traffic Basics Course, which is the first five weeks of qualification training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City (FAA, 2018). In addition, the FAA introduced the Biographical Questionnaire which was envisioned to predict controller performance through a process of asking individuals to recall their typical and/or specific behaviors from earlier times in their lives. But due to the lengthy process of hiring and training an air traffic controller which can take several years, it is too soon to conclude whether the FAA’s new hiring policies improved the ability to hire individuals who are more likely to successfully become federal controllers (FAA, 2017b).
This publication specifically questions whether the new hiring process selects more qualified individuals than the old hiring policies. It also seems to corroborate some of the claims made in the Wall Street Journal article:
>> The safety issues and staffing levels have been an issue since Reagan fired the PATCO ATC workers.
This seems to be you shoehorning in political beliefs. You can't analyze a situation by taking a list things done by politicians you don't like and picking out the ones with the same keywords.
It's not reasonable to blame a recent 65% year over year increase in safety events to an event that happened 42 years ago. Federal Air Traffic Control was created 45 years before Reagan's firings, so they've had as much time to recover from Reagan that as they had to get to wherever they were when Reagan came along.
DEI where D = Diversity, E = Equity (NOT Equality) and I = Inclusion.
Diversity is achieved for sake of achieving the diversity. When they do not find qualified people who are described to be diverse, they lower the standards in every industry. Same is the case for FAA.
FAA lowering their standards to increase diversity
From the article: The FAA discarded its longtime use of the difficult cognitive assessment test and implemented instead a new, unmonitored take-home personality test—a biographical questionnaire. Among the questions asked are: “The number of high school sports I participated in was … ” “How would you describe your ideal job?” “What has been the major cause of your failures?” “More classmates would remember me as humble or dominant?”
Here is another example of lowering standards: Oregon governor signs bill ending reading and math proficiency requirements for graduation
From the article: Backers argued the existing proficiency levels for math and reading presented an unfair challenge for students who do not test well, and Boyle said the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon's "Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color."
Again, it comes to, lower the standards for everyone to achieve diversity. Proponents of diversity blow the horn that it raises our standards, which is a lie. That would be true if there were true diversity, based on merit but DEI is all about Equity same outcome irrespective of skills, efforts or qualifications.
