NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE N ew York City has begun announcing payouts in one of the city’s largest-ever legal settlements. From the New York Post:

Roughly 5,200 black and Hispanic ex-Big Apple teachers and once-aspiring educators are expected to collect more than $1.8 billion in judgments after the city stopped fighting a nearly three-decade federal discrimination lawsuit that found a certification exam was biased.

The Liberal Arts and Sciences Test (LAST) was used from 1994 to 2014 to determine whether teachers in the city had sufficient baseline knowledge in core academic subjects like math and grammar. But white test-takers passed the exam at far higher rates than black and Latino teachers. As a result, the city will now pay out almost $2 billion in back pay and other benefits to those who did not receive teaching licenses because they failed the exam. Some of the plaintiffs will even be receiving pensions as compensation for classes they never taught.

This waste of taxpayer resources, agreed to at the end of the de Blasio administration after decades in court, is just one more consequence of the overbroad principle of disparate impact. The mere fact that different races passed the test at different rates is not evidence of discrimination, nor is it justification for lowering academic standards for our educators.

Representatives of the state education department and the city’s public-school district did not provide copies of the test by the time of publishing, nor did they confirm how the exam was scored, when National Review inquired. A practice test from Kaplan (a reputable test-prep company), however, gives at least some sense of the exam’s difficulty. The LAST consisted of 80 multiple-choice questions and a written essay, all to be administered over a four-hour period. In less than an hour, I comfortably passed the practice exam (if this description of the scoring formula is accurate) without dealing with the essay portion. Frankly, were I a parent, I would not want to put my child in a classroom with a teacher who could not do the same.

You can review some practice tests for yourself here, but a few questions should suffice to give a sense of the exam’s difficulty:

a. 2:27.1

b. 2:55.7

c. 2:32.3

d. 25.7

• Vertebrates are members of the animal kingdom that have backbones. Which of these is NOT a vertebrate?

a. Human

b. Trout

c. Alligator

d. Earthworm

• It is thought that people go into teaching for a variety of reasons: interpersonal, service, material benefits, or time compatibility. Jane wants to be a teacher because she is diabetic and is attracted by the excellent health benefits. This is an example of which of the following?

a. Interpersonal

b. Service

c. Material benefits

d. Time compatibility

• Juanita is a(n) ________ person. She always tends to see the negative side of a situation.

a. optimist

b. optimistic

c. pessimist

d. pessimistic

If you answered C, D, C, D, congratulations. You might have qualified to be a teacher in New York City — though the smarter course would have been to fail the exam and cash out.

According to the Post, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that “much of the discrepancy in scores could be attributed to some of the questions being culturally biased in favor of whites.” If Kaplan’s practice test is any indication, this is a spurious claim. I do not think white people are inherently better at basic arithmetic or writing grammatically proper English than people of other races.

One could argue that the handful of art questions on the exam are based in Western artistic conventions, but then black Americans are just that — American. There is no good reason to believe that a college-educated black person is any less likely to be familiar with Starry Night than his white counterpart, and if he is, it’s not because society conspired to hide the fruits of the West’s cultural heritage from him.

Not only did the creators of the exam not intend to produce a biased exam, they took steps to do the opposite. The ruling that found the test discriminatory nevertheless recognized that a “Bias Review Committee” (BRC), on which black teachers were a plurality, “reviewed the draft framework” for the exam and a sample of the questions that would appear on it. Pilot testing was also conducted “to ensure that the questions were understandable, relevant, and unbiased.” The ruling does not offer any reason to believe that these efforts were themselves biased, other than that the committee only reviewed a sample of the test questions instead of the entire question bank. The state education commissioner also initially implemented the BRC’s recommended threshold passing score for the exam, rather than the higher score recommended by the “Content Advisory Committee.”

None of that mattered when the doctrine of disparate impact reared its ugly head. The plaintiffs argued that in making the exam a requirement of receiving a teaching license, the city’s Board of Education violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. That section of the law makes it illegal to use “a particular employment practice that causes a disparate impact on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” unless a business can show that the practice is a “business necessity.” Somehow, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York managed to find both that the mere fact of differential rates in passing the exam proves a civil-rights violation and that it isn’t a “business necessity” for teachers to demonstrate a degree of competence in things you should have learned in elementary school.

Nearly $2 billion that could have gone to improving New York’s education system, or to reducing the massive tax burdens experienced by residents of the city, will now go to pay off would-be teachers that somehow managed to earn college degrees without mastering addition and subtraction. Of course, this is not the first time “disparate impact” has led to a bad legal outcome, nor will it be the last. Ensuring our public institutions are free from racism is important, but paranoically finding racism where it doesn’t actually exist will inevitably lead us to ridiculous places.