USA: Following the city's settlement of a decades-old discrimination lawsuit for $1.8 billion, the New York Post reported on Saturday that aspirant teachers of color who failed the New York City licensing exam could receive as much as $2.1 million each.
The Post reported that 225 people who failed the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, which the city used to license teachers between 1994 and 2014, have already been informed that they will receive sizeable rewards totaling more than $1 million each, according to Manhattan federal court records.
The payments, which even include health insurance and pension checks, are based on what the recipient would have made had they passed the test and kept or been hired for their teaching position.
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Herman Grim, who claimed he hired private tutors and diligently studied but won almost $2.1 million for repeatedly failing the exam in the early 1990s, was unable to provide any examples of how the test was biased when pressed by the Post. After passing the most recent exam, he only recently was hired by the city as a special education teacher.
The lawsuit was initially brought on behalf of four teachers in 1996, but it was later expanded to include 5,200 current and former educators. The multiple-choice test was passed with a success rate of over 90% by white applicants, 51 to 62% by black test takers, and only 47 to 55% by Latinos.
In addition to being "culturally biased" in favor of whites, the test, according to the plaintiffs, failed to predict "competent job performance" because it did not assess "general knowledge, teaching skills, or competency in content areas." One of the test's questions asked test-takers to explain the meaning of a painting by Andy Warhol.
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A Manhattan federal judge found the city liable in 2012 because it had made hiring decisions based on the test results, despite the city's ongoing defense that it shouldn't be held responsible for an exam the state required it to use and its 2003 victory in court.
A federally appointed special master was appointed after the judge ruled that the tests were discriminatory because they had an unconstitutional "disparate impact" on black and Latino teachers while having no bearing on student performance. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio quietly started the settlement process in 2018, setting aside $1.8 billion to compensate the plaintiffs - the largest settlement in city history - while the city continued to appeal.
In 2014, De Blasio also decided to pay $98 million to resolve a long-running discrimination lawsuit brought by black and Hispanic firefighters who had been turned down for employment by the New York Fire Department.
