Hard lesson in ‘biased’ payouts
Teacherss $oar over FDNY’ers
Taxpayers shelled out $98 mil-l lion over a discriminatory FDNY screening test just four years agogo — but that’s pocket change com-mpared to the $1.7 billion the city may now have to pay out over an allegedly biased teaching exam, m, The Post has learned.
Legal papers quietly filed overer the summer reveal that a court-tap-pointed special master hasas recommended paying a total of $91.6 million in damages to just 219 of the plaintiffs in a long-g running class-action suit against the former Board of Education — now the Department of Education — over a racially biased certification exam.
Approximately 4,000 people are eligible for payments, according to court documents — so if the remaining recommendations follow suit, the final bill would be around $1.67 billion.
The potential tab is more than five times larger than the $300 million officials were anticipating in 2015, when The Post obtained budget documents warning of the grave fiscal threat it posed.
And it dwarfs the $98 million the de Blasio administration paid in 2014 to settle a similar case brought by the Vulcan Society of black firefighters after a court ruling found the written screening test used by the FDNY discriminated against black and Hispanic applicants.
That’s an average of $65,000 for each of the 1,500 would-be firefighters involved in the suit — while the recommended payout to teachers works out to $418,000 per person.
A spokeswoman for Mayor de Blasio told The Post the city is trying to negotiate a teacher-suit settlement, too.
“We will budget for this at the appropriate time, and we’ll remain aggressive in ensuring that plaintiffs and taxpayers are treated fairly during this process,” said Jaclyn Rothenberg.
City Law Department spokesman Nicholas Paolucci warned that checks won’t go out anytime soon unless the case settles. “If we are unable to settle, it will be many years before any money is paid to the plaintiffs,” he said.
The teachers’ case involves the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, a state-mandated exam that city educators and job applicants were required to take from 1993 to 2004.
More than 90 percent of white test-takers passed the 80-question multiple-choice quiz — which in one version asked teachers to explain the meaning of a painting by pop artist Andy Warhol.
But black applicants scored passing grades only between 51 and 62 percent of the time, and Latinos had an even lower passing rate, just 47 to 55 percent.
The failures resulted in fulltime teachers getting demoted to substitutes and prevented aspiring educators from getting hired.
Four teachers in 1996 first filed a suit over the test. They targeted both the state and city but an appeals court ultimately let Albany off the hook since the city is the teachers’ employer.
The test was ruled discriminatory in 2012 by the third Manhattan federal judge to handle the case — which included a twomonth nonjury trial and repeated trips to an appeals court.