Incremental change and transformational governance
Creators: name: Sondike, Gwyn A.
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2011

description: The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Ricci v. DeStafano (2009) has raised a multitude of concerns about how cities develop and administer promotion tests for civil servants. The Ricci case involved the city of New Haven’s efforts to administer a promotion exam for firefighters in the city, with an explicit attempt to promote social equity in the upper reaches of the city’s fire department.  Briefly, when no minority firefighters scored high enough on the promotion exam for the positions of Captain and Lieutenant, the city refused to certify the exam.  White firefighters who passed the exam filed suit against the city claiming they had been discriminated against on the basis of their race.  The High Court ruled against the City and for the white firefighters. In light of the Ricci ruling, the purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth review of the administrative process conducted by government officials of the City of New Haven with regard to the promotion testing process for firefighters. There are four main goals for this paper.  The first aim is to provide a historical framework for the analysis; the second goal is to conduct an analysis of relevant literature and provide an account of the actual case. The third goal is to evaluate and elaborate on the concerns that arose from the case, and the fourth purpose of the study is to provide suggestions of how things could have been done differently. In an attempt to make the City’s public workforce more diverse, a select group of public administrators, including the mayor, John DeStefano, engaged in an unconventional course rather than a deliberative process to create a fire department that was more representative of the current ethnic makeup of the City of New Haven. Many government programs are only modestly successful over the long term, are hard to evaluate on more than anecdotal evidence, and the public is the final jury on government policy outcomes.  And, as a result, public administrators are often in a position to create policy that reflects political and economic realities. They have to constantly weigh the purposefulness of program inputs as well as the strength of program outputs. In addition to strong, evidence-based data and the presence of politically sensitive, good will interventions, transparency and deliberative evaluation is imperative for a meaningful policy process. It is posited in this case study that while eliminating adverse and disparate impact from promotion testing is an urgent goal to create workplace diversity and representativeness, it can be accomplished through an incremental process. In a sense it has to be conducted this way because of the following three reasons: 1. Scientific findings in the area are incremental with several findings but no firm conclusions. In fact, over 60 years of rigorous study on the subject by the University of California have yielded statistically mixed results basically indicating that schools in lower and higher income areas continue to provide disparate preparation for tests.  2.  Democracies change policies almost entirely through incremental changes, rather than in leaps and bounds (Lindblom, 1959). In principal every citizen has an equal say in our political and policy process. Because we have different perspectives and values, and because American citizens highly prize individualism, we support a participatory decision making process.  3.  The public as a whole prefers homeostasis rather than crisis.   Unless there is overwhelming, supportive public opinion for change, in general, the public prefers deliberation on an issue rather than a sudden shift in policy.   While in this case, some administrators in New Haven thought that there was no time like a crisis to make a substantive change in promotion testing policy, there was no collective opinion on how this should be accomplished. Instead, a sudden reaction to the crisis provoked suspicion, alienation and resentment on the part of stakeholders and the general public.  What was seen by the Mayor of New Haven as a representative and transformational move in a decision to not certify promotion test results, was instead perceived by others as an exploitive abuse of his personal power and privilege to make a change that he personally supported and possibly to burnish his image as a change maker.   Whatever Mayor DeStefano's decision, his position would have been strengthened with both the courts and the various constituencies to which he was responding had he engaged in a deliberative process. As it was, he turned the case over to the City's Civil Service Board. Although the Board was divided and held hearings, given its political makeup, the outcome of these discussions was never really in doubt. The function of these hearings, then, was to bypass a genuinely deliberative process rather than to facilitate it. This process might have led to the same conclusion-- to reject the test. And given its conservative makeup, the Supreme Court might still have found that the City was in violation of the law. Even so, the City's case would have been far stronger and it might have set a precedent for other cities to follow, allowing an incremental process to lead to a more representative city workforce.    Using a qualitative evaluation approach, a case study was conducted of the City of New Haven promotion policy decision making process for its firefighters in the context the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano (2009).  Data was collected through interviews with a select group of administrators in New Haven, a review of testimony before the City’s Civil Service Board, and a review of related documents regarding the promotion testing of a group of classified civil servants in the city’s fire department in 2003.