http://www.suntimes.com/news/cepeda/2509282,CST-EDT-esther19.article
Hiring goal: Aim for merit and diversity
July 19, 2010
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA Sun-Times Columnist
Last week, my Sun-Times colleagues Fran Spielman and Rosalind Rossi reported that Mayor Daley is considering Mary Ellen Caron, founder and former principal of his daughter's Catholic elementary school, to be the Chicago Public Schools' chief education officer.
My eyebrows raised. An administrator with little experience with the expansive, highly political bureaucracy of the country's third-largest public school district as chief education officer? Could Caron scale her past experience at an elite private school to the daunting tasks of eliminating achievement gaps, increasing academic rigor, managing meaningful evaluation processes and building capacity among teachers and administrative staff in a system beset by poverty's ills?
Maybe. Maybe not. But either way, two sentences in the story raised the eyebrows of many online readers: "If Mary Ellen Caron is tapped as chief education officer, she would be the first white and non-CPS educator to assume that post since Daley won control of the city's public schools in 1995. Over the last 15 years, the top CPS education post has been held by three successive African- American women, all former CPS principals in a system that is 45 percent black, 41 percent Latino and 9 percent white."
The comments board lit up:
"White? Oh my gosh, she's being judged by the color of her skin, and not based on character? Maybe this is what you Black and Hispanic people should know: RACE has no bearing on her qualifications. I'm sick of the race card."
Another reader wrote: "You mean Chicago has become so bad that black people only must fill positions previously filled by black people. That is racism! Come on, if someone said only white people can be governor of Illinois there would be protest marches in Springfield, and the media would be jumping up and down yelling racism."
And so on and so on.
I agree the position shouldn't be a black entitlement -- nor should it be a Latino entitlement, though 41 percent of CPS students are Hispanic. Every CPS student is entitled to the most qualified person for the job, regardless of political viability, personal relationships or skin color.
As it happens, diversity hiring has been at the top of my mind lately. When President Obama chose Elena Kagan as his Supreme Court pick, she was criticized for her racial hiring record at Harvard. As Boyce Watkins, a prominent African-American scholar, put it: "Kagan did not hire a single African American tenured or tenure-track faculty member. This says, very clearly, that Elena Kagan doesn't care about black people, at least when they are applying to be professors. . . . With all the applications that poured in every year from top black attorneys, she didn't feel that one single black, Latino or Native American scholar was qualified to teach at Harvard university?"
I have discussed both of these news items -- the Caron story and the Kagan story -- with a wide variety of people, and their reactions have been passionate. Dividing into two camps, some insisted that hiring of any kind should be a strictly merit-based, color-blind affair, while others insisted that strong measures must be taken to get people of color fully integrated into every workplace at every level.
Because I agree with both camps, I blew in a call to Gloria Castillo, president of Chicago United, a group that promotes equal access to professional opportunities, to help me square these seemingly opposing views.
"Yes, there has to be a commitment to accessing great talent, and there has to be a commitment to casting a wider net in order to find it," Castillo told me. "For doubters, I'd say do the research. Read Scott Page to learn how diversity of all kinds leads to more positive outcomes."
Page is the author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies.
And that, it seems, really is the best way to reconcile the two camps: Go the extra mile to find the very best applicants, including minority ones, for any position, and then be truly color-blind in making the final decision.
That won't necessarily diversify an organization as quickly as anyone would like, but it is the best way to ensure that diversity is equitably practiced in every workplace. And it does so in a way that no one feels discriminated against, unfairly assisted or disadvantaged or a victim to ethnic or racial entitlements.
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