Groves v. Alabama State Bd. of Educ.

• Citation: 776 F. Supp. 1518
• Decision Date: 03 October 1991
• Docket Number: Civ. A. No. 88-T-730-N.
• Parties: Gregory GROVES, et al., Plaintiffs, v. ALABAMA STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION, et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Middle District of Alabama

776 F. Supp. 1518

Gregory GROVES, et al., Plaintiffs, v. ALABAMA STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION, et al., Defendants.

Civ. A. No. 88-T-730-N.

United States District Court, M.D. Alabama, N.D.

October 3, 1991.

Terry G. Davis, Montgomery, Ala., Gregory B. Stein, Mobile, Ala., Donald Watkins, Montgomery, Ala., for plaintiffs.

David Boyd, Balch & Bingham and Richard Meadows, Denise Azar, Office of Gen. Counsel, State Dept. of Educ., Montgomery, Ala., for defendants.

MEMORANDUM OPINION

MYRON H. THOMPSON, Chief Judge.

With this litigation, the court has had to venture again into the often complex and controversial area of teacher testing. Plaintiffs Gregory Groves, Floretta L. Coley, and Arnita Holder brought this civilrights action in 1988, challenging the requirement imposed by defendant Alabama State Board of Education that college sophomores seeking admission to undergraduate teacher training programs in Alabama have achieved a minimum score of 16 on the American College Testing Program's ACT exam or a 17 on the new, "enhanced" ACT exam.¹ Plaintiffs charge that the ACT requirement discriminates against them and other African-Americans on the basis of their race, in violation of their rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, 42 U.S.C.A. §§ 2000d through 2000d-4a. They assert both "disparate-treatment" and "disparate-impact" claims, and they seek declaratory and injunctive relief against further enforcement of the ACT requirement. The case was tried before the court in April 1991, with each side presenting extensive documentary evidence and expert testimony. For the reasons explained below, the court concludes that the plaintiffs should prevail on their disparate-impact claim and are thus entitled to the requested relief.²

I. BACKGROUND

Beginning in the late 1960's, public attention in Alabama increasingly focused on what was perceived to be widespread incompetence among school teachers in the state. Then as now, such teachers were the product of training programs offered by institutions of higher learning in Alabama. Much of the popular criticism was directed at the State Board; however, the Board exercised relatively little control over the process of admission to teacher-training programs, to which college students ordinarily applied at the end of their sophomore year, or the content of such programs, and generally granted certification to all successful teacher-training graduates on the recommendation of their respective colleges. However, reacting to public concerns, the State Board signalled its intention to alter this system in a 1972 resolution containing a number of recommendations for improving teacher certification and preparation, including the establishment of certain minimum standards for admission to teacher-education programs.

In the wake of this resolution, the State Board in 1975 created a special committee to study teacher education and propose specific reforms to improve the quality of training programs and the competence of their graduates. The "Poole Committee," named after its chairperson and board member Victor Poole, contained representatives from various areas of public education in Alabama. Although the committee adopted a requirement that students seeking acceptance into teacher-training courses attain a certain minimum grade-point average in their first two years of college, most of the members agreed that this alone would not be sufficient to improve the quality of students entering such programs; the State Board did not oversee grading practices, and the committee shared a perception held by much of the public that certain institutions awarded passing marks to students regardless of ability or achievement. Accordingly, the committee settled on the idea of also requiring a particular level of performance on a standardized exam as a prerequisite to entering teacher education. The purpose of such a requirement would be to screen out persons unlikely to become adequately capable teachers.³ Without significant deliberation or dissent, the committee settled on the ACT exam.

The ACT exam is intended and widely used as one of several components in assessing the academic abilities of high school students applying for admission to college. Students ordinarily sit for the exam during their junior year of high school.⁴ The exam's value lies in its ability to predict, albeit at best moderately, a student's first-year college grade-point average.⁵ However, the ACT test is not designed to be used as an absolute criterion to select students for specialized under-graduate courses, let alone to gauge whether a student possesses the skills necessary to become a competent teacher, the diagnostic purpose for which the exam was adopted by the Poole Committee.⁶ Nevertheless, the Poole Committee chose to include a minimum score on the ACT exam as a prerequisite to admission to a teacher training program, ostensibly because it was a readily available, nationally standardized test that already was routinely taken by most college-bound high school students in Alabama. The committee engaged in little discussion and no study, independent or otherwise, of the usefulness of the ACT exam in predicting teaching ability.

Sometime in late 1975, after the committee had completed the remainder of its work and settled on a set of reforms to recommend to the State Board, several of its members turned their attention to deciding on a "cut-off score" — the minimum score that students would have to attain on the ACT exam in order to be eligible for teacher-education courses. During one of the committee's final meetings, Poole ordered the half dozen or so members of the "steering committee" to meet by themselves and not to return to the main committee room until they had agreed on a specific cut-off score. Although the steering committee had collected data on the median ACT scores of Alabama students, broken down along lines such as college, race, and area of academic concentration, it had made no efforts whatsoever to obtain information on the issue of whether and to what extent any particular score or range of scores on the ACT correlated with competence to teach. Moreover, the members were aware of data demonstrating a wide gap between the median scores of black and white students on the ACT exam, and of the fact that anything more than a minimal cut-off score would exclude a significant, disproportionate number of African-Americans from teacher training.⁷ Nevertheless, after a meeting that lasted no more than 20 or 30 minutes, the steering committee decided to recommend that a minimum score of 16 on the ACT exam be included as a prerequisite to entrance into teacher education. This score represented the "39th percentile" of Alabama high school students who took the ACT the previous year — in other words, 39% of such students scored at or below this level.⁸ The members arrived at this figure as a rough compromise between the need, on the one hand, to avoid establishing a standard so stringent that it would prevent such programs from turning out enough graduates to satisfy the demand for new teachers and, on the other hand, their desire for a proposal that the State Board and educators could "sell" to the public as a reform aimed at guaranteeing well-qualified teachers. One member's comments capture perfectly the way in which this attention to public relations guided the meeting and the steering committee's adoption of a minimum ACT score of 16:

So we went in that little room there, and we looked at one another, and we knew we were playing with fire. We had all these pressures.... You knew you were putting both feet, both hands, in the middle of a philosophic war, a media war, a racial war ...

Finally somebody said, well, what can we take to the people? At that point we forgot the university. We forgot everybody.... What kind of argument we can make that the people gon buy? And some soul in there said, well could we make the argument that the teachers ought to be smarter than half the students. And we looked around. We said, them old boys down there in Letohatchee will buy that. Everybody will buy it. We were all Alabamians. We all good old boys.

We said, we can sell that. Folks in Lowndes County will buy it. Folks up in Wilburn will buy it. Even sophisticates up there in them Birmingham Newspapers, that'll make sense that the teacher ought to be as smart as at least half the students she's teaching.

So one of the steering committee members was commissioned to go to his office and find out what the average ACT was for graduates, came back and said, I believe it's 16.4. So our big decision was whether to go to 17 or 16. And the only argument I think I recall them arguing for 16. Then we could go back out and say, looka here. Of course, this is also a fallacious argument because the student — the teacher never is as smart as half the students.... But that was the scientific basis of it gentlemen and lady. It was just that scientific.

The full committee accepted the propsal of a cut-off score of 16 without debate. The State Board, in turn, passed a resolution in March 1977 adopting the admissions criteria recommended by the committee, including the requirement of a score of 16 or higher on the ACT exam. The resolution allowed students to satisfy the ACT requirement by taking the exam at any time — or, if necessary, multiple times — within five years of submitting an application to a teacher-training program. However, as most students take the ACT in their junior year in high school, the requirement, in practical terms, has operated on the assumption that scores on the test are capable of predicting the skills a teacher-hopeful will possess five or six years in the future, when he or she graduates from college.

In addition to the ACT requirement, the resolution adopted other prerequisites including a minimum grade-point average of at least 1.2 on a three-point scale on work completed...