In October 2024, the Biden Department of Justice forced the Maryland State Police to pay $2.75 million in back pay to Black and female applicants who had failed its entrance exams. The written test covered math, reading comprehension, grammar, and report writing. The physical fitness exam required 18 push-ups, 27 sit-ups, and a 1.5-mile run in under 15 minutes and 20 seconds. Candidates got three attempts. About 91 percent of white applicants passed the written test; 71 percent of Black applicants did. About 81 percent of men cleared the fitness test; about 51 percent of women did. The DOJ's conclusion? Discrimination. The tests were, in the government's framing, "not job-related." Because apparently, reading, writing, and running after a suspect have no bearing on police work.
That's disparate impact — the legal doctrine holding that a neutral policy becomes unlawful if different demographic groups pass it at different rates, regardless of intent. Nobody has to be a bigot. Nobody has to do anything wrong. The only thing that matters is the outcome distribution. If the numbers don't match the preferred demographic breakdown, someone pays.
The doctrine traces to Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971). That ruling was defensible — Duke Power required diplomas and IQ scores to keep Black workers in lower-paying jobs, and the Supreme Court rightly struck it down. Congress codified the framework in 1991. But somewhere between then and now, a legitimate corrective became a standing presumption that any statistical gap is proof of wrongdoing.
Maryland wasn't isolated. The same Biden DOJ filed similar suits against fire departments in Durham, North Carolina, and Cobb County, Georgia, and the South Bend police department — all on the identical theory. Nobody explained which questions were biased. The statistics were enough.
The same logic ran up a $1.8 billion tab in education. New York City settled a lawsuit brought by 5,200 teacher candidates who failed a standard certification exam, awarding some over $1 million each. Plaintiff Herman Grim told the New York Post he failed "a lot" and couldn't name a single racist question. The gap was the proof.
The impulse runs deeper than the last decade. In 1996, the Oakland school board declared Ebonics a genetically distinct language and directed teachers to instruct Black students in it — drawing opposition from Jesse Jackson, Maya Angelou, and the Clinton White House alike. The question it posed never went away: if standard English is cultural exclusion, why require anyone to master it?
Meet Aleysha Ortiz. She's 19 years old, from Hartford, Connecticut. She graduated from Hartford Public High School with honors. She enrolled at UConn. And by her own testimony before the Hartford City Council in May 2024, she cannot read or write. She has since sued the Hartford Board of Education and the City of Hartford for negligence, seeking $3 million in damages. Her attorney called it one of the most "egregious" cases in 24 years of special education law. Ortiz told CNN she alerted teachers to her situation every first day of school for years. She was passed along anyway. Graduated with honors anyway. That's not a failure of funding or resources. That's a system that decided showing up was good enough and promoted her out the door because failing her would have looked bad on someone's spreadsheet. She wants to be a teacher someday. She'll have to learn to read first.
The same thinking has reached medicine. At UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, more than half of some cohorts were failing shelf exams in emergency medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics — roughly 10 times the national average. A federal civil rights investigation opened in March 2025. The USMLE Step One exam was converted to pass/fail in 2022 partly because Black students' average scores ran a full standard deviation below the national mean. When the gap won't close, change the measurement. Patients be damned.
I spent three years at UCLA Medical Center in the early 1990s in the Pediatric and Orthopedic wards. The doctors there trained where the margin for error was zero. A patient either got better or didn't. Would you rather have a doctor who looks like you or one who can actually diagnose you? That's not a rhetorical question anymore.
On April 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14281 directing agencies to eliminate disparate impact enforcement. It can't override statute or precedent — private plaintiffs can still sue. But after three decades of trooper settlements and billion-dollar teacher payouts, the directional signal is overdue.
Real meritocracy isn't the enemy of civil rights — it's the condition under which civil rights mean anything at all. The promise of equal opportunity is that performance determines outcomes, not ancestry or demographic category. When we tell a Black applicant that the math test is racist, we're not defending his dignity. We're telling him we don't think he can pass it. George W. Bush called this "the soft bigotry of low expectations." The phrase drew eyerolls in 2000. Twenty-five years later, it's a $1.8 billion consent decree.
The answer isn't to abolish standards — it's to build the pipeline that prepares people to meet them. California eliminated dedicated GATE gifted program funding in 2013. Thomas Sowell explained the failure mode decades ago: preferential placement puts students in programs they're not ready for, producing the very failure rates it was supposed to prevent. You don't raise the floor by lowering the ceiling.
A police force that can't pass a reading comprehension exam won't serve its community better because the demographic numbers look right on a spreadsheet. A doctor who can't pass shelf exams in pediatrics won't provide better care because the admissions committee hit its targets. A student who graduates without learning to read has been cheated — not helped. Standards exist because real things are at stake: public safety, lives on a table, kids in a classroom who deserve a teacher who actually knows how to teach. That's the part of this debate that keeps getting buried under legal theory.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.