Reading the ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Kaplan Higher Education, it becomes obvious early on which side scored the win. “In this case,” reads the court’s first sentence, “the EEOC sued the defendants for using the same type of background check that the EEOC itself uses.”
The April 9 summary judgment in favor of Kaplan, the education company perhaps best known for providing standardized test preparation, asserted that not only did the commission lack the evidence that Kaplan practiced racial discrimination in its hiring process, but that the commission uses comparable credit checks in its own employment practices. The case is another setback for the commission, which recently had a big discrimination case loss in EEOC v. Sterling Jewelers.
