January 26, 2009--The Obama Effect?

During the campaign I speculated about something I called the Obama Effect--a potential electoral phenomenon that I thought might prove to be the opposite of the so-called Bradley Effect: that rather than some white voters telling pollsters that they were planning to vote for Obama but then when in the privacy of the voting booth voting for McCain, this time around it was possible that a significant number of white voters would tell those polling them that they were going to vote for McCain but then, when alone with their ballots, they would vote for the black candidate, Obama.

Post-election analysis indicated that this turned out to be true--a significant percent of white voters reluctant to tell their drinking buddies that were going to pull the lever for a black guy actually did. So in Pennsylvania, for example, Obama won the state by about 11 percentage points whereas the last polls before Election Day had him with only a three to four point lead.

But we may be on the cusp of seeing an even more interesting and profound Obama Effect. As reported last week in the New York Times (article linked below), when testing a representative sample of 472 18-63 year-old black and white students before and after the election on a series of questions taken from the Graduate Record Exam, researchers found that whereas there was a significant gap in the number of questions students blacks and whites got right, after Obama’s election victory, when tested again, that gap had virtually disappeared.

Initially, whites on average got 12 of the 20 answers right while blacks answered only 8.5 correctly. When last tested the gap was “statistically nonsignificant.”

The questions chosen were designed to assess reading comprehension, the ability to handle analogies, and sentence completion. The tests took place at four distinct points over three months during the campaign: in the words of the researchers from Vanderbilt and San Diego State Universities, “two [times] when Obama’s success was less prominent (prior to his acceptance of the nomination and the mid-point between the convention and Election Day) and two [other times] when [he] garnered the most attention (immediately after his nomination speech and his win of the presidency in November).”

Again to quote, “The nationwide testing sample of 84 black Americans and 388 white Americans--a proportion equivalent to [their] representation in the overall population—[were] matched for age and education level. [The results] revealed that white participants scored higher than their black peers at the two points in the campaign where Obama’s achievements were least visible. However, during the height of the Obama media frenzy, the performance gap between black and white Americans was effectively eliminated.” In addition, the researchers noted that black Americans who did not watch Obama’s nomination acceptance speech continued to lag behind their white peers, while those who did view the speech successfully closed the gap.

To verify these remarkable and hopeful results more testing and analysis obviously needs to occur, but these data support what many on-the-ground public school educators have anecdotally been reporting since Obama rose to public prominence—that African-American youngsters, especially boys who lag even further behind than girls, are saying that they want to be like Obama and to do so means doing well in school.

It would be beyond the possible to conclude that the very fact of Obama’s becoming president would solve one of our most frustrating and daunting educational problems—the thus-far persistent achievement gap between blacks and whites—but these early indications of change, which in truth are as much cultural and psychological as they are academic, are very promising.

And make sense—if children feel that because of their color their chances for success have been limited, why even bother to aspire, why try to succeed if the odds are stacked against you. Of course many, including Barack Obama, refuse to count themselves out or limit their dreams; but sadly all evidence indicates that many do give up before even trying.

With Obama as a living example of what’s possible, it feels certain that this will go a long way to inspire young people so long as we also do all that we know needs to be done to meet and satisfy these rising expectations. This then desperately means making the appropriate national effort to improve the quality of our public educational system.