The Obama Effect Raises Test Scores

In conversations with friends, I've been saying that the moment President Barack Obama took the Oath of Office last Tuesday, everything changed. I mean it in the sense that a new optimism and sense of pride now has a chance to take hold. I am hoping that President Obama makes it "cool" to excel in the classroom. I am hoping young people teased for "talking white" will find strength in our new President's skilled oratory and understand that mastering standard American English is the thing to do. So many barriers are purely psychological and maybe, just maybe there is good news already. According to the New York Times:

Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama's nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results. Source

I previously wrote about the measurable, positive impact that affirmations have on black student test performance. It is not surprising that our accomplished first husband and first wife are just the kinds of role models some kids need to break free of whatever self-limiting racial beliefs they carry:

"It's a very small sample, but certainly a provocative study," said Ronald F. Ferguson, a Harvard professor who studies the factors that have affected the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students, which shows up on nearly every standardized test. "There is a certainly a theoretical foundation and some empirical support for the proposition that Obama's election could increase the sense of competence among African-Americans, and it could reduce the anxiety associated with taking difficult test questions."

Researchers in the last decade assembled university students with identical SAT scores and administered tests to them, discovering that blacks performed significantly poorer when asked at the start to fill out a form identifying themselves by race. The researchers attributed those results to anxiety that caused them to tighten up during exams in which they risked confirming a racial stereotype. Source

It's just too soon to say what the 'Obama effect' will mean for test scores in the long term. I have hope that it's going to be all good.

Are your kids inspired by our new President?