This is exciting:
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 study has not yet undergone peer review, and two academics who read it on Thursday said they would be interested to see if other researchers would be able to replicate its results.
It seems hard to believe, but all studies that reveal stereotype threat seem hard to believe, and yet there they are. This kind of thing is why I get so frustrated with social niceties like “I won’t vote for Hillary just because she is a woman” or “I would never vote for a man because of the color of his skin.” Well, why not? “Serious” voters focus on policy and ignore symbolism. But assuming the findings are valid, what educational policy works this well?
Symbolism was always the best thing Obama had going for him from a libertarian standpoint (alongside the paucity of the opposition). But we underestimate how powerful it is. This and something I saw via Obsidian Wings http://hellobeautiful.blackplanet.com/your-man/his-presidents-black are my data points for the day.
I have a feeling this “study” is bullshit—there’s nothing white America loves more than an excuse to assuage its guilt, and Obama provides an opportunity for them to do this on a mass scale.
In this sense he’s more dangerous than Bush every was; so what if the policies of “rendition” (extra-judicial torture) and “the war on terror” (imperialism) continue? “We” (the illusion of democracy) elected a Black man as President; we must be a progressive and enlightened society, very different than how we were a hundred years before!
Oh that’s terrible. You are not allowed to draw a conclusion that something has changed based on a test statistic being insignificant. Here is what’s happening. In ital is some rephrasing to make it clearer.
“”"
In total, 472 Americans — 84 blacks and 388 whites — took the exam … On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered significantly better than blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, >… black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant” .
“”"
The study uses very few black test takers so gets a lot of error in the estimate of that mean. Note that no claim is made in the NYT that there was a significant improvement in scores for black test takers. Sheesh. Maybe the full article is good, but I doubt it.