Yearly Archives: 2009

Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama’s example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance.

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.

SAM DILLON, Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers. January 22, 2009

I think this study might be some of the best news coming out of the new administration yet. We will have to see if the “Obama-effect” can be reproduced in other studies, of course. It almost sounds too good to be true. But it’s a part of an entire series of small, undramatic changes that might just add up to a very dramatic shift in higher education.

We could have a Secretary of Labor that thinks about working people, and a National Labor Relations Board that isn’t trying to stop graduate students from organizing. “Obama will not fix academic labor’s problems from above,” Marc Bousquet writes, “but he will ensure that labor has the chance to exercise workplace rights.”

What’s really good for education is that we have a president who looks and sounds like someone who reads and writes. The Bush debacle did all sorts of harm, but it might have does the most damage in its brash disregard for learning. Bush seemed to like epitomizing a kind of “ugly student” not like the “ugly American.” I won’t miss that frat-boy con artist.

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community’s top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call — including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG — were urged to persuade their clients to send “large contributions” to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.

Bailout Recipients Hosted Call To Defeat Key Labor Bill

Anyone who thinks about politics and economic and political systems has a problem with conspiracies. Capital, for example, almost always fights efforts to create independent labor organizing. Do the powerful industrialists gather once a year to plan out their anti-union strategies? Apparently, sometimes they do.

Aside from scratching that conspiratorial itch the recordings in the article give us a good feel for what might be called the collective unconscious of capital, that profound, almost instinctive anxiety, if not hatred, for any power that might oppose them. Marcus honestly seems to believe that making organizing campaigns easier signals “the end of civilization” as we know it.

Meanwhile, Obama has begun to unwind the twisted knot of anti-labor regulations put in place by the Bush administration, starting with a series of executive orders and a new law that would help women sue for equal pay. And there is some evidence, from workers in the oil industry, that people are beginning to remember they can fight back.

I don’t know the details of the oil strike well enough to decide if I feel that they did the right thing by agreeing not to strike. I hope, though, that they will not let the oil corporations use the threat of the recession against them. In a crisis all sorts of things that once seemed solid can begin to shift. Pushing back now makes a lot of sense.