Obama Effect at school: Black parents volunteer, expect more - USATODAY.com: ...In the new findings, African-American parents of children in K-12 schools say they're much more likely to volunteer in a classroom this fall, in effect narrowing a volunteering gap.
The survey, being released today by GreatSchools, a San Francisco non-profit that promotes parental involvement, finds a jump of 37 percentage points in the portion of African-American parents who say they'll volunteer in their child's school — 60% vs. 23% a year ago.
In the same period, the percentage of white parents who plan to volunteer rose six points, from 47% to 53%.
"Clearly, this data is showing that the parent in chief, President Obama, is having an impact on parents' thinking, especially African-American parents' thinking," GreatSchools CEO Bill Jackson says. He notes that in several speeches, Obama has urged parents to turn off the TV, read to their children and attend parent-teacher conferences.
"That jump that we're seeing … is clearly a response to that," he says.
The Internet survey of 1,086 parents has a sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. For the African-American group, the sampling error is much larger — 12.7 percentage points — but the new findings are outside the sampling error.
