Category Archive

Last night I wrote a short piece on the White Rose, a small group of young Germans who organized against the Nazis during the Second World War. Three White Rose leaders — Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst — were discovered leafleting at the University of Munich in mid-February 1943, and tried and executed sixty-eight years ago yesterday, four days after their arrest.

I’ve been thinking about the White Rose a lot recently as I watch young people throughout the Arab world rise up at great risk to themselves to stand non-violently against the governments that have been holding them and their families down. I’ve been thinking about the power of that kind of witness, that kind of organizing, and its fragility. Thinking about the calculus that says “maybe you will decide that there is greater risk to you in killing me than to let me live, or maybe the young people you send to kill me will refuse, or maybe you will kill me and that itself will topple you.”

Because it is a calculus, right? People don’t generally take to the streets of such dictatorships out of pure despair, or pure rage, because when they do they are picked off one by one and disappear without notice. When people set out to stand against such a government they plan, they organize, they weigh the tools they have at their disposal and how to deploy them to be most effective against their targets and most effective in providing protection to themselves.

Which is why I found Malcolm Gladwell’s sniffy dismissal of those tools of communication so infuriating. “Surely the least interesting fact about” the protests in Egypt, he wrote right before Mubarak’s fall, “is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.”

Yes, they did. And many more protested and failed to bring down governments. They failed and they died. And many, like Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst (and their friends and comrades Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, and Hans Leipelt) died precisely because the tools for communication they had at their disposal were tools that put them at incredibly high risk of discovery and betrayal.

Now, the last thing I want to do here is start getting into counter-factuals like “what would have happened if the White Rose had had access to Facebook?” That’s just silliness. It doesn’t do anyone any good.

But Sophie Scholl was twenty-one when she died in 1943, which means that if the Nazis hadn’t beheaded her sixty-eight years (and one day) ago, she’d be eighty-nine now. I’ve known eighty-nine-year-olds who were sharp and active and engaged with the world.

And that, for me, brings up a question that I don’t consider silly. Would Sophie Scholl agree with Malcolm Gladwell that “how … people with a grievance communicate with each other” is “less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place”?

That seems unlikely.

People who stand up against oppressive regimes don’t always win. Often — most of the time — they lose. And, as we have seen in Egypt and Algeria in recent weeks, when they do win one of the ways they win is by finding ways to communicate with each other and with possible converts.

This basic project was a central pre-occupation of the White Rose. They wanted to get the word out. They wanted to share what they knew. They wanted to let allies and potential allies know that they weren’t alone. And so they scrambled to get access to printing facilities, they mailed their leaflets to random addresses, they scrawled slogans on walls with tar and paint. And — in the act that led seven of them to their deaths — they climbed to the top of an atrium at the University of Munich and scattered papers to the floor below.

Why Hans and Sophie Scholl turned against the Nazis is still only imperfectly understood. Their father was an anti-fascist who was jailed earlier in the war for speaking out against Hitler. As a teenager, Hans appears to have been persecuted by the Nazis for a sexual relationship with a male friend. Many members of the White Rose were radicalized against the Nazis by their experiences of military service.

All of these issues — the “why” of Gladwell’s formulation — are to my mind fascinating and worthy of study. But is the “how” really any less intriguing, any less riveting, any less important? It’s the “how,” after all, for which the White Rose is now known. It’s the “how” that we honor today.

It’s the “how” that made them heroes.

I’m having a busy day today, so I haven’t had time to post before now, but it happens to be the 68th anniversary of the execution of Christoph Probst and Hans and Sophie Scholl, leaders of the White Rose resistance in Nazi Germany, and I didn’t want to let that pass without mention.

“Resistance” is perhaps too big a word here. Hans and Sophie were twenty-four and twenty-one when they died, and Probst was twenty-three. None of them ever got any further than printing up and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets and painting a few slogans on walls.

In the summer of 1942 the White Rose began writing anti-Nazi essays and distributing them anonymously any way they could. On February 18, 1943, the Scholls and Probst dropped stacks of leaflets in the corridors of the University of Munich for students to find when they left their classes. Impulsively, they decided to fling the last few in their possession from the top floor of the university’s atrium. They were observed in that act by a janitor who turned them in to the Gestapo.

Four days later the three were tried. Found guilty, they were sentenced to death and beheaded that same day.

I’ve been thinking about the White Rose a lot recently, in the context of the recent youth uprisings in the Arab world. The Scholls, Probst, and their friends and allies were young people willing to risk death to attempt to bring freedom to their country.

More about this tomorrow.

Update | I’ve posted part two of this essay here.

“I read once, passingly, about a man named Shakespeare. I only read about him passingly, but I remember one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it in the mouth of Hamlet, I think, it was, who said, ‘To be or not to be.’ He was in doubt about something — whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune — moderation — or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. And I go for that. If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone — I don’t care what color you are — as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”

–Malcolm X, speaking at Oxford University on December 3, 1964. Malcolm was killed just eighty days later; 46 years ago today.

As I posted yesterday, the tweets going around comparing Wisconsin’s SAT/ACT scores to five states where teachers have no right to unionize are based on bad data — it’s not true that Wisconsin’s SAT/ACT ranking is second in the nation, and that Texas, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina are all clustered at the bottom of the pile. The chart that says otherwise is based on outdated statistics and improper statistical analysis.

So what’s the truth? What would good data tell us about this question?

Well, it turns out that that’s kind of a complicated question. I can answer it, but you’ll have to bear with me for more than 140 characters.

It’s hard to measure SAT/ACT performance, because different numbers of students take the tests in every state, and comparing the strongest students from one state with a much bigger sample from another doesn’t tell us much that’s interesting. A 2000 study in the Harvard Educational Review, in fact, found that 85% of the difference in states’ performance on those tests is due to variation in participation rates.

Having said that, though, it’s clear from the numbers in my last post that once you’ve controlled for participation Wisconsin remains near the top of the country on SAT/ACT scores, Virginia is near the middle, and the rest of the no-union states from the tweet are near the bottom. High school graduation rates — the subject of another popular Wisconsin tweet meme in recent days — tell a similar story. It’s not as dramatic as best vs. worst, but it’s still dramatic.

Wisconsin does well on a third measure of student performance, too. Its scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2009 were above the national average in three of four measures (fourth grade math and eighth grade math and reading) and at the national average in the other (fourth grade reading). Of the ten states in the US without teachers’ unions, only one — Virginia — had NAEP results above the national average, and four — Arizona, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi — were in the bottom quintile. (One scholar, in fact, found that the states with the strongest teachers unions tended to out-perform states with weaker unions too.)

But there’s another problem. Most of the states that don’t have teachers’ unions are poorer than Wisconsin, and have more English Language Learners in their schools, and rank higher for other demographic factors that make strong academic performance less likely. Rich kids in a school with a teacher’s union will do better than poor kids in a school without one, generally, but that doesn’t have much to do with the union itself. States with teachers’ unions do better, on average, than states without, but is this because of the unions, or state demographics?

There’s only been one scholarly effort to tackle this problem that I’m aware of. Back in 2000, three professors writing in the Harvard Educational Review did a statistical analysis of state SAT/ACT scores, controlling for factors like race, median income, and parental education. They found that the presence of teachers unions in a state did have a measurable and significant correlation with increased test scores — that going to school in a union state would, for instance, raise average SATs by about 50 points.

Two other findings leap out from the Harvard Educational Review study. First, they concluded that Southern states’ poor academic performance could be explained almost entirely by that region’s lack of unionization, even when you didn’t take socioeconomic differences into account.

And second, and to my mind far more interesting, they found that concrete improvements in the educational environment associated with teachers’ unions — lower class sizes, higher state spending on education, bigger teacher salaries — accounted for very little of the union/non-union variation. Teachers’ unions, in other words, don’t just help students by reducing class sizes or increasing educational spending. In their conclusion, they stated that

“other mechanism(s) (ie, better working conditions; greater worker autonomy, security, and dignity; improved administration; better training of teachers; greater levels of faculty professionalism) must be at work here.”

To sum up:

Yes, Wisconsin has great schools, with great outcomes. Yes, states without teachers’ unions lag behind. Yes, that lag persists even when you control for demographic variables. Yes, that difference seems to rest less on the quantifiable resources that unions fight to bring to the classroom than on the professionalism, positive working environment, and effective school administration that unions foster.

And yes, Virginia, (and Texas, Georgia, and North and South Carolina) unions do work.

Update | Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Blog has a new post up reviewing the state of scholarship on the relationship between teacher unionization and student performance, looking at (and linking to) several articles I missed. Di Carlo leans a little more heavily on an “on the one hand/on the other hand” approach than I would, but it’s definitely a worthwhile read for both his data and his analysis.

Update | Be sure to read this post on the truth behind the numbers — how teachers’ unions do improve student performance, and why. Seriously. Read it. If you don’t, you’re only getting half the story.

Also, if you’d like to follow me on Twitter or Facebook, feel free.

There’s a tweet circulating widely that says that Wisconsin ranks second in the nation in its students’ SAT/ACT scores, while five states that bar teachers from participating in collective bargaining all rank near the bottom of the pile. Here are a few examples:

@WisDems Only 5 states don’t have collective bargaining for educators. Their ACT/SAT rankings: SC-50th/NC-49th/GA-48th/TX-47th/VA-44th.

@PTraeder: 5 states have no collective bargaining & deemed it illegal. States & Their ranking on ACT/SAT scores: VA-44 TX-47 GA-48 NC-49 SC-50 #wiunion

@trek: 5 states forbid collective bargaining for educators: SC, NC, GA, TX, & VA. Their national rank in ACT scores: 50th, 49th, 48th, 47th, 44th.

The information presented here on which states bar collective bargaining in education is correct (although it only reflects the five states where teachers’ unions are illegal, leaving out the other five states where they’re legal but essentially don’t exist). What it doesn’t include, however, is any supporting documentation on the SAT and ACT rankings themselves.

So I’ve taken a look at the data.

State scores on the SAT and ACT are hard to compare directly, because there’s so much variation in how many students take the tests. In addition, I haven’t yet found a source that combines SAT and ACT scores into a composite ranking like the one in the tweet. Looking at charts for SAT and ACT results separately, however, here’s what I found:

Wisconsin ranks 3rd in the nation in SAT scores, but with a participation rate of just 4%. On the ACT, with a much more representative partcipation rate of 69%, it was tied for 17th. In comparison…

• Virginia was 34th on the SAT with 67% participation, 13th on the ACT with 22% participation.
• Texas was 45th on the SAT with 53% participation, 33rd on the ACT with 33% participation.
• Georgia was 48th on the SAT with 74% participation, 34th on the ACT with 44% participation.
• North Carolina was 38th on the SAT with 63% participation, 20th on the ACT with 16% participation.
• South Carolina was 49th on the SAT with 66% participation, 44th on the ACT with 52% participation.

Wisconsin is clearly above the other five states in both SAT and ACT scores, but the gap isn’t anywhere near as big as the pro-union tweets suggest. Among high ACT participation states, Wisconsin ranks something like 4th in the nation. But among high SAT participation states, Virginia ranks about 5th in the nation — almost all the states with better SAT scores than Virginia have far smaller participation rates, drawing on a far more elite test-taking group.

I’m open to seeing new data on this, but for now I’m going to mark this claim down as highly exaggerated.

Update | Several readers have posted links to the original source for the tweeted claim, which can be found here. Thanks!

Now, about that source. First, it’s from an analysis conducted in 1999, apparently by a University of Missouri law professor named Douglas O. Linder. Linder doesn’t say specifically what year the SAT/ACT numbers come from, but they’re obviously more than a decade old.

Second, the ranking methodology is really weird, and completely unreliable. What the author did was take each state’s ranking on the SAT, add it to each state’s ranking on the ACT, add those two numbers together, and then put them in order. In other words, Wisconsin scored 5th in the country on the SATs and 4th in the country on the ACTs, giving it a total of 9, and only Iowa had a lower total, so Wisconsin was 2nd in the country overall.

This is just silly. As I noted above, almost nobody in Wisconsin takes the SATs — the state has only a 4% participation rate on that test, with the only students taking it being those who are applying to competitive out-of-state colleges that don’t accept the ACTs. When you compare Wisconsin’s SAT average to Georgia’s, you’re comparing the performance of a tiny elite in one state with that of 74% of the graduating class of the other. And on top of that, this chart gives Wisconsin’s SAT score equal weight with its ACT score in determining which state is “better.”

It’s nonsense. It’s meaningless.

Second Update | The scores don’t seem to match the data, either. Linder gives Wisconsin’s average combined Math and Verbal SAT score as 1073, but Wisconsin’s average SAT scores in the late 1990s ranged from 1169 in 1996-97 to 1181 in 1999-2000. Something’s screwy with Linder’s numbers.

Third Update | As I said at the top of the post, I’ve put up a new essay this morning discussing exactly how teachers’ unions do improve student performance, and why. If you’ve read this far, you really should keep reading.