(MintPress)— “In America, education is the great equalizer. And in our urban high schools, competitive debate is one of the great equalizers of educational opportunity. Urban debate leagues help ensure that teens in the inner-city get the same exposure to academic rigor as teens in wealthy suburban schools—where competitive debate teams have long been a fixture,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last month at a meeting of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues.
In the wake of failing test scores and more students of color falling farther and farther behind their white peers, a group of advocates across the U.S. is battling the problem and seeking to close the achievement gap in a unique way: by enlisting more inner city youth in debate programs. But some programs, like the one in Chicago, potentially face steep budget cuts, despite studies proving that debate programs have an enormous capability to inspire student success.
The scene in Chicago
“It’s not always the high achievers that do debate – or do well in debate,” said Edith Canter, Executive Director of the Chicago Debate Commission, a nonprofit group which aims to “empower the voice of urban youth” through participation in debate programs, in an interview with MintPress.
Canter says that many debate programs across the nation are facing potential budget cuts.
“Debate really addresses the problems that urban school districts are struggling with,” Canter says, “at whatever level students start, debate has proven a positive impact on academic results across the board,” she said.
Canter says in Chicago and other cities across the country, debate programs are proving to be instrumental in providing students with skills, but despite research which concretely points to this, programs, like Canter’s, are facing funding problems.
“Chicago public schools have a terrible graduation rate,” Canter points out. She said only 57 percent of students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) graduate, compared to 93 percent of students who participate in debate programs. And, 77 percent of students who participated in a debate program went on to a four year college, versus 20 percent of their counterparts who did not.
Canter’s group partners with public schools to provide materials, train coaches and run tournaments. It also does fundraising for school programs.
“Our program has had a strong 15-year partnership with the Chicago Public Schools. In recent years, private funding of debate through the Chicago Debate Commission has supplemented CPS’s financial commitment, allowing significantly more kids to get the great academic benefits of debate. We hope that CPS will be able to continue its financial commitment to debate despite tough budgetary times,” said Canter.
Reductions in state education funding have squeezed many non-essential school programs across the country, and many districts are opting to cut extracurricular activities, like debate. Still, some say that programs like debate play an important role in helping students to succeed.
The case for debate programs
Historically, students of color living in urban areas have underperformed their white suburban counterparts in scholastic achievement in the U.S.
A spokesperson for the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues (NAUDL) told MintPress in an interview that debate is a key factor in increasing college readiness, according to emerging research.
NAUDL is a national organization which works to facilitate participation in organized debate activities for as many urban students as possible.
“One hundred percent of kids involved in urban debate programs go to college,” said Keri Kilbane, communications director for the NAUDL.
The group says that multiple studies demonstrate that NAUDL participants have shown proven increases in traditional measures of academic success: literacy scores increase by 25 percent they say, grade-point averages increase around 10 percent and other positive benefits have been documented in attendance rates and critical thinking skills.
Further, preparation to debate at tournaments motivates students to conduct extensive research, much of it computer based, and to develop organized and complex spoken and written communication skills.
Cities like Boston, Atlanta, Baltimore and Chicago have been investigating and investing in debate programs as a way to ameliorate far-reaching disparities in high school achievement and college readiness, particularly in urban districts. The first Urban Debate League (UDL) was founded in the Atlanta Public School District in 1985. The goal of the Atlanta model was to encourage under-served high school students to participate in competitive debate.
Proponents of debate programs argue that the skills students learn from participation in such programs translate into tangible results in helping students overall to succeed.
A recent study published in Educational Research and Reviews in 2011 stated, “Debaters were more likely to graduate, more likely to meet ACT college-readiness benchmarks, and had greater gains in cumulative grade point average (GPA) over the course of high school relative to comparable peers…these findings suggest that debate programs may offer a means to extend learning time and promote engagement with scholastic materials in a manner that translates into academic performance.”
The National Forensics League (NFL), a non-profit honor society created to recognize high school students in speech and debate aims to “promote high school and middle school speech and debate activities as a means to develop a student’s essential life skills and values,” as its mission statement reads.
For the 2010-2011 school year, there were a total of 2,912 chapters of the NFL active in schools across the U.S. and more than 120,000 students enrolled in debate and speech programs nationwide, the organization reports.
The group says its vision is that every U.S. student is “empowered to become an effective communicator, ethical individual, critical thinker, and leader in a democratic society.”
Can participation in debate programs close the achievement gap?
The achievement gap is a term describing the disparity in measures between the performance of groups of students, especially groups defined by gender, race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status.
The disparity is evidenced through standardized test scores, grade point average, dropout rates, college-enrollment and completion rates, all of which tend to be lower for low-income minority students.
Research suggests that gaps in student achievement between low-income minority students and middle-income white students have been ongoing since the publication of the report, “Equality of Educational Opportunity” (more widely known as the Coleman Report), commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education in 1966.
Both in-school factors and home/community factors impact the academic achievement of students and contribute to the gap, according to the most current theories around why the gap exists.
After the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was passed in 2001, closing the achievement gap became a focus of federal education accountability efforts.
The NCLB was signed into law by President Bush on Jan. 8, 2002, was a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the central federal law in pre-collegiate education. which was first enacted in 1965.
At a time of widespread public concern about the state of education in the U.S., the NCLB legislation set in place requirements that were enacted in nearly every public school in America. It expanded the federal role in education and took particular aim at improving the educational lot of disadvantaged students through measures such as annual testing.
But the measure has widely been seen as unsuccessful. “The law has led to thousands of schools investing untold hours in test-preparation exercises. Instead of educating children, many public schools are preparing students for tests that, at best, yield weak measures of narrowly conceived achievements. In the meantime, schools have abandoned music, art, physical education, and even cut back on science and social studies when those subjects are not on their state’s tests. And teaching kids to think creatively, wisely, or ethically has become a big no-no because — you guessed it — they’re not on the tests,” writes education expert Robert J. Sternberg, provost and Professor of Psychology and Education at Oklahoma State University, in a recent article for the Washington Post.
Part of the reason that measures like the NCLB have been such abysmal failures in eradicating the achievement gap, according to Sternberg, is that it leaves students unprepared for university-level inquiry and analysis. One young man mentioned in the article, who Sternberg calls a “survivor” of the NCLB measures, says he was unprepared for matriculation at Georgetown University. While his high school preparation under the NCLB standards had taught him to memorize and regurgitate information for the tests he was given in school, he never learned how to “form original, concise thoughts…[and] to focus less on remembering every piece of information, word for word, and more on forming independent ideas,” Sternberg relays.
“My own research on ‘successful intelligence’ and others’ research on ’emotional intelligence’ show clearly that post-college success depends on much more than the general knowledge and narrow analytical thinking currently measured by standardized tests,” Sternberg says.
“If you want to search for a Holy Grail, see a Monty Python movie. Don’t look for it in standardized tests. Let’s seek accountability, but this time, let’s do it right. Our last attempt at the Holy Grail, ‘No Child Left Behind,’ may get an A for effort, but it gets an F for its outcomes,” Sternberg concluded.