High School Tournaments - Coming Soon
Many high school students have not been exposed to HBCUs. Consequently, there is an opportunity to host high school tournaments on HBCU campuses. This will allow high school students to experience HBCU campuses and also be a greater opportunity for HBCU teams to interact and recruit from various high schools.
High school debate as a pedagogical tool has many advocates; studies find that debate enhances critical thinking and problem-solving abilities, and encourages awareness of global issues. In the well-known book, Gifted Tongues: High School Debate and Adolescent Culture, Northwestern Professor of Sociology Gary Fine calls debate a “valuable training ground for adolescents” because it “captures the skills of competent expression, self-confidence in public activities, the use of logic, the gathering of evidence, and the presentation of policy options that we expect of all citizens. Debate participation is tied to heightened academic performance; studies of students in Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Seattle, and New York found that debate improves students’ reading test scores at statistically significant levels, decreases the likelihood of high-risk behaviors, and improves academic success and student attitudes towards higher education.
Debate participation also narrows the achievement gap across race/ethnicity and social class. A study of debate programs in the Chicago Public School district found that even accounting for the influence of self-selection, students who participated in the Chicago Debate League were “more likely to graduate from high school, performed better on the ACT, and showed greater gains in cumulative GPA relative to similar comparison students." Moreover, debate has been shown to help bilingual high school students master academic discourse in their non-native language.
Motivation
Quantitative studies back up the academic benefits of debate, but less has been written about the way debate educates students politically. Since debate often involves stepping into the shoes of policymakers, participation may deepen understanding of the political process. Writing in the context of exercises such as crisis simulations, Esberg and Sagan argue that simulating policymakers teaches “the importance of understanding foreign perspectives…simulations can deepen understanding by asking students to link fact and theory, providing a context for facts while bringing theory into the realm of practice." More generally, debate may foster a robust political culture by emphasizing different perspectives; Stannard suggests that debate programs are crucial for deliberative democracy because they foster public discussion, removing the stigma from disagreement and confrontation, and empower citizens.
The skills that make debaters more politically engaged citizens are important in light of an unequal democracy. The United States has deep, ongoing problems with political disenfranchisement, especially among minority communities and disempowered communities. This is especially relevant for adolescents. Recent research argues that that social inequality in civic engagement has grown for youth in the United States in recent years (Wray-Lake and Hart, 2012). This builds on top of wide documentation among all age groups that there is a strong association between socioeconomic background and civic engagement. Wray-Lake and Hart’s study, which uses data from the National Election Study to examine the political behavior of 18 to 29 year-olds, indicates that civic inequalities persist, documenting that ethnic minorities and women are less politically involved. They conclude that “research is sorely needed that suggests effective ways to engage underrepresented groups in the political process."
Could debate be one possible answer to inequality in political engagement?