Resolved. Robert Litan
area, won the national high school championship in “policy debate” that year. Also, in that same year, a team from Kansas University won the college policy debate championship (readers will learn about the multiple debate formats that have developed as alternatives to policy debate and the main reason why, in chapter 2). Even more remarkably, the following year, two Kansas teams from the same high school, Washburn Rural in Topeka, qualified for the championship round at the national high school tournament, only the second time that has happened in the history of the national tournament, making the second year in a row that a Kansas team won the national championship. Another Johnson County, Kansas, high school team made it to the semifinals of the 2019 tournament, as did a team from Kansas University in the college national tournament that year.
I digress (though with pride). The key for you, the reader, is that the article to which I refer somehow lit a lightbulb in my head, giving me the spark, the energy, and the enthusiasm it takes to write any book. Almost instantaneously, the article prompted the following thought experiment: “What if every high school student had debate training, and specifically the research, thinking, organizational, and speaking skills that debaters develop, and most important, the ability to take both or multiple sides of an issue in a public way before a real audience? Wouldn’t students have more fun in school and learn more while they’re there? Wouldn’t students be better prepared for the workforce? Wouldn’t our country and our democracy be in a better place?
My gut answers to all these questions was yes, and those answers, fully fleshed out, form the core of this book. But still, the structure of a book wasn’t immediately apparent to me, nor was I sufficiently confident that it would have an audience. I needed, first, to get some feedback from the people I thought could give me some honest input—those with some debate or debate coaching experience themselves. So, I began emailing and talking to many such individuals. To a person, everyone also said yes to one or more of my questions.
These outreach efforts gave me the confirmation and enthusiasm I needed to make the two-year time investment of research and writing that it took to write this book. Thank goodness, I had a lot of help along the way. Michael Harris, the debate coach at Wichita East High School, and Scott Harris, the head coach at Kansas University, and his assistant coach Brett Bricker (a former national college debate champion), were all extremely useful sources in these early interviews, and highly encouraging about the project. Norman Ornstein, one of the nation’s most prominent political scientists and a long-time scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, also helped me organize my thoughts at a very early stage, while giving me excellent advice and encouragement. He later kindly reviewed and helped improve the draft manuscript.
I also am deeply indebted to the many other people who took the time to talk with me, including:
AnneMarie Baines (former debater and debate coach, founder of “Practice Space”)
Alex Berger (former champion high school and college debater, now a Hollywood screenwriter)
Bo Cutter (former high-ranking White House official during the Carter and Clinton administrations)
Jesus Caro (former debate coach at Marjorie Stoneman High School, Broward County, Florida)
Diana Carlin (former high school and college debater and debate coach and former professor of communications and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kansas)
Francesca Haass (the ex-debater daughter of my former Brookings and Council on Foreign Relations colleague Richard Haass)
Brian Hufford (ex-debater at Wichita State and now outstanding trial attorney in Baltimore)
Jeff Jarman (former national college debate champion and now the dean of the Elliott School of Communications and head debate coach at Wichita State University)
Alexa Kemper (former high school debater from Lee’s Summit, Mo., who twice debated at the national high school championship tournament)
Megan Kowaleski (debate program coordinator, Success Academy schools, New York)
Linda Listrom (former executive director of the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues)
Joe Loveland (former champion debater at the high school and college levels, and successful litigator)
Annika Nordquist (a former high school debater and the daughter of a good friend and former Brookings colleague, D. J. Nordquist)
Gallo Pitel (a high school debater at Stuyvesant High School in New York, and Cutter’s grandson)
Nicole Wanzer-Serrano (director of development, National Speech and Debate Association)
Cy Smith (former high school and college debater, and outstanding trial attorney in Baltimore)
Bill Thompson (debate coach, NSU School, South Florida)
Eric Tucker (former deputy director of the National Urban Debate League, and co-founder, with his wife Erin Mote, of the Brooklyn Labs school in New York city)
Dave Trigaux (executive director of Washington D.C. Urban Debate League and the Matthew Ornstein Summer Debate Camp)
Brian Wannamaker (former Kansas high school debater)
Stephanie Wu (former high school debater in Australia and college debater at the University of Pennsylvania)
Scott Wunn (executive director of the National Speech and Debate Association)
Early in my research, however, I realized I was talking only to people well versed in competitive debate, which at best engages 1 percent, most likely less, of all high school students. With the help of Todd Fine, a former national high school debate champion and son of Gary Fine, a sociologist at Northwestern, whose book Golden Tongues is the best academic treatment of high school debate I have seen, I was introduced to a small cadre of education pioneers. One of these was Les Lynn in Chicago, the founding director of the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues and the first to “debatify” (his term) the high school educational curriculum in the work he does with his current organization, Argument-Centered Education. Shortly thereafter, I stumbled across Mike Wasserman, executive director of the Boston Debate League [BDL]). Lynn and Wasserman, and the BDLs’ experienced team of coaches, have been assisting schools and teachers in Chicago and Boston to use debate and argument-based instructional techniques throughout the high school curriculum, and even in pre-high school grades. You will learn much about Les, Mike, the BDL, and the schools they are assisting in chapter 3 of the book.
I cannot thank both Lynn and Wasserman enough for educating me about their work, and for also organizing my visits in the spring of 2019 to Chicago and Boston, respectively, to see in action the teachers they are mentoring. I want to thank each of these dedicated professionals and their students for opening my eyes—and through me, hopefully, yours—to their cutting-edge use of argument-based learning. At Proviso West High School outside Chicago, I want to thank these teachers for allowing me to observe their classes: Sherry Bates, Danielle English, Angda Goel, Adenike Natschke, and Stephen Ngo. In Boston, thanks go to BDL’s experienced coaches, Sarah Mayper, Marisa Suescun, and Kim Willingham, and to these teachers: Melissa Graham at the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School and Patti Dennis, Doris Kane, Mike Nickerson, and Vanessa St. Leger at the Henderson School.
I previewed the broad outlines for the arguments in this book in a blog post I wrote for Brookings in September 2018 titled “A Counterintuitive Proposal for Improving Education and Healing America: Debate-Centered Instruction,”2 which I draw on in various places, especially in chapter 1. I want to thank Jonathan Rauch, a coauthor from over twenty years ago and a close friend and Brookings colleague, for suggesting that I write that initial essay, both to get my thoughts “out there” for public view and to gain valuable feedback and information for possible readers of a future book. He was right on both counts. Numerous people, many of them former debaters, saw the essay and did precisely what Jonathan had forecasted: they gave me both positive and constructive feedback and made me aware of professionals around