Resolved. Robert Litan
the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues. Afterward, Tucker and his wife Erin Mote founded the Brooklyn Labs charter school, which, at this writing, has over 800 students, almost all minorities, many with learning disabilities (like those Tucker overcame), and currently teaches students from the 6th through the 10th grade.10
That so many educators and students have participated in various forms of competitive debate over multiple decades suggests that, at the very least, there must be some value added to the activity beyond self-selection—though I admit more rigorous evaluations of the kinds I will soon describe are necessary. But why should the skills that competitive debate teaches to participants be limited to just them? Why shouldn’t all students, not just the less than 1 percent who debate competitively, have an opportunity to acquire such skills?
Debate-Centered Instruction in Action
In fact, as you will learn in chapter 3, several educators have been hard at work on a little-noticed effort to incorporate debate- or argument-centered instructional techniques into other parts of the high school (and lower school) curriculum and classes. A pioneer of this kind of learning, Les Lynn, the founding executive director of the NAUDL, calls this “debatifying” the curriculum. Lynn has developed a set of materials, featured on his website, to enable teachers to do precisely this across a wide range of subjects, including science, where one wouldn’t think debate instructional techniques would be useful or appropriate.11 Similarly, the Boston Debate League (BDL) has been assisting over a dozen Boston-area schools in a similar way since 2013. Lynn’s and the BDL’s activities implement, in multiple innovative ways, “debate across the curriculum,” a pedagogical approach that has been advocated in a theoretical way over several decades by multiple researchers from different academic backgrounds,12 which Lynn, the BDL, and the teachers they mentor have put into practice.
Well before any of these academic articles were written or Lynn and the BDL’s current leader Mike Wasserman became active, one middle school teacher—in Dodge City, Kansas, in the 1980s—experimented with the notion that debate techniques could be useful in nonspeech classroom settings. Former debater and current trial lawyer Brian Hufford recounted to me that his teacher in a “citizenship class” in 9th grade had the students argue both sides of different propositions, such as what policy stance the United States should take vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.13 He told me that this exercise taught him to look at issues from both perspectives—one of the most important lessons rules-based debating imparts to all students. Hufford’s experience also enticed him to become a competitive debater in high school, which, in turn, led to a full scholarship to debate in college and put him on his way toward his outstanding legal career.
As multiple researchers have written, and as Lynn, Wasserman, and the teachers they have coached have told me—and common sense is likely to tell you—students are much more likely to remember what they research and debate than when some or even much of the material is delivered to them by “the sage on the stage” in lecture format that they then regurgitate on an exam. It is often said that the best way to learn something is to teach. Debate-centered education takes this adage up a notch, requiring students not only to teach but also to anticipate and counter questions and opposing arguments, activities that teacher-delivered lectures do not promote.
British educator Lucy Crehan, whose Cleverlands provides a comprehensive survey of why school systems in other countries are outperforming those in the United States, observes that the “motivation of students plays a huge part in whether they succeed …”14 Having to prepare for and participate in a debate in class, perhaps first in small groups and later before the entire class, should be an ideal way to motivate students of all ages, but especially those in middle and high school, when students hit the first stage in life where they want to express themselves as individuals separate from their parents. Structured debate formats make that possible, making learning enjoyable and worth pursuing.
I am not claiming that DCI is the only way to do this. As Ted Dintersmith makes clear in his compelling and pathbreaking book What Schools Could Be, multiple educational innovation efforts are underway across the country, primarily in conventional public schools, to engage students in the joy of learning, organized around solving society’s problems. Many of these efforts are described under the umbrella of project-based learning (PBL).15 Tom Vander Ark, former director of education grantmaking at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, has compiled an even broader list of innovative instructional techniques being used by both conventional and charter public high schools throughout the country.16
Dintersmith also makes a compelling case in his book not only for PBL but against the use of standardized test scores to measure student and teacher performance. Whether or not you are convinced of his arguments, the education establishment is not likely to abandon test scores any time soon as a measurement tool, and so I make the case that DCI can improve both test scores and interest in learning (which otherwise is deterred by a single focus on test score improvement) as well as workplace skills and civic life. One can be an advocate for PBL and DCI, viewing DCI as a type of ongoing project. The closing chapter of the book suggests that a linkage of DCI and PBL as part of a broader “education innovation” campaign could be the best way to expand the implementation of both ideas.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of making debate a central part of learning during the school day and not just expanding students’ participation either in competitive debate or some variation of it as an extracurricular activity. Education researchers and practitioners Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine have reported the huge problem of boredom in high schools all across America—only 32 percent of students reported being “engaged” in school, according to a Gallup poll taken in 2015—and have suggested that competitive debate, along with theater and sports, after school can help address the problem by giving students “much more agency, responsibility and choice.”17 DCI would do the same thing for all students, in all their classrooms, potentially throughout every school day.
One of the school leaders Mehta and Fine interviewed highlights another problem endemic to all K–12 education, but especially at the high school level: “Most schools and classrooms are set up in ways that trigger adolescents to resist. What we need to do is to trigger their instinct to contribute”18 (emphasis added). By directly involving students in their own learning and in teaching others, and by enabling them to express themselves in a civil and constructive way in front of their peers, DCI directly answers this challenge.
DCI also should be attractive to teachers, many of whom may be initially skeptical of the idea. It reduces the number of lectures teachers must give and turns them more into mentors. I suspect many teachers would enjoy this mentorship function as much as, if not more than, delivering lectures, especially if they get better educational results. Moreover, DCI does not require all teachers to be superstars. The techniques of teaching through debate are replicable, scalable, and capable of being implemented well, even mastered, by all teachers who believe in it and want to make it work.
There Is Enough Evidence to Warrant Further Experimentation with DCI
DCI does not require all students take an introductory course in forensics and debate to prepare themselves for debates in the classroom. With a limited amount of upfront training, and some coaching or mentoring throughout the school year, any teacher instructing any subject can transform her classes, using the same curriculum she is already teaching, into debate-enhanced centers of excellence. The modest cost for doing all this can and should come out of existing professional development budgets that are now used to fund a variety of professional development programs for teachers. Although there may be some resistance to reallocating a limited portion of such existing budgets to DCI, as more teachers learn of the advantages to students and to them of DCI, such resistance should wane.
Ideally, the education philanthropic community, which historically has shown great interest and financial support for education reform, will turn its attention to this agenda: supporting more research into, development of, and experimentation with ways to introduce debate-centered instructional techniques into elementary, middle, and high school classes; in developing curricula or materials that can be easily adapted by teachers so that each doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel; launching state-based