Resolved. Robert Litan
solely with parental or student choice, even for successful public charter schools. Pedagogical reform infused by debate or argument-centered education could be even more important than what kind of schools students attend, if the goal is, as it should be, to improve educational outcomes for all students in all types of public schools—conventional and charter—and especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who face steeper challenges than peers from higher income families and neighborhoods.
Getting from Here to There
Notwithstanding the clear educational, workplace, and civic benefits of DCI, persuading local school boards, principals, and even many teachers to embrace it will not be easy. Most school systems around the country face stiff fiscal challenges, and although the cost of the proposed reforms recommended here would be a wash if funded by reallocating existing teacher professional development monies, doing that may also be politically problematic, at least for a while. In addition, school boards, principals, and teachers are constantly being pitched all kinds of pedagogical reforms, and as a result there is understandable reform fatigue that works against widespread adoption of DCI techniques. That is why there is a need for the studies called for here. If they demonstrate the educational benefits of DCI, this would provide an important impetus for wider adoption.
I am also fully aware of how difficult change can be to accomplish, especially when good ideas are introduced from outside the “club” of existing practitioners. It took well over a hundred years for doctors and hospitals to give priority to hand washing as a way of preventing the spread of infections, a simple idea whose power was discovered in the nineteenth century by Joseph Lister. Or, in a completely different arena, it took a while—but at least a shorter period than hand washing in the medical context—for sports executives, managers, and coaches to embrace the power of statistics or “analytics” pioneered by Bill James in baseball and popularized by Michael Lewis in his best-selling book Moneyball. The baseball establishment is embracing the more recent efforts by innovators on the fringes of professional baseball to combine insights from physics and statistics to improve player performance with even greater speed.22 I am hopeful, as an outsider to the educational establishment, that the faster dissemination of good ideas witnessed in sports will be replicated in education with the rapid and widespread adoption of DCI.
In the meantime, the fact that there are well over a million adults who have benefited from competitive debate in school should provide a natural constituency for change and activism to support a much larger role for debate in education. Former debaters know its pedagogical value and are ideal ambassadors to the education community to urge much wider use of debate techniques in all classrooms. Indeed, many elected officials at all levels of government—though, admittedly, not necessarily at the school board level—were former competitive debaters in high school, and perhaps in college, and for them urging DCI should be like pushing on an open door.
To be clear, I do not claim that requiring debate and introducing debate-centered education in nondebate courses will completely solve both the political and economic problems of the country, or even most of the challenges confronting K–12 education. Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan makes a powerful case in his book How Schools Work that major increases in teacher pay, coupled with true accountability, and multiple measures for reducing gun violence in schools (not just reasonable gun control measures), stand at the top of any “to do” list to improve American education, especially in its inner-city schools.23 The argument here, rather, is more modest: that much wider participation in debate and the introduction of DCI techniques clearly belong on education reform, workforce improvement, and civic health agendas, ideally at or near the top of the list.
The logic supporting the expansion of DCI is compelling. I am confident that rigorous evaluation will confirm the logic or, at the very least, shape the ways in which American students are taught to search out and understand multiple sides of the issues they confront in their personal and political lives. The future health of our society and our economy may depend on it.
APPENDIX 1-A
Sample List of Former Debaters
| Samuel Alito | Supreme Court Justice |
|---|---|
| Steve Bannon | Political strategist |
| James Belushi | Actor |
| John Belushi | Actor |
| Stephen Breyer | Supreme Court Justice |
| Bill Clinton | President |
| Hillary Clinton | Senator, secretary of state, presidential candidate |
| Calvin Coolidge | President |
| William G. Crow | Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; U.S. military |
| Ted Cruz | Senator |
| Bo Cutter | White House official during Clinton years; private sector financier |
| James Fallows | Journalist and television personality |
| Dan Glickman | Congressmen, agriculture secretary; former head of the Motion Picture Association of America |
| Austan Goolsbee | Former chair, Council of Economic Advisers |
| Kamala Harris | Senator |
| Glenn Hubbard | Former chair, Council of Economic Advisers; dean, Columbia Business School |
| Lee Iacocca | Legendary corporate CEO |
| Richard Nixon | President |
| Frank Partnoy | Popular nonfiction author; law professor |
| Jane Pauley | Television journalist |
| Norman Pearlstine | Journalism executive |
| Jonathan Rauch | Journalist; prolific author |
| Franklin Roosevelt | President |
| Karl Rove | Political strategist |
| Robert Rubin | Financier; treasury secretary |
| Carl Schramm | Foundation president; entrepreneur |
| Heidi Schreck | Broadway star; playwright |
| John Sexton | College president |
| Lawrence Summers | Treasury secretary; president of Harvard |
| Margaret Thatcher | Former prime minister, United Kingdom |
| Lawrence Tribe | Constitutional lawyer |
| Malcom X | African American leader; activist |
| Elizabeth Warren | Senator and presidential candidate |
Source: National Speech and Debate Association website: www.speechanddebate.org/alumni/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Alumni%2520page&utm_campaign=Family%252BNewlsetter%252B20181220 and the author’s own research.
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