This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 11, 2011 - The high school level Urban Debate League, now in its third year in St. Louis, has almost doubled its membership from last year as a result of extra energy devoted to bringing in new people.
Ravi Rao, executive director of St. Louis' Urban Debate League, said his efforts were prompted by studies that correlate participating in debate during high school with job retention rates and skill improvement.
Rao said he looks at studies and numbers every few years and tailors programs accordingly. After last summer, the league began a two-year initiative to double the number of new members.
"This year we had something like 45 new kids," Rao said, out of a total of about 125.
Why debate? Rao said: "The St. Louis Urban Debate League is committed to providing the academic and social benefits of rigorous, competitive policy debate opportunities that students in suburban school districts often enjoy to the students in urban public school districts."
Proof of Benefits
Briana Mezuk of Virginia Commonwealth University and researchers at the University of Michigan released a study last summer that looked at the Chicago Urban Debate League over 10 years.
"What is unique with the Mezuk study is what we call the self-selection box," Rao said. He explained that "urban debate makes kids smart" versus that the idea that "urban debate attracts the smart kids."
In her study, Mezuk factored out eighth-grade achievement, and found that, no matter what prior achievement was, students were seeing the same exponential perks and improvements.
"The other thing that she found is the more a kid debates, the more the benefit. That doesn't actually plateau until they've debated in about 10 or 12 tournaments," Rao said.
He said the benefits would plateau, on a high school average, after about two years of debating.
The City Debaters
The high schools in the St. Louis Urban Debate League are Beaumont, Mel Carnahan High School of the Future, Central Visual and Performing Arts, Cleveland Junior Naval Academy, Clyde Miller Career Academy, Gateway, McKinley, Metro Academic and Classical High School, Northwest Academy of Law and Sumner. Two-person teams compete in policy debate six times a year. Rao says this is the oldest and most rigorous form of debate.
Warren Detjen, three-year sponsor of the debate team at Metro Academic Classical High School, said he lets the students choose their own partners, but he does ask that the teams be paired for the entire school year.
"Debate ... enables students to develop and practice critical thinking, analytical and reasoning skills," Detjen said. "It takes the public discourse out of the Jerry Springer show and places it in a nonjudgmental intellectual arena."
Detjen said his students meet, practice and research arguments one night a week as a group but commit to other hours of work on their own time. While Detjen is skeptical of the studies, he said he has anecdotal support that correlates with what Mezuk found.
Studying Debate
Briana Mezuk's study suggested more than three-quarters of debaters graduate, compared to barely half of non-debaters. The effects for black males are even bigger. African-American males who participate in debate are 70 percent more likely to graduate and three times less likely to drop out than their peers.
In the 1990s, Linda Collier studied results from a round of urban debates in St. Louis, Kansas City and elsewhere. Her focus was on literacy testing. Collier found that urban debaters improve their literacy scores at a rate of 125 percent of that of their peers, so they make up a 25 percent difference over their non-debate peers a year.
She also found that kids enrolled in urban debate leagues have virtually a 100 percent (high school) graduation rate and a four-year college matriculation rate of north of 70 percent.
"I have had colleagues come to me and say that the kinds of questions debate kids ask in class, the methodology of analysis or interpretation in academic work have improved or are noticeably different as a result of, or at least in conjunction with, involvement with debate," he said. "I will tell you that the development of analytical skills, of recent interpretive skills, and the skill of presenting a persuasive argument while taking emotion out of the equation sees some impressive results in the writing of essays and the engagement of kids in class."
The topic that will be debated each year is released by the National Forensics League in April. This year's is:
"Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially reduce its military and/or police presence in one or more of the following: South Korea, Japan, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq, Turkey."
Rao said, "The kids have to research these six countries and they have to learn why we're there, what are the benefits of staying, what are the benefits of leaving, what are the arguments for and against it and then they prepare an affirmative, and they prepare negatives for each," Rao said.
The most basic skills that debate teaches, Rao said, are reading critically, a comfort in speaking and in themselves and conflict resolution.
Rao's work as executive director entails recruiting schools, providing training for the teachers and full responsibility for running tournaments and coordinating volunteers. He is employed by a private board, made up of mostly lawyers in the St. Louis area.
"We want these kids to be familiarized with the fact that they're going to be challenged, and know how to handle that constructively," Rao said. "Debate challenges these students at an intellectual level."
Executive Director
As student director of debate at Washington University, Ravi Rao was among the college debaters hired to work with UDL schools as an assistant debate coach, first at Roosevelt High School and later at Soldan International Studies High School. Rao also worked as an instructor at three UDL Summer Institutes at the University of Missouri St. Louis, before taking over as a policy debate coach at the Chaminade College Preparatory School. He became executive director of UDL in 2008.
Rao attended Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he indulged his debate-inspired interest in foreign policy by completing a certificate in international and comparative law. His academic interests include participatory democratic theory and comparative legal theory, specifically the role of foreign and trade policy in building democratic institutions.
Rao's debate accomplishments include qualifying for the Missouri State High School Activities Association's state tournament three consecutive years, twice winning Top Speaker at the Greater St. Louis Speech League, and being on the Washington University team awarded the Garrison Newcomers' Award as the top new collegiate policy debate program in the country in 1998. (Source: Urban Debate League.)
Leah Randazzo is a senior in journalism at Missouri State University who worked as an intern with the Beacon over winter break.