NC/1NR — AT: Status Quo Solves

2NC/1NR — AT: Status Quo Solves

Despite efforts to expand access to debate, our activity remains excessively insular – the number of schools participating in debate continues to decline and access remains unequal. Current efforts to expand debate opportunities will fail because they remain too passive – a new strategy is needed to bring the benefits of debate to all students.

(“Popularizing Debate: An Equity Strategy,” Rostrum, Volume 81, Number 6, February, p. 69-70)

Joe Miller started as a journalist looking for signs of success at Central High School, a troubled inner-city school in Kansas City, Missouri. He found the debate program. His new book is bringing welcome attention to debate: the press gives Cross-X glowing reviews, including Amazon's "top ten non-fiction books of the year" (see http://www.crossxbyjoemiller.com for a list of reviews). He spins a good yarn, and curious parents who are unable to attend a tournament will enjoy it. It would not be surprising if it became a movie soon.

Miller chronicles the 2002-03 season of coach Jane Rinehart, debaters Marcus Leach and Brandon Dial, and other Central debaters as they tour the national CX circuit. By incremental steps, he leaves his journalist role behind, becoming an advocate, assistant coach, and in later seasons, a coach himself. While the book is written for a general audience, he also has ideas that may be of interest to the debate community. Coaches and debaters will find his perspective to be both thought-provoking and controversial.

Miller notes that the percentage of schools participating in debate has been declining for decades, beginning back in the 1970s. (As just one example, Gary Fine notes a precipitous drop from 50% of all Minnesota high schools down to 10% that competed in debate from the 1960s to 1990s.)1 Miller implies that the national-circuit style, which caught on at the high school level in the 1970s, caused this decline. He criticizes several practices, arguing that the kinds of research used in debate can turn kids away (especially minority students who feel no connection to academics and political pundits) and positing that unrealistic impacts (such as nuclear war or genocide) distance debaters from the real-world activism debate should foster. Instead, Miller advocates the use of poetry, song lyrics, and personal narratives as alternative kinds of evidence and moves his teams to a narratives style.

On the one hand, Miller presents a valid concern. If a coach finds that a certain style connects with a student—especially if it is a student from a group currently under-represented in the debate community— then it is reasonable for the coach to support that student's needs and wants. Students ought to feel personally invested in both the substance and style of their arguments. As James Gee notes, students always begin learning about a subject in their "primary discourse" (conversational language emphasizing an intimate connection), but education can help move them into "secondary discourses" (academic languages that abstract and publicize an issue)— and our society gives much greater credibility to second ary discourses.2 The detachment might be greater in secondary discourses, but coaches ought to help students close that argumentative distance. Narratives are best if used as a bridge between personally relevant stories and academic research. Based on his descriptions, this is exactly what Mr. Miller did as a coach.

On the other hand, this analysis applies only to the retention of students. His analysis can say nothing about the retention of programs, and on this issue, neither his explanation nor his solution squares with the facts. Why did speech-only programs also decline to roughly the same degree? Why have LD and PF, both of which explicitly rejected the national-circuit style, not reversed the decline in NFL membership? A better explanation is that the 1970s saw the emergence of the back-to-basics movement, which cut co-curricular speech classes, hired new teachers of "basic" subjects while superannuating teachers of "extras" such as art and debate, and generally denied the place of rhetoric in the liberal arts canon. Programs folded, and never returned. The national circuit emerged in response to these events but did not cause them, despite what Miller posits.

Neither a new style nor a new format will address the root causes of declining NFL membership. Miller blames the debate community for creating exclusionary norms around the activity, which is unfair because many of the pressures that limit participation to a few well-to-do schools were given to the debate community by inequalities in the education system as a whole. The style of debate may affect which students participate— and increasing participation, especially minority participation, is important to consider—but style does not affect how many schools participate. There are substantive problems facing debate programs that no amount of new rules are capable of solving. After all, the rules only determine what happens in the round, not what the school district and principal do before the tournament. In other words, I believe Miller overestimates how many real world inequalities can be rectified with a new debate style or theory.

However, the question whether or not Miller's particular diagnosis is true is less relevant than his passion for raising these issues explicitly. He is at his strongest when he says that educational inequality is something that debate coaches need to confront: that few under-funded public schools participate is a real, moral challenge. Coaches of good faith may disagree about what an ideal debate round looks like, but all coaches can agree that a student at a high school without an NFL program is at a serious educational disadvantage. The terrible irony is that students most in need of engagement in education (through exciting extra-curricular activities like debate) are the least likely to have such options available. What is needed from coaches is collective [end page 69] action to address one of the substantive inequalities in education—to give more students the opportunity to participate in the NFL through their school.