Posts Tagged ‘Urban Debate’

Sorry for the recent silence – I was in Boston over the weekend running a debate tournament for the Boston Debate League. I don’t have a WYP for this week, so instead please enjoy this Trip Report which hopefully will provide a behind-the-scenes insight into the world of high school debate, or our own little corner of it anyway:

There are 174 high school students registered for the debate tournament I am running this weekend. Roughly 135 will actually show up to compete, but not all of those 135 will be among those who registered in advance. These students will compete Friday evening and all day Saturday. Most of them will, anyway – a few show up, without warning, on only one day or the other. Just as many will be competing simultaneously at another of our schools, most of which are not large enough to host so many debates at once. That other school is not my responsibility at all.

About half as many middle schoolers will debate in their own separate competition at my school on Saturday only. They are kind of but not really my responsibility.

When I stepped down, three and a half years ago, as executive director of the Boston Debate League (BDL), we were lucky to get 40 kids at a tournament. Obviously there was no need to spread them out across two sites. There were no middle school debaters.  Read the complete post...

Baltimore’s local NBC affiliate, WBAL TV 11, recently covered a Baltimore Urban Debate League public debate in honor of Black History Month:

Some Baltimore city high school students said they believe there is a connection between crime and “gangsta rap” music, and the issue was hotly debated Tuesday among teenagers who have opposing views on the issue.

The Baltimore League, along with one or two others, is pretty much the envy of every other UDL in the other country. They’ve got a program with extraordinary reach, involving every public high school and many middle schools in the city and with strong connections to the public school system, the state university system (particularly Towson University), and the local media. A few years ago, they even managed to get a piece on 60 Minutes which to this day is one of the promotional materials of choice for every UDL in the country.

The Baltimore Sun also covered the debate and hammered home the point about just how large and successful the BUDL is:

Organizers of the event tapped students from the Baltimore Urban Debate League – a nonprofit organization that helps students acquire debate skills and that works with about 1,000 students a year in about 60 city schools. The program targets teenagers who are in danger of dropping out of school and helps them become strong debaters and better students, said the league’s executive director, Pam Spiliadis.  Read the complete post...

Yesterday’s Boston Herald, prompted by today’s opening of The Great Debaters, included a short feature about the Boston Debate League. Frankly, I was a little disappointed by the article’s length. The reporter spoke with myself and several of the coaches in the BDL, but the article mentioned only one of our schools by name:

“Students at the Josiah Quincy Upper School, and six other schools, represent the city locally and nationally as part of the program.

“Debate is about taking a risk,” said Alexander Chan, 17, captain of the Josiah Quincy team. “It is about finding a voice.

“Debate used to be very upper class. With urban debate you have all different backgrounds,” said Chan, a three-year veteran of the team. “It gives us a taste of what we can accomplish.”

For the students at Josiah Quincy Upper School, the debate squad gives students a team they can call their own. For football, athletes must play for South Boston.”

Also, a photographer was there and took literally hundreds of pictures, but the only photo accompanying the piece was a still from the film. Still, it was great to get the exposure and media attention!

Marc Fisher, who blogs for the Washington Post, just wrote about a group of debaters from the DC Urban Debate League who were invited to a special screening of The Great Debaters, like the one that I attended on Tuesday and the one that I am attending tonight, but were told the theater was full when the arrived:

“Touhey exchanged a series of emails with Carol Jones of the New York firm Bazan PR in which Jones confirmed that she had allocated 60 seats for the D.C. students. But when Touhey and the students arrived at the theater Monday evening, they were told that the seats were all taken by others who had been sent passes to the movie.

“Despite the fact that a guest list had been demanded and that the students and teachers were in line, the lists were not used to let people into the theater,” says Touhey, a former teacher at Cardozo High School. “When I asked why I had been required to provide a list, I was told that this was to justify the numbers [of seats] that I had been offered. When I protested that the students had done what they were supposed to do and that Bazan was not living up to its obligation, Ms Jones said that she would try to get some passes for the opening day.”"

The Washington Post recently ran a very thorough story on two debaters from the Baltimore Urban Debate League. It’s probably the best article I’ve seen on any urban debate league. It’s generally true that any press is good press, but too often news articles tend to have an undertone of “Can you believe these kids are debating?!?!!?” or resort to unfortunate turns of phrase such as, “learning to settle arguments with words instead of guns” (actually a paraphrase of First Lady Laura Bush talking about the Atlanta Urban Debate League).

It’s not even that those angles are false, exactly, but I find it very unfortunate when people choose to focus on these exclusively. Providing valuable educational opportunities to young people without access to them ought to be valued on its own merits, not simply because we are afraid of encountering those same young people in a dark alley. As the Post article puts it,

“But the biggest benefit of debate, according to the coaches, teachers and judges in the program, is that it engages underprivileged students, who are learning to study, think, write and present their ideas with the best of them. In the ’70s, when budget crunches forced urban schools to eliminate many “extraneous” programs, such as art, drama and speech, debate became the exclusive bailiwick of affluent private and suburban public schools. “For a long time, debate teams had looked very white and male, in coats and ties, like you’d expect,” says Spiliadis. “But we’ve changed the face of debate.”"  Read the complete post...

Sorry things have been slow recently, but I haven’t played much, with Boston’s summer institute last week, and now I’m headed out to Chicago to volunteer for a week at their institute. I won’t be playing much if any poker, and probably won’t have a lot of opportunity to update here either, so I may not post again until the weekend.

Best of luck until then!

-Andrew

I happened today to come across two media pieces dealing, at least tangentially, with the issue of gangs in Los Angeles. Gangs and related problems of crime and drugs are issues in virtually every major metropolitan area in the US, but LA seems to be the epicenter both in terms of incidence and as a barometer of how the country generally addresses the issue.

I’ll start with the good news. My friend David Wiltz is garnering still more media attention for the work that he has done with youth in LA. He and one of his former debaters were interviewed in this National Public Radio segment.

There are nearly two dozen urban debate leagues in the US, and I’m more familiar with some than with others, but everything I’ve seen suggests that few leagues do as good a job as LA has done to reach young people already in gangs or at high risk of getting involved with one. To some extent, this is simply a matter of necessity. Gangs are such an omnipresent part of urban life in LA that it would be nearly impossible to work with the populations Dave does without addressing the issue.  Read the complete post...