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Open to DebateThe
National Association for Urban Debate Leagues is changing the lives of
students at inner-city schools across the nation. And its leader is a
Baylor grad.
By Lisa Asher
Scott Deatherage '84, MA '86, has spent the majority of his life
debating--as a high schooler, as a college student in Baylor's
award-winning debate program, and as the head debate coach at
Northwestern University, where he helped lead his students to an
impressive seven National Debate Champion titles.
So when it came time for him to make a career change, he naturally debated
the issue. "I wasn't looking for a job. The easy, comfortable decision
would have been to stay," explains Deatherage, who had been at
Northwestern for twenty-two years--four years as a doctoral student and
eighteen years as a professor and debate coach. But the job, it seemed,
was looking for him.
This spring, Deatherage took over as executive director of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues
(NAUDL), a non-profit organization that creates and fosters Urban
Debate Leagues (UDL) in high schools across the country. While debate
programs can be found in many public high schools, NAUDL works in
poorer, inner-city districts to bring the art of research, rhetoric,
and rigorous academic study to students who are often overlooked. As of
the 2008-09 academic year, Urban Debate Leagues can be found in
twenty-five major cities, including Los Angeles, St. Louis, Dallas, and
Boston. And there's a growing list of cities whose programs are on the
drawing board.
From his new office in Chicago, Deatherage spoke to the Line about how a debate program can have a profound effect on inner-city youth--and how debate even saved his own life.
BAYLOR LINE: NAUDL oversees and helps
administer a large network of Urban Debate Leagues. What types of
schools are involved in a UDL, and how large a network do you oversee?
SCOTT DEATHERAGE: We rely on
the Federal Education Act of 1965, something called Title I, for its
definition of what those urban high schools are. First, we work
principally in cities that have a population of 250,000 people or more.
And secondly, we work in high schools that are referred to as 40/40
schools--schools where 40 percent of the student population are
underrepresented minorities, primarily African Americans and Hispanics.
The other part of the 40 percent component is students who are on the
federal school lunch program, which is an official statistic that the
federal government uses to measure a poverty line.
During this academic year, we will work with about ten thousand to
twelve thousand participating students at the high school level and two
or three thousand at the junior high level in urban debate programs.
That counts several startup cities where we're looking for long-term
growth potential. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, we're
just scratching the surface. We have eleven schools in that district
signed up now. But there are probably two hundred high schools
altogether in the districts around the Bay, so there's a long way to go.
LINE: Your expansion plans sound pretty ambitious.
DEATHERAGE: We have launches
planned in about ten new cities this fall, and we already have
inquiries from at least half a dozen more major cities who have
expressed interest for a fall 2009 launch. We've got contacts and
interest expressed from Cleveland, Columbus, Jacksonville, New Orleans,
Philadelphia, and Phoenix for another cycle beyond what's happening
next fall.
LINE: Is it a case of be careful what you wish for?
DEATHERAGE: There's a little
bit of that. I gave that speech in the staff meeting on Thursday
afternoon, which was to say I think we need to be very careful as we
move forward here because we don't want to do a poor job in any city
where we are underway simply because we're trying to get started
somewhere new. We've got to make sure we batten down the hatches and
make sure we get things started in a successful trajectory in the
places that are launching this fall before we seriously take on
expansion possibilities.
LINE: To what do you owe this recent interest in urban debate?
DEATHERAGE: Last winter's movie The Great Debaters,
starring Denzel Washington, has been a tremendous help. It really
created a wave of consciousness and interest that stretched literally
across the country. We doubled and tripled our expansion efforts as a
result of interest in different communities that came to us from people
who had seen the movie and wondered why the state of debate programs in
their community was so poor. In Houston, Tampa, Los Angeles, and other
places--I don't know if we’d be underway right now were it not for the
film.
LINE: Was it a difficult transition to move from your longtime post at Northwestern to this new opportunity?
DEATHERAGE: Yes, but for me, it
was kind of an opportunity to give back to debate and to try to be a
part of building an institution that can make something like this
available to students all over the country and to students who have a
real and dedicated need for that intellectual enterprise. When I was in
high school in Houston, I lost both my parents in separate incidents,
and I was very fortunate to be surrounded by a great school and
community. Many people had personal resources they were willing to
dedicate to get me through Friendswood High School and then get me out
into the world and off to college. When I turned to Baylor, there was
tremendous financial and other support available.
So when I considered taking this job, I just thought about my own
personal experience. I didn't live in a community where the crime rate
was high. I didn't live in a community where there was drug use or
urban decay or anything of that nature. You encounter that story over
and over again when you talk to Urban Debate League students. In some
way or another, each has gone through a serious life experience that is
not typical for the usual suburbanite. It's a lot more of a challenge
than what most suburban high school students have gone through. Having
had a little bit of that myself, I thought that this was a chance for
me to give back to the community and to try to help in similar ways to
those that were around me had when I was that age. As much as all the
adults around me at the time deserve enormous credit for the
intervention and the work that they did to ensure that I made it
through successfully, I would never had made it without the debate
team. There's just no doubt in my mind.
LINE: What are the different entities involved in an Urban Debate League?
DEATHERAGE: We find that almost
every co-curricular program is threatened by the budget acts almost
every year in pretty much every public school system in the country.
But when we bring private partners to the table, ultimately the
budget-cutter goes away and heads somewhere else because the private
partner provides community support that guarantees there is both some
additional financial support for debate programs and that there are
volunteers and different ways of accommodating students who want to
participate in debate. In Houston, our private board of trustees
includes fifty people who are community leaders. They are leaders in
business and law and government and virtually any field you can think
of. They're organized into different subcommittees: a media committee,
a finance committee, a committee to organize our teaching training and
our student programs. Pretty much every aspect of how the program will
work is done by way of that private partnership model. The private
partners put a lot into the program, and that didn't exist in the 1960s
and 1970s, when debate was robust in the public schools and the public
schools were not hurting financially as much as they are now.
LINE: Who is the typical urban debater?
DEATHERAGE: I'd say that we
draw a lot of students who are very thirsty for a challenge--an
academic challenge, an intellectual challenge--and who find the
classroom not as rewarding as curriculum designers like to think that
it is. In some cases, that means students who are already excelling in
the classroom but aren't particularly challenged to do so. In a lot of
cases, that means students who initially aren't doing all that well in
the classroom because they don't find it interesting or challenging.
And debate starts to do that for them. You find they attend school on a
more regular basis, that they go to class in part because they have to
go in order to be eligible to participate on the debate team. They
start doing better in their academic work after they've started their
debate work. I think that's because it teaches them and gives them a
challenge and interest level they hadn't found before in a traditional
academic model.
LINE: Are there longer-lasting effects on these students?
DEATHERAGE: Our research has
suggested that reading comprehension improves anywhere from 10 to 25
percent in the typical debate student relative to the general academic
population and to where those individual students were when they began.
It's not just a matter of getting the strongest students in the debate
program, but individual students pick up their own reading
comprehension rate at about 10 percent in a single year. I think it
accomplishes that by virtue of encouraging students to do work outside
of the traditional classroom. They have to invest themselves in
understanding fairly complicated matters of public policy and
philosophy that demand extra reading and outside mastery. That's what I
think explains the reading comprehension rate.
The graduation rate and the college placement rate are well above the
typical average of the urban public school system. The graduation rate
for a student on the debate team is almost 100 percent, and that's
almost universal across the country. The college placement rate varies
a little bit, but lands somewhere in the range of two-thirds to 75
percent of participating students.
LINE: What types of issues are they debating?
DEATHERAGE: They debate the
national topic that all schools debate, but when we have, for example,
our summer institute programs for urban debate students, oftentimes we
try to adapt the curriculum or topic to issues that are of specific
relevance to an urban population. Our first objective is to engage them
in policy debate. Our sense is that you start where your strengths are
and do what you do best and then grow out from there. We debate about
political questions and political arguments on a fairly frequent basis.
We're seeing a lot of excitement about the upcoming presidential
election among the urban debate student population. We've done a couple
of events, for instance, where we've organized urban debate reaction to
some of the primary debates, and we have in the works plans to do
similar kind of events with the general election debates.
LINE: Your first major events this
spring as executive director of NAUDL were the Chase Urban Debate
National Championship and the National Dinner. How did the events go?
DEATHERAGE: If you want a
better answer, you might ask the league director in Dallas, Kason
Kimberly. He said that for his students, the tournament was a
life-changing event. Most of these students had never been outside
their communities before. Most of them had never been on an airplane
before. Most of them had never before experienced any life difference
that is beyond the three- or four-block area of their neighborhood. We
integrated the student schedule with not just debates, but also
cultural events here in Chicago. We had an event at the
Mexican-American Museum of Art and an event at the Freedom Museum and
the Chicago Tribune Tower. You kind of put all of that together, and it
was sort of a first post-adolescent life experience for a lot of them,
I think. That was great.
The National Dinner was tremendous because one of the things we did was
to create opportunities for the students to interact with the adults
who came to the dinner and to show the adults--here they are. They
really do exist. They're really quite articulate. They really are quite
focused, and there's a reason for this. There's a reason why you've
been supporting this in various ways. There's a reason why you've been
putting time into it and effort into it and money into it. I think it's
important to get the adults reengaged in why they're doing this in the
first place.
LINE: Were you involved in debate at Baylor?
DEATHERAGE: I debated for all
four years that I was in school there, and I was captain of the Glenn
R. Capp Debate Forum when I was a senior. We were a strong team--as
Baylor has been for so many years--but we weren't the best team that
Baylor ever had by any stretch of the imagination. We did well
competitively, but we didn't knock the top off of the charts as far as
competition is concerned. But it did help build community and family
for me there. Some of my best friends in the world are people I grew up
with at Baylor. I'm forty-six years old and I graduated from Baylor
twenty-four years ago, and there are people that I was on the debate
team with at Baylor that I still talk to practically every day. That's
just kind of the bond that happens with that kind of team-building
opportunity and experience.
LINE: Who was your debate coach at Baylor?
DEATHERAGE: Bill English, who
is Baylor's acting chair of communication studies right now. I first
met English in 1978, when I was at Baylor's summer debate institute as
a high school student. I think I last saw him two or three years ago,
but I don't think he's changed a bit. He looked forty-five the day I
met him, and he looked forty-five the last time I saw him.
LINE: As you look toward your future with NAUDL, what are your hopes for the organization and what it can do for young people?
DEATHERAGE: It's easy to be excited at a time like this when we're watching all the opportunity and excitement--partially generated by The Great Debaters
and partially generated by the time, investment, and resources that
have come to the table from former debaters around the country. What I
want to be careful of is that the organization doesn't get too caught
up in that excitement. It's like I used to tell the debaters at
Northwestern when I was coaching there--the thing I said to them at the
beginning of every year is that we won't win any debates today for
those that we won yesterday, so we've got to go out and do our job
every day.
I want to build something that lasts. The hype is great, and it's a lot
of fun and exciting. But if we don't do our groundwork to make sure we
have a secure political backing from school boards that's necessary to
keep them going and all the different things that go into making it
last, then we're going to lose the ballgame. We've got to take care of
the details.
The very first assignment I got when I came to NAUDL was to go to
Houston, where we were just getting started. It was exciting for me to
have that opportunity, to slide right in and head back home. When I
first sat with the superintendent, he was talking about all the
different high-risk high schools that he was trying to get debate
programs in. He was listing off all these places, and I was sitting
there thinking that all these places had debate programs when I was in
high school. I debated against them and debated on their campuses. So I
know it can be done. We can make it happen.
To find out more about NAUDL and how you can help, go to urbandebate.org.
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