In 2003, CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl introduced 60 Minutes viewers to the Walbrook High School Warriors, the champion debate team of Baltimore. The segment featured Angelo Brooks, a Baltimore police officer who taught criminal justice classes by day and coached debate after school, in full uniform, gun included. "Alright, wipe the slob off your mouth and off the pen," Brooks told his students, laughing. "And don't nobody borrow each other's pens."
The students at Walbrook came from low-income families, many from broken homes. Before joining the debate team, one student, Marie Bentley, had been coming to school only once or twice a week. Now she wanted to go to the police academy. Another student, Regina Summers, had been thinking about dropping out. Now she wanted to become a Supreme Court justice.
The 60 Minutes segment brought national attention to a movement that had been building for nearly two decades: the urban debate league. In cities across America, educators and debate coaches had been proving that competitive debate could transform outcomes for students who had been written off by the educational system. The evidence was extraordinary. And yet, as with so many things in the history of debate, the movement revealed both what was possible and what remained missing.
The Hypothesis
The urban debate movement began as a graduate school research paper. In 1983, at Emory University in Atlanta, a researcher proposed a hypothesis: that debate might be a tool to level the playing field in education, and that words might be used to reduce violence in America's cities.
The idea was not entirely new. The Detroit Public Debate League had begun in 1984 as an after-school partnership between the Detroit Gifted and Talented Program and Wayne State University. In Philadelphia, a Senior High School Debate League had started in the mid-1960s, with approximately 30 teams meeting weekly at Olney High School by the early 1980s. But these were isolated efforts, often fragile, dependent on individual champions who could be transferred, defunded, or simply burned out.
What emerged in Atlanta was different. In 1985, Melissa Maxcy Wade, the Director of Forensics at Emory University, partnered with Atlanta Public Schools to create what would become the Atlanta Urban Debate League. Wade, who had been one of only four women at the National Debate Tournament her junior year in college, had set out to change the world when she took the job at Emory. "I was going to recruit lots of women and people of color and bring debate to the inner city and preside over the utopia I had created at 24 years of age," she later wrote. "The reality was that I quickly realized that change happened slowly and I became content to garden my little corner of the universe."
Early funding came from Atlanta Public Schools, Phillips Petroleum Company, the Gulton Foundation, and the Atlanta Bar Association. By 1995, over 3,000 students had participated in debate programs. The model that emerged combined after-school programs with tournament competition, using college students as coaches and mentors. Students from under-resourced schools were mainstreamed into the regular Georgia tournament circuit within a year of their intra-school debating.
The Soros Funding
The crucial turning point came in 1997, when George Soros's Open Society Institute provided seed funding to take the initiative national. Beth Breger of OSI had discovered the Atlanta program while looking for education initiatives that could address urban inequality. OSI had already supported high school debate programs in twenty-two of its overseas offices, promoting open exchange of ideas in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Now it turned its attention to America's cities.
OSI chose the Atlanta Urban Debate League model as the template for expansion. The strategy was deliberate: provide initial support to fund debate programs within urban communities, develop local stakeholders, and then exit. The concept was that once local actors saw the value of the program, sustaining investment would become easier.
The funding catalyzed rapid growth. By 2000, OSI had provided seed and support funding for leagues in New York City, Detroit, Tuscaloosa, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the San Francisco Bay area, Baltimore, Providence, Southern California, Los Angeles, and Newark. Wade's role expanded to serve as lead advisor to the various programs. The Emory National Debate Institute offered scholarships for urban students to attend summer debate camp, with more than half of the 450-plus participants receiving full scholarships.
"Information is free," Wade said at the time. "But we live in two different countries. Through debate, the dialogue between the two spans the chasms of difference and levels the playing field."
Chicago's Story
In 1995, Illinois Supreme Court Justice Seymour Simon gathered a group of business and civic leaders with a straightforward observation: Chicago Public School students did not have the same access to debate as their suburban peers. Competitive debate had become concentrated in wealthy areas, and the benefits that had once been available to students across the city had atrophied.
Simon and his colleagues founded the Chicago Debate Commission, a nonprofit charged with bringing debate back to the city's schools. Early sponsors included the Community Renewal Society, the League of Women Voters of Chicago, and the Phi Beta Kappa Association of the Chicago area. In 1997, in partnership with Chicago Public Schools, the Commission launched the Chicago Debate League in five under-resourced high schools on the city's South Side.
Simon steered the organization for its first eleven years, until his death in 2006. He was principally responsible for obtaining the initial investment from CPS in debate. The league he built would become the largest and most competitive urban policy debate league in the country, eventually serving approximately 1,500 students each year at over 85 middle and high schools across the greater metropolitan area.
More importantly, Chicago provided the data that would prove the urban debate hypothesis.
The Evidence
Dr. Briana Mezuk of the University of Michigan spent years studying the Chicago Debate League, analyzing data from 1997 to 2007 on approximately 12,000 students. Her findings were stark.
Debate participants were 70% more likely to graduate and three times less likely to drop out than those who did not participate, even after accounting for 8th grade test scores and grade point average. Among the highest-risk students, 72% of debaters graduated compared with 43% of non-debaters. For African American males specifically, debaters had GPAs nearly half a letter grade higher than non-debaters, with an average spring 12th grade GPA of 3.23 compared to 2.83 for comparable students who did not debate.
The college readiness results were equally impressive. Debaters scored significantly higher on every section of the ACT, especially English and Reading. They were twice as likely to score at or above the college readiness benchmark in English and 70% more likely in Reading. Students who debated more showed greater gains: participation in 25 or more rounds in high school correlated with significantly higher GPAs than participation in 5 or fewer rounds.
The mechanisms were clear. Urban Debate Leagues equipped students to take advantage of learning opportunities by creating relationships where students gained recognition, feedback, and perspective; providing competitions that tangibly rewarded hard work; shifting relationships to scholastic achievement and raising expectations; and requiring focused, independent work on college-level assignments.
A University of Missouri-Kansas City study found that after one year in a UDL, debaters attended school more frequently, improved their GPA by 10%, decreased risky behaviors, and achieved a 25% increase in literacy scores relative to a non-debating control group. Houston studies showed debaters earning higher GPAs by 0.66 points and gaining 52 points on their SAT Math scores and 57 points on SAT Evidence-based Reading and Writing.
"That same child who couldn't read three or four sentences now can read ten to twelve pages in eight minutes," Angelo Brooks told 60 Minutes. By the time the segment aired, all 12 seniors on the Walbrook Debate Team had graduated, and nine of them were going to college.
National Recognition
The 60 Minutes segment on Baltimore brought urban debate into national prominence. Major press coverage followed in the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Teacher Magazine, Chronicle for Higher Education, and Christian Science Monitor.
In 2002, the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues was created to provide national leadership of the growing network. By 2004, NAUDL was established as a grassroots organization seeking to address educational gaps through debate interventions. The organization served as the backbone of the urban debate network, building new leagues, reorganizing struggling ones, providing research on impact, and measuring outcomes.
In 2005, the Associated Leaders of Urban Debate was formed, led by NYU President John Sexton and Pitney Bowes CEO Michael Critelli. The movement had attracted attention at the highest levels of American institutional life.
In 2013, President Obama invited NAUDL champions to the White House, the culmination of a journey that had begun with a graduate school research paper thirty years earlier. Eight students met with the President in the Oval Office. The activity that had nearly disappeared from urban schools had become a national model for educational intervention.
Today, NAUDL is a backbone organization for 20 debate league partners in 20 cities, serving over 10,000 middle and high school students. Seventy-six percent are from low-income families; eighty-six percent are students of color. Independent peer-reviewed research continues to demonstrate that ninety percent of urban debaters graduate from high school on time, that eighty-five percent attend college, and that urban debaters are 80% more likely to graduate from college than their non-debating peers.
What Debate Teaches
The research explained why debate worked, but the students themselves explained what it meant. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, described her high school debate experience in 2017: "That was an experience that I can say without hesitation was the one activity that best prepared me for future success in law and in life. I learned how to reason and how to write, and I gained the self-confidence that can sometimes be quite difficult for women and minorities to learn at an early age."
The skills that debate develops are distinctive. Students learn to analyze information better than their peers and are less likely to distort the truth or ignore conflicting evidence. They learn to think critically, to collaborate, to communicate, and to create. They learn to persevere and focus in the face of disappointment and defeat. They become three times more likely to vote in elections and twice as likely to participate in social and political campaigns.
But something else happens in debate that is harder to measure. Students from under-resourced schools find themselves competing with and beating students from wealthy suburbs. They discover that their voices matter, that their arguments can win, that they can command attention and respect through the quality of their thinking rather than the circumstances of their birth.
Elysia Tillman, who debated in the Atlanta Urban Debate League starting in fifth grade, described what it meant: "I was a shy kid, so it helped me make a lot of friends. I still talk to people who were in my debate club now." When the club started participating in open debate around the time of the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown killings, debate "helped me look at the systemic issues surrounding their murders and think about solutions. It gave me a place to put my sadness and frustration."
Now working as the Melissa Maxcy Wade Debate and Dialogue Specialist for the Atlanta Urban Debate League, Tillman tries to impart something to the students they train: "I want them to feel empowered to look at the world around them and have faith in their own critical-thinking skills. A lot of kids aren't confident in what they say even if they're right. It's about getting them to realize that they have valuable thoughts about the world. Just because they're students and they're not experts, they still have valuable thoughts."
The Pipeline Problem
The urban debate movement proved something important: that debate could transform educational outcomes for students regardless of socioeconomic background. The evidence was overwhelming, replicated across cities, validated by peer-reviewed research. The model spread from Atlanta to twenty cities, from a few hundred students to over ten thousand.
And yet the movement also revealed the fundamental gap in American debate infrastructure. The pipeline that Bruno Jacob had built in 1925, that the urban debate leagues had extended to under-resourced schools, still ended at the same place: graduation.
The National Speech and Debate Association now enrolls nearly two million members, with 140,000 active student participants each year. Urban Debate Leagues serve another 10,000 students in 20 cities. College debate programs train thousands more. Every year, approximately 500,000 students participate in competitive debate at some level.
And then they graduate.
The private money that launched the urban debate leagues eventually ran out. The Baltimore Urban Debate League asked the city, which provides millions of dollars to high school sports, to put money for debate into the annual budget. As of the 60 Minutes broadcast, to no avail. The leagues that survived did so through the tireless work of coaches, the support of universities, and the continued investment of school districts that recognized the value. But they served students. Only students.
There are no urban debate leagues for adults. There are no after-work programs where professionals can develop their argumentation skills. There is no equivalent of the recreational basketball league, the amateur softball team, the community theater group. The infrastructure that exists to train young people in the skills of research, argumentation, public speaking, and civil discourse does not exist for the adults who need those skills to participate effectively in democratic life.
The Gap
Consider what the urban debate movement demonstrated: that debate skills could be taught to anyone, that they produced measurable improvements in academic performance and life outcomes, that they created engaged citizens who voted and participated in civic life at higher rates than their peers. Consider that these benefits were greatest for the students who started furthest behind.
Now consider that every adult who once debated, and every adult who never had the opportunity, lacks access to any infrastructure to develop or maintain these skills. The half million students who debate each year join the millions who debated before them in a silent alumni network with no ongoing connection, no way to continue practicing, no community to belong to.
The urban debate movement proved that the intervention worked. It did not solve the problem of what happens next.
In the final installment, we will examine what happened to public discourse when an entire generation graduated from debate training into a world designed to make thoughtful disagreement impossible. We will look at the crisis of polarization, the spectacularization of conflict on social media, and the collapse of shared spaces for civil argument. And we will consider what it would mean to finally build the infrastructure that has been missing since the literary societies dissolved in the 1880s: a way for ordinary adults to practice the skills that democracy requires.
Sources and Further Reading
On the Urban Debate Movement: Wikipedia, "Urban debate league"; "Our History," Atlanta Urban Debate League (atlantadebate.org); "History," Chicago Debates (chicagodebates.org).
On Open Society Funding: Wade and Breger, "IdeaFest 1997" (Emory University); "60 Minutes Broadcast to Feature Baltimore Urban Debate League," Open Society Foundations, June 2003.
On Justice Seymour Simon: Wikipedia, "Seymour Simon"; "Who We Are," Chicago Debates.
On Research Outcomes: Mezuk, B. "Urban Debate and High School Educational Outcomes for African American Males," Journal of Negro Education, 2009; Mezuk et al., "Impact of participating in a policy debate program on academic achievement," Educational Research and Reviews, 2011; Anderson and Mezuk, "Participating in a Policy Debate Program and Academic Achievement Among At-risk Adolescents," Journal of Adolescence, 2012.
On the 60 Minutes Segment: "Making Their Case," CBS News 60 Minutes, June 8, 2003; Wikipedia, "Baltimore Urban Debate League."
On NAUDL: "Who We Are," National Association for Urban Debate Leagues (urbandebate.org); "Urban Debaters Meet with President Obama," DebateUS, August 2013.
On Ketanji Brown Jackson: Bradley and Roland, "Critical Thinkers for a Critical Time," National Civic League, 2022.
On Melissa Maxcy Wade: "Retirement reception to honor Melissa Maxcy Wade," Emory University, 2015; "New Era for Emory Debate," Emory Magazine, 2015.
Stay Updated
Get the latest debate insights, tournament updates, and community news delivered to your inbox.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
