It wasn’t the Boston Debate League, but a team from our sister league in Chicago recently won the National Forensics League Grand Tournament in Kansas City, making them the first Urban Debate League team ever to win a national championship (there are several- the NFL’s are the largest, though arguably not the most prestigious). The Chicago Debate League was one of the first UDL’s in the country and is considerably older and larger than the BDL. The winning team hails from Whitney Young High School, which actually had a debate team even before the CDL got off the ground.
Not that I can take any credit for this victory, but I worked with the CDL for several years while I was in college. In fact, it was a formative experience that led to my starting up the BDL when I moved to Boston. Even absent that personal history, I’d have to say that this is a very impressive accomplishment that hopefully will pave the way for more UDL success on the traditional debate circuit in the future.
Wow, that’s pretty impressive for a UDL school to win in policy debate. I thought for sure it was gonna be in that weak “Public Forum” event. Nice to hear it was in “real” hardcore debate!
It definitely took some extra effort to compensate for the resource disparities between WY and the traditional powerhouse schools. For one thing, WY is a magnet school, meaning that is part of the Chicago Public Schools but has a competitive admissions process and in fact is often considered one of the best public schools (not just urban public schools) in the country. For another, quite a lot of private money was donated specifically to help this team travel and compete on the national circuity.
Not to take anything away from their accomplishment, but it’s not a model that’s replicable on a large-scale, and this school’s experience is not representative of the vast majority of UDL schools/students.
It’s cool to see a different school do well at NFL, but it would have een even bette had it been at TOC’s, but still a great accomplishment known the less. With the BDL you started, do you guys do Policy and LD, or all the IE events (Extemp, HI, DI, etc.) as well?
This team did actually do quite well at the TOC as well. I think they were only the second UDL team ever to clear to out-rounds and were something like 3rd and 8th speaker. One of the Whitney Young students won the Julia Burke award as well. They’ve had quite a bit of success on the national circuit, been invited to round robins and stuff like that.
The BDL is only policy debate, as are most UDL’s. It’s a lot easier to focus on just one activity, especially since most of the coaches have no prior experience with forensics, and policy is the most rigorous and the one that focuses most on literacy skills, which are very important to urban school systems.
Whitney Young HG not only qualified for the TOC, but broke to octafinals. They have a ton of experience doing “fast” policy debate and had one of the highest bid counts in the nation.
Foucault, just curious but how are kids in your UDL instructed? Is speed bad or a normal thing? Most urban schools I’ve seen go run either some sort of critical pedagogy or speed kritiks.
It’s really amazing that you also are involved in policy debate, lol. Small world.
There’s no official BDL policy regarding speed or anything like that. The thing is that 99.9% of BDL debater’s debates take place within the BDL. That is, we have a few opportunities to compete in suburban tournaments or with other UDL’s, but usually only more experienced students take advantage of those.
We have about 200 debaters in the city of Boston at 10 schools, and those numbers will be even higher next year, so we have enough people to basically just do our own thing internally. It doesn’t help that what policy debate there is in Massachusetts is extremely competitive and there isn’t a lot of middle ground for students who are among the best in the BDL but not on the level of Lexington.
So most of our students don’t even get that speaking quickly is common practice in many debate circles. It’s not a skill that we teach during our seminars, not because of any official policy disapproving but simply because there are more important things to focus on. We do have some students who are familiar with it and attempt to emulate it, with varying degrees of success. The thing is that a lot of the judges in the BDL aren’t able to follow it anyway, so it’s usefulness is limited.
My own opinion is that spreading is educationally valuable- it’s how I debated and I got a lot out of it- but only for really serious debaters. Basically it takes a lot of work to get good at it before one starts seeing the educational benefit, and most of our students are what I would call casual debaters. They debate locally for 1-3 years, probably 25-30 rounds each year, and don’t continue with in college. Those students don’t have the time to get “up to speed” to the point where it’s an educationally valuable skill for them, so we focus on helping them get the most out of their relatively brief careers with regard to critical thinking, reading, English language skills, organization, etc.
That’s just my opinion, though, which honestly doesn’t carry much weight these days anyway. It’s something that the coaches, the students, and the current ED will have to figure out eventually.
Great news! This is a very worthwhile cause to support with financial donations, or with volunteering time and expertise. How would a person get in touch with their local UDL?