Policy Implications for Policy Debate
Most reading interventions are focused on the early elementary years, and third grade reading proficiency is viewed as a bellwether for success in adulthood. But what about the nine years of school that follow? We find substantial positive impacts for teenage students, the majority of whom are low-income students of color, when they participate in a competitive high-school policy debate team. Debaters make outsized progress in mastering sophisticated literacy skills and are more likely to graduate high school and enroll in college—and the biggest gains are among the students the farthest behind at the end of fifth grade. It’s never too late to accelerate student progress.
The average improvement in debaters’ reading scores is comparable to two-thirds of a year of learning and about 20 percent of the gap in 8th-grade reading between students who do and do not qualify for subsidized school lunch. Prior research has uncovered few interventions that generate literacy impacts of this magnitude for secondary school students.
Further, the positive impacts on reading scores from participating in debate are twice as large for students with the lowest baseline levels of proficiency than for students with average scores, and we find a similar pattern of results for postsecondary outcomes. Debate programs therefore have the potential to reduce educational inequality by accelerating improvement most dramatically for the students who struggle most.
These programs also are inexpensive relative to other interventions. For example, the current per-pupil cost of the Boston Debate League is about $1,360 compared to about $2,800 for high-dosage tutoring, such as the well-regarded Match Education program. Prior research has found that students’ reading performance improves by 15 percent to 25 percent of a standard deviation after tutoring. Therefore, policy debate programs appear to generate up to double the impact on reading test scores per dollar compared to state-of-the-art high-dosage tutoring.
Our study is not without limitations. Only a small subset of Boston students, all of them volunteers, participate in debate, and we can’t speak to what would happen if students were required to join. We also can’t fully rule out the possibility that some or all of the estimated effects on postsecondary outcomes are driven by selection bias, particularly because the postsecondary impact estimates are quite large.
However, our finding that the gains in reading scores are concentrated on analytical thinking competencies rather than foundational language rules and conventions strengthens our confidence that our results reflect the impact of debate participation, not some other unobserved factor. This finding also suggests that policy debate develops students’ critical thinking skills, another goal for which evidence-based strategies are in short supply. Future research should probe this finding further with better measures of critical thinking, argumentation skills, and other competencies needed for academic and civic participation such as social perspective taking, media literacy, the ability to distinguish fact from opinion, and engagement with the policy process.
Beyond highlighting the value of formal debate programs, we believe these findings also have implications for classroom instruction. A handful of organizations, including the Boston Debate League, have developed and implemented professional development programs to help teachers infuse debate pedagogy into regular classrooms. Often called “debate-centered instruction,” the goal is to give more students the opportunity to benefit from debate-like learning opportunities, not just those who can choose to take part in an intensive out-of-school program. The potential for such instruction to accelerate reading development, particularly for students far behind grade level, is an important subject for future research. While our study demonstrates exciting results for extracurricular debate participants, there may be even greater dividends to incorporating some of these practices into regular classroom-based instruction, to reach all students.
