Quantifying Inequalities in Progressive Debate

Quantifying Inequalities in Progressive Debate 

Creighton J. Getting 

Humanities Department, Naperville Central High School 

Humanities Capstone 

Mr. Seth Brady 

December 13, 2024 

Abstract 

Many high school debaters hold the perception that progressive debate is more inequitable than traditional debate, although such speculation is little other than conjecture supported by anecdotal evidence. Using Lincoln-Douglas Debate as a case study, this article uses data from Tabroom at the Tournament of Champions (progressive) and National Catholic Forensics League (traditional) from 2021-2024 to quantify and evaluate the extent that inequalities of income and resources have in the diverging trends of progressive and traditional debate. In line with speculation from debate competitors, progressive debate is substantially more inequitable than traditional debate as evidenced through (a) the disproportionate attendance at private schools among competitors, and (b) increased access to a tailored debate curriculum, particularly at private schools. These findings highlight the expansion of equitable measures to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds within progressive debate to achieve higher levels of success within the activity.

Quantifying Inequalities in Progressive Debate 

Introduction 

It should come as no surprise that debate as a whole suffers from many of the same inequalities seen in other extracurricular activities. Competitors with higher family incomes are more able to hire a private coach or tutor to train, refine, and improve their argumentation (Jha, 2019). Schools with small debate programs are less likely to attend the same number of national debate tournaments as well-resourced or larger teams might, depriving them of additional opportunities to practice and earn recognition (Chen, 2023). Even the existence of teams themselves is inequitable, as debate is often limited to (or at least skewed towards) higher-income public and private schools while low-income schools may not have the resources to fund a debate team (National Speech and Debate Association & Gorjian, 2024). Those who attempt to rise above the challenge of an unsupportive or nonexistent debate team face additional barriers in the form of bans on independent entries and expensive team fees that often get in their way (Gorman, 2024). 

Simply, debaters with access to coaching — either privately as an individual or hired by the school through a debate team — are more likely to succeed, particularly if the coach is experienced or qualified (Kay, 2023). Debaters from a large team or program are more likely to have competitive success than those from smaller teams, in no small part because they have greater access to experienced and qualified coaching (Fiala, 2023). And those with a team have access to a much greater number of resources than those without a school program to support them (Gorman, 2024). If in the lottery of life, an aspiring debater is born to a family of low economic resources and attends a school without a debate team, they are significantly less likely to be competitively successful than the same debater born to a well-off family attending a private school renowned for its debate program. 

These inequalities are a fact of many extracurricular activities, with debate being no exception. Extracurricular athletics and academic clubs both suffer from economic inequalities, where those from private schools and high socioeconomic statuses are more likely to be involved and earn recognition than counterparts from lower socioeconomic groups or public schools (Park et al., 2023). These inequalities are largely fueled by the barriers of access in activities like debate, such as financial investments associated with coaching and transportation (ibid). However, the barriers of entry in progressive debate are much higher than that in traditional styles of debate. With a broader scope of argumentation, the research required becomes much greater and more complex, such that outside help becomes a requirement (Weigert, 2022). These academics and language tutors are often inaccessible at anything other than the wealthiest public and private schools in the nation, exacerbating existing inequalities beyond the typical investment of a coach stipend into a full-time debate teacher (ibid). Such an experienced debate coach, usually seen as a necessity for improvement to the upper echelons of success, is instead often a prerequisite to learning progressive argumentation in the first place. Resultantly, “[a]lmost all debaters have some form of a coach who helps them with debate” (CircuitDebater, 2024). 

In a context outside of debate, limited-access activities perpetuate existing inequalities, and higher barriers to access often lead to greater socioeconomic inequality (Park et al., 2023). As these barriers are built within progressive debate, there is a growing perception that progressive debate is inequitable, even more so than other debate styles (Weigert, 2022; Thandassery, 2022; Fiala, 2023). To this point, such perceptions are little other than speculation supported by anecdotal evidence. However, that isn’t to say that their analysis is false, only that it lacks the credibility necessary to call for effective action. 

This data-driven analysis seeks to tackle whether or not progressive debate is any more inequitable than traditional debate. It is the first effort to quantify and compare inequalities within progressive and traditional debate.

Methodology 

“Progressive debate” and “traditional debate” are terms that evolve with the argumentation of the competitor pool, and restricting their scope with a limited definition has the potential to cause undesired effects on the methods and conclusions of this article. Granted, some explanation is required to understand and create a distinction between the two styles of debate. To this end, Pittman (2022) writes: 

“Progressive debate usually includes multiple off-case positions such as a counterplan, disadvantage, or Kritik and just about anything possible in the 1AC. The 1AC could be a blatantly non-topical kritikal affirmative or it could be a topical plan text with advantages — the bounds are minimal if at all. These kinds of debates also usually feature nationally-known debate coaches or former debaters who have recently graduated. Debaters in these kinds of debates also “spread” or speed-read[,] talking at a much faster rate than [a] normal conversational speed so as to read off as many arguments as possible in a certain time limit. Traditional debates are very different — they have harsher restrictions on arguments possible, formal dress norms, usually feature values and value criterions, and are [a] conversational speed with any possible judge who do[es] not always have debate experience.” (para. 5) 

Throughout this article and analysis, the above definition can serve as a general rule to differentiate between “progressive debate” and “traditional debate.” 

Lincoln-Douglas debate was chosen to be a case-study for this analysis because of its unique circuit with both progressive and traditional tournaments. Rather than comparing policy debate (generally progressive) and Public Forum debate (generally traditional), Lincoln-Douglas is best able to standardize extraneous variables (i.e. type of debate, whether a school offers the event) and therefore maximize the utility of the findings, because both styles are still governed by the same event rules and regulations.

Two tournaments were chosen for analysis, one progressive and one traditional. After extensive discussion and research, the National Catholic Forensics League Grand National tournament (NCFL) was chosen to represent traditional debate while the Tournament of Champions (TOC) was chosen to represent progressive debate. The status of these tournaments as prestigious national championships attempts to standardize the quality of competitors, as an extensive qualification process lends itself to providing only the most successful debaters in their respective spaces. Thus, no additional weight was placed on those who broke into outrounds or won the tournament except such as to standardize the number of entries — all entries for whom data was cleaned were considered competitively successful for the purposes of this article. 

In each of the four years of data analysis (2021-2024), NCFL had substantially more entrants than the TOC. To eliminate this externality, only the best n performing competitors at each NCFL were analyzed for the purpose of data collection, where n = number of TOC entries during that given year and best performance is defined by prelim records.

Information about the school that each entry attended was collected and analyzed. That information included: 

● Whether the school is a private or public school 

● If the school offers a curricular debate class 

All data was collected from the school’s (or in some cases, the school district’s) official website. The entries and prelim records were collected from tabroom.com, the tournament hosting website of the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA) used by both NCFL and the TOC. 

It is possible that due to human error, certain schools were either omitted or their data was incorrectly reported. However, it is not believed that errors happen on such a large scale to make the multi-year analysis meaningfully different. 

The first data point — whether a school is a private or public school — was collected to provide a correlation between the school and the income of its students. Attendance at a private school has a strong correlation with a student’s family income (Murnane & Reardon, 2017), such that disparities between public and private schools are also likely evidence of income inequality. Attempts to provide a more detailed analysis through the use of per-pupil expenditures were ultimately unsuccessful because (a) many schools do not publish per-pupil expenditures, such that the data would be incomplete, and (b) private school tuition is meaningfully different from public school per-pupil expenditures because of endowments and other factors, such that comparing the two would damage the integrity of any resultant findings. Public charter schools were considered public schools for the purpose of this article. 

The second data point — if the school offers a curricular debate class — was collected to provide evidence of opportunity within debate. Debaters with access to coaching, including those hired by their school, are more likely to experience higher levels of competitive success (Kay, 2023). Attending a debate class and receiving instruction on a daily basis through one’s school provides them with more training and practice than if they were to just participate as a standard extracurricular, therefore exacerbating these disparities of opportunity. Having a curricular debate class can also indicate that the school hired the coach for the express purpose of teaching debate, which is meaningfully different from a non-debate teacher being given a stipend to teach debate as an extracurricular and is further evidence of inequality. Course information was taken from the most recent year on record, and may not be fully accurate for all years analyzed (2021-2024); however, it is believed that any changes to courses offered would not happen on such a large scale to make the analysis meaningfully different. 

Results 

Across the four years Tabroom data, 2021-2024, a total of 361 Lincoln-Douglas entries were analyzed in each the TOC and NCFL, coming from a coming total of 259 schools. Of those, 25 schools had at least one entry in both the TOC and NCFL in any of the years analyzed, while the other 234 were exclusive to only one of the tournaments, indicating that there is minimal crossover between progressive and traditional Lincoln-Douglas debate at the highest levels of competition. The results show that entrants in the TOC had access to more resources and opportunities than those at NCFL across all metrics tracked. The top progressive debaters were more likely to come from a private school (43.8%, n = 158) than traditional debaters (21.6%, n = 78). Both styles of debate skewed towards private schools compared to the national average of 13.4% (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022).

Progressive debaters were also more likely to have a dedicated debate class offered at their school (68.4%) than similarly-skilled traditional debaters (50.1%).

Interestingly, the trend is driven by disparities between public and private schools attending the two tournaments. Though both the TOC and NCFL have higher rates of coaching experience and curricular debate offerings at private schools than public schools, the disparity is substantially larger at progressive tournaments. At the TOC, entrants from private schools are more likely to have access to curricular debate (83.5%) than entrants from public schools (54.2%). Meanwhile, entrants from private schools at NCFL are only marginally more likely to have curricular debate (51.9%) than public schools at the same competition (45.8%).

Since 2021, this inequality has grown in progressive debate while simultaneously shrinking in traditional debate. At the 2021 TOC, a smaller percentage of entrants came from private schools (43.5%) than did at the 2024 TOC (50.0%). In traditional debate, the percentage of entries coming from private schools has remained virtually unchanged in that time period, marginally increasing from 2021 (21.2%) to 2024 (22.7%).

Those progressive competitors from 2021 also had similar access to curricular debate programs (70.3%) as progressive debaters from public schools (68.8%). By contrast, the 2024 TOC featured a greater percentage of private school debaters with access to curricular debate (93.2%) while hosting a smaller percentage of public school debaters with the same opportunity (46.5%). Meanwhile, the exact opposite has happened in traditional debate. At the 2021 NCFL tournament, entrants from private schools had greater opportunities in the form of curricular debate (61.1%) than entrants from public schools (41.8%). In the three years since, that disparity has decreased. At the 2024 NCFL tournament, entrants from private schools were marginally less likely to attend a school with curricular debate (50.0%) than those from public schools (51.5%).

Discussion 

These results show that while both traditional and progressive debate are inequitable and skew towards private schools, progressive debate is significantly more inequitable than traditional debate. Furthermore, the difference is only increasing as Lincoln-Douglas further subscribes to progressivism in national competitions. The most competitively successful progressive debaters are disproportionately likely to attend private schools, have access to curricular debate paid for by their school, and work with recognized coaches on their debate team. These results are all statistically greater inequities than the same metrics applied to traditional debate.

Given the high barriers of entry that are associated with progressive debate (Weigert, 2022), these results are not entirely surprising. If students are required to access dedicated coaches and language tutors from the world of academia to understand complex progressive arguments (ibid), then it’s far more likely that those students attend schools with curricular debate that allows them to receive more frequent training, research, and practice.

When the barriers of entry into an activity are high, there is often greater income inequality within the activity favoring the wealthy (Park et al., 2023). Progressive debate is no different. Because private school enrollment is so strongly correlated with income (Murnane & Reardon, 2017), many of the inequities typically seen in income inequality similarly present themselves in a growing disparity between public and private schools at the TOC. This is further evidenced by the disproportionate focus that private schools offer more opportunity for extracurricular activities than their public school counterparts (Park et al., 2023). Thus, it should come as no surprise that private schools are the ones attending progressive tournaments and offering curricular debate. The limitation of these trends to just progressive debate indicates that it is the style of debate, more than the activity as a whole, that experiences these inequalities. 

Substantive changes in the data points tracked between 2021-2024 were an unexpected result, although it’s not entirely surprising. As Lincoln-Douglas debate has further subscribed to progressive argumentation (Wright, K., personal communication, October 10, 2024), it would make logical sense that the students qualifying and competing at the TOC would face a greater extent of the same inequalities that occur within progressive debate generally. Such a result has the potential to conversely decrease the inequalities within traditional debate in that same span. 

Some schools also did not have all data points available for collection. Between NCFL and the TOC, a total of 12 schools (4.63%) did not publicly release a full list of available courses such that it would be impossible to make a conclusion about whether or not curricular debate was offered, representing 29 entries (4.01%). In these instances, no assumptions were made about the affected data and the school was rather exempted from analysis on that metric (i.e. schools not publishing course offerings did not contribute to the number or percent of schools offering curricular debate). The data from those schools were analyzed for metrics that were unaffected by the absent evidence (i.e. schools not publishing course offerings were analyzed for whether they were a public or private school). 

No conclusions can be effectively drawn about socioeconomic inequalities, as gathered data instead focused on inequalities of opportunity. While there is a strong correlation between income and attendance at private schools (Murnane & Reardon, 2017), similar inequalities exist within public education — high-income areas usually have a greater quality of public education than low-income areas (Owens et al., 2016), resulting in better student outcomes and increased funding for extracurricular offerings (Jackson et al., 2015). 

The analysis was also limited to Lincoln-Douglas debate as a case study. However, progressive debate is not limited to Lincoln-Douglas — it exists to a greater extent in Policy debate and is growing in Public Forum debate (Bodnick, 2023). Traditional debate, similarly, is not limited to Lincoln-Douglas — it exists to a greater extent in Public Forum debate and Parliamentary debate (ibid). 

Further research may reveal further conclusions about income inequality within debate by analyzing the specific public and private schools in attendance or the (family) income of competitors at progressive and traditional tournaments, instead of making generalizations as was done in this analysis. It may also draw from evidence in other relevant debate events, such as Policy and Public Forum debate.

Beyond these limitations, there were many inequalities demonstrated through this research: that progressive debate skews towards private schools at a higher rate than traditional debate and that disparities between curricular debate offering between public and private institutions are larger at progressive tournaments than traditional ones — and growing.

Conclusion 

This case study represents the first effort to quantify inequalities within progressive and traditional debate. It found that the highest levels of competitive success in progressive Lincoln-Douglas debate are disproportionately populated by students from private schools with access to curricular debate, compared to counterparts in traditional Lincoln-Douglas debate, and that these inequalities are growing. 

This evidence shows that attendance at a private school and greater access to quality coaching through curricular debate are precursors of success, particularly in progressive debate. Such conclusions should be taken with caution given the statistical limitations in the availability of data, and should encourage further studies to analyze a greater number of factors that contribute to inequality within progressive debate. 

These findings can be interpreted such as to encourage more tournaments to adopt traditional styles of debate. Since they are more equitable compared to progressive debate, this would serve to help achieve the mission of tournaments like the TOC, which “values the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion with regard to tournament practice” (Tournament of Champions, 2024). Such a practice would include the enforcement of the NSDA’s standard practices in Lincoln-Douglas debate, chiefly: 

“Resolutional burden: The debaters are equally obligated to focus the debate on the central questions of the resolution, not whether the resolution itself is worthy of debate. Because the affirmative must uphold the resolution, the negative must also argue the resolution as presented.” (Halvorson & Koshy, 2013)

The standard practice may also be encouraged to be adopted as NSDA policy within their unified manual for all forms of debate. Further action in support of traditional debate may include the hiring of judges that are experienced in traditional Lincoln-Douglas debates over those who are experienced in progressive Lincoln-Douglas debates. This action becomes increasingly important as the TOC and other progressive tournaments overwhelmingly host judges that support progressive argumentation (Bodnick, 2023). 

The findings can be otherwise interpreted to encourage change within the system of progressive debate. Urban Debate Leagues (UDLs) provide an opportunity for many low-income schools to compete and receive coaching in policy debate (Wright, K., personal communication, October 10, 2024), which thereby has the potential to decrease inequalities within that space. Local CFLs provide similarly-affordable opportunities for competition in traditional debate formats (ibid). If comparable action were to be taken to expand access to regular, quality coaching and practice in progressive debate, there is a reasonable chance that inequalities could be diminished. 

Given the growing nature of these inequalities in recent years, the need for urgent action should be stressed in creating any policy solution. Progressive debate is inequitable, but it doesn’t need to be that way.

References 

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