Executive Summary: Common Core Standards
The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), in partnership with Achieve, ACT, and the College Board, have launched a joint effort to develop Common Core Standards. Governors and state commissioners of education from around the country have committed to this state-led process to develop common core state standards, and are making significant progress towards the adoption of research-backed, evidence-based, and internationally benchmarked college- and career-ready standards.
The Common Core Standards represent the goals which school systems nationwide have set as instructional imperatives - the skills without which no high school graduate is adequately prepared to face the demands of his or her future. Urban debate participation enhances broader efforts to improve teaching and learning by promoting key components of the Common Core Standards. The most recent public draft of the Common Core Standards for English and Language Arts emphasizes argument identification, construction, and interaction, skills which are uniquely cultivated by debate participation.
The Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening standards center on evidence, argumentation, and audience. In privileging the importance of evidence, the standards contend that students who are college and career ready exhibit these capacities:
Students cite specific textual evidence when offering an oral or written interpretation of a piece of writing. They use relevant evidence when supporting their own points in writing and speaking, making their reasoning clear to the reader or listener, and they constructively evaluate others' use of evidence.
In framing the purpose of the writing standards, the Common Core begins with argument:
Make an Argument: While many high school students have experience presenting their opinions, they need to be able to make arguments supported by evidence in order to be ready for careers and college. Students must be able to frame the debate over a claim, present the reasoning and evidence for the argument, and acknowledge and address its limitations. In some cases, students will make arguments to gain entry to college or to obtain a job, laying out their qualifications or experience. In college, students might defend an interpretation of a work of literature or of history; in the workplace, employees might write to recommend a course of action.
In describing how communication must respond to the varying demands of audience, task, purpose, and discipline, the standards remind policy makers and practitioners that students are prepared for post-secondary success when:
Students consider their reading, writing, and speaking and listening in relation to the contextual factors of audience, task, purpose, and discipline. They appreciate nuances, such as how the composition and familiarity of the audience should affect tone. They also know that different disciplines call for different types of evidence (e.g., documentary evidence in history, experimental evidence in the natural sciences).
Urban Debate Leagues (UDLs) employ policy debate, a method of academic competition that incentivizes effective communication of arguments based on evidence. Debate engages students by using a proven competition format to motivate and establish academic norms to teach evidence-base argument within reading, writing, speaking and listening.
Research shows that debate participation improves college and career ready English and Language Arts skills. In a study of the Chicago Debate League, urban debate participants were 50% more likely to reach the ACT English benchmarks than non-debater peers, and African American male urban debaters were 70% more likely to reach the ACT Reading benchmark than non-debater peers.