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Resources for Policy and Practice: White Papers and Issue Briefs
- Focus on Turning Around the Lowest-Performing Schools Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has prioritized improving our lowest-performing schools.The Urban Debate League approach focuses on exactly these schools, providing students with opportunities to learn and low performing schools with a chance to raise the ceiling.
- On-Time Graduation and Drop-Out Rates Ensuring that students in urban schools graduate from high school is a pressing challenge. Urban Debate Leagues have been shown to increase on-time graduation rates and decrease drop-out rates for participants.
- College and Career Readiness The knowledge economy demands that high schools equip graduates with the skills necessary for post-secondary success. Urban Debate Leagues have been shown to increase college and career readiness.
- Secondary Literacy Even those students who gain basic literacy skills in earlier grades too often fail to advance beyond basic literacy and master reading diverse texts of sufficient complexity, quality, and range. Urban Debate Leagues refine exactly these skills.
- Common Core Standards The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers have initiated a state-led process of developing and adopting a common core of state curricular standards. Among the first standards to be developed will be those for English Language Arts. The skills taught by Urban Debate Leagues align with the proposed English Language Arts standards.