Finding Their Voices

Jermol Jupiter, left, and Ignacio Evans in an alley near Jermol's house in Baltimore. (Scott Gregory Robinson)

This, despite the fact that debate coaches don't set out to attract top students. "The kids people expect us to serve, the ones who naturally rise to the top, always find us," says Baltimore Urban Debate League Executive Director Pam Spiliadis. "But those aren't the kids we're most after. We target the ones who have a lot of potential but don't live up to it, who skip school, who goof off, who are disengaged from learning."

The program relies on teens' love of arguing, their desire to compete and their prodigious appetites (free breakfast and pizza are served at every tournament) to attract participants. "We tell students, 'You already know how to argue; let's just add some structure and research to make your arguments sound,'" Spiliadis says.

Organizers get the students on their feet from the start, arguing in front of their peers about a topic they are already familiar with. "Immediately, they get the thrill and rush that comes from having people listen to them instead of lecturing them, and there is something very exciting and empowering about that -- especially when they get rewarded with a trophy for doing it well."

These "intellectual athletes" can get 500 additional hours of academic instruction each year through debate practice and the research that goes into preparing their arguments, Spiliadis says, but, just as important, debate becomes an empowering tool for them. "They become critical thinkers and speakers, and effective advocates for themselves and their communities."

Baltimore's Urban Debate League is part of a burgeoning national movement to bring debate to inner-city kids, with similar programs launched in more than 20 cities over the past decade, from Detroit to Chicago to Kansas City to Washington. The program in the District is still in its infancy: Approximately 300 students regularly participate, many from the city's charter schools. Colin Touhey, director of the District's program, says debate has reached a crucial turning point here, with the city's new chancellor willing to embrace and expand the program throughout the public schools.

In Baltimore, money to launch the Urban Debate League in 1999 came from the George Soros-funded Open Society Institute, which spent more than $3 million over six years to get the program going. Originally, OSI had been an advocate and funder for debate programs in the former Soviet Union, envisioning the programs as a way to teach the disenfranchised about citizenship in a participatory democracy. But it wasn't long before the folks at OSI looked around and realized that the disenfranchised in this country might benefit from a similar program. Today, OSI has funded urban debate programs in 14 U.S. cities where poverty, crime and racism are prevalent.

"A few years back, you could walk into some of the language arts classes here in Baltimore and kids would literally have their heads down on the desk, asleep," says Diana Morris, director of OSI-Baltimore. "Then you walk into a debate class, and the kids would be on their feet, totally excited, strategizing about putting an argument together and arguing over how to back it. It was like night and day." The program has been so successful in Baltimore that it now operates independently of OSI and is administered instead by a partnership between the city's public schools and Towson University.

But the biggest benefit of debate, according to the coaches, teachers and judges in the program, is that it engages underprivileged students, who are learning to study, think, write and present their ideas with the best of them. In the '70s, when budget crunches forced urban schools to eliminate many "extraneous" programs, such as art, drama and speech, debate became the exclusive bailiwick of affluent private and suburban public schools. "For a long time, debate teams had looked very white and male, in coats and ties, like you'd expect," says Spiliadis. "But we've changed the face of debate."

The Baltimore urban debaters have also put their mark upon it.

If the nation's high school debate world is its own subculture with its own lingo (legalese and non-vernacular speech) and traditions (business attire, please!), and the Urban Debate League is its own subculture within this world with slightly different lingo ("Yo! Judges, listen up.") and traditions (food, and plenty of it), then Iggy and Jermol are in a further counter-culture of the debate world.

Students in all the high school Urban Debate Leagues practice policy debate, which is research intensive and requires them to argue the same topic all year, going deeper into their preparation and thinking. But Iggy and Jermol are part of a growing movement that challenges the very rules of debate.

Called kritik, or performance debate, the form is generally credited to teams at California State University-Fullerton, the University of Texas-Austin and Fort Hays State University in Kansas. The teams who use it -- estimated to be approximately 10 percent of the college circuit, 5 percent of the high school circuit and 25 percent of Baltimore debaters -- value the emotional impact of arguing, and they work that angle by using rap, hip-hop, poetry and performance art to help make their points accessible and moving. ("Other cats spit raps about gats and staying strapped because that's all they got / focus on what's not / well, it's times like this / somebody should speak up and say it's ludicrous," high school senior Damien Poole rapped to the Baltimore judges during a debate about violence at a tournament in April.) These rebel debaters are likely to go off topic or "kritik" the topic, rules or nature of debate itself. Critics of the form say it undermines the rigorous research required to win in conventional policy debate. But proponents insist it levels the playing field.