Tag: U.S. education policy

By Logan Scisco

Education, the one social issues topic that makes most extempers as squeamish as drawing a topic on abortion, a controversial racial issue, or gender topics.  The reason for this squeamishness is simple:  most of your judges are educators or are parents who have children in some stage of the American education system.  As a result of this, extempers are afraid of offending their audience because no teacher wants to be told for seven minutes that they are part of the problem in U.S. education and no parent wants to be told that their child is stuck in a failing education system for the same period of time.  However, extempers who fall into the trap of ending up on the wrong side of a judge’s ballot often run afoul because they do not have solid facts and information to convince the audience of their viewpoint.  Instead, those who often go with the advocacy position that U.S. education needs to be improved do not offer much hope for improvement at all and simply dwell on the negatives of the system.  That road will lead to many lost rounds that an extemper could have won if they had researched the issue much more in depth.

U.S. education is one of those topics where an extemper already has direct experience.  After all, if you are an extemper reading this brief you are enrolled in a high school somewhere in this country and (hopefully) regularly attend school everyday.  There are probably teachers you like and teachers you hate and you probably have some of your own opinions as to how your education could be improved upon.  Therefore, when reading information about the U.S. education system you should be able to make connections to your own learning environment.  This makes reading articles about U.S. education much simpler and more intriguing for extempers (at least of the domestic variety).

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