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Over the next month and a half, Extemp Central will provide R&Ds on the topic areas for the 2022 NSDA National Tournament. USX topic areas will have R&Ds posted on Thursday and IX topic areas will have R&Ds posted on Friday. This is meant to help extempers assemble resources to prepare for the competition in Louisville. This week we tackle USX topic area #2 on education.
More recognition, flexible schedules, and better pay are among the keys to improving teacher morale, a panel of education experts said in a candid discussion about a “profession in crisis.” #TeacherTwitter https://t.co/YN2JsS84S8
— Education Week (@educationweek) May 10, 2022
Opinion: We can’t afford not to pay for undocumented immigrants’ education https://t.co/a8oqgMyMCI
— Houston Chronicle (@HoustonChron) May 10, 2022
NEW: Black and Hispanic Americans, those with less education are more likely to fall out of the middle class each year https://t.co/unR8iBttdQ pic.twitter.com/gSoXL16rpd
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) May 10, 2022
Although growing partisanship has characterized Congress for the better part of the last two decades, there is still one area where members of both political parties find ways to work together and that is education reform. Traditionally, bipartisan coalitions have been instrumental in crafting federal education legislation, whether that be the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the formation of the Department of Education in 1979, or the 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Last week, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate approved a reauthorization of the ESEA that had been left in limbo since 2007. The reauthorization bill – dubbed the Every Student Succeeds Act – will replace NCLB in the fall of 2017 and will give states more flexibility when designing assessments, measuring school performance, and evaluating teachers. In many ways, it is a repudiation of the top-down structure imposed by NCLB, which aimed to use testing to measure American schools and identify troubled ones. However, the bill will retain NCLB’s testing requirements, so the American education system’s culture of standardized testing is not completely going away.
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One of the biggest anxieties in American culture is the fear that the country is lacking a qualified workforce that will be economically competitive in the twenty-first century. While politicians have primarily focused their efforts on fixing America’s elementary and secondary institutions, college might be the next frontier of state-driven education reform. Less than thirty percent of Americans have a Bachelor’s degree and reformers note that part of the reason is the growing cost of college attendance. Over the last fifty years, tuition costs have exploded at public and private institutions, as have housing and textbook charges. While the number of Americans attending college is rising, graduation rates remain poor and student debt to service the cost of college is also increasing. Fears about the growing cost of college and its impact on American social mobility and the nation’s economy have made college-oriented education reform a part of the 2016 presidential elections. Candidates such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie have detailed plans to either slow tuition increases, reduce student debt, and/or make college education more of a national entitlement. Political analysts argue that a candidate with a suitable program to make college more affordable could galvanize the youth vote in 2016, something that politicians have learned can sway elections in the Obama years.
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Last week Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sparked a firestorm over the controversial Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which are aimed at raising education standards nationwide to meet college and career ready targets. Addressing criticism of the standards, Duncan argued that white, suburban mothers were angry because their children and schools were not as good as they felt they were. Forces that oppose Common Core standards immediately called for his resignation and he apologized for his comments several days later. The firestorm over Common Core standards is one of the most interesting domestic issues because it is one issue where far-left and far-right forces find areas of agreement.
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Domestic social issues are issues that extempers never want to discuss. Extempers dread walking into them and feel even worse after they have competed. Speaking on domestic social issues well is a fine balancing act between taking a moderate approach on issues, so as not to offend judges, and having a knowledge base that can cite specific examples of how approaches have worked in the past and could work better in the future.