Urban Debate League

An urban debate league (UDL) is a group of high school policy debate teams from urban high schools in the United States. UDLs are generally located in large cities throughout the United States and work predominantly with minority students.

There were various initiatives surrounding debate in urban areas in the early 1980s in Atlanta, Detroit, and Philadelphia.

The 1960s saw a rapid expansion of interscholastic forensics - competitive speech and debate. Rapid growth by the National Forensic League and the forensic community as a whole was matched by a growing number of metropolitan leagues intended to increase tournament opportunities in areas where a number of speech and debate programs existed. The Philadelphia Senior High School Debate League was started in the School District in the mid-1960s. By 1965, a large Metro Forensic League which included speech, theater, and debate competition developed in Nashville, Tennessee. Many of those programs simply merged into the overall forensics community, but some continued to flourish as specialized, localized communities. By the early 1980s, approximately 30 Philadelphia teams were meeting once a week after school at Olney High School doing Policy Debate. The league became the Philadelphia Scholastic Debate League in 2007 with the support of the After School Activities Partnerships (ASAP) and switched to Public Forum debate in 2008.

In the 1980s, the face of high school debate began to change. A growing awareness of the unequal access to debate spurred some individuals to focus on the need to expand access to disadvantaged groups in urban areas. Traditionally left out by financial constraints, many inner-city school students were completely excluded. The Detroit Public Debate League began in 1984 as an after-school partnership between the Detroit Gifted and Talented Program and Wayne State University Director of Debate George Ziegelmueller. While developed as a "gifted" program, it was open to all Detroit communities and brought many socio-economically disadvantaged students into the activity. In Atlanta, the Urban Debate League was born as a graduate school research paper in 1983 that explored the hypothesis that debate might be a tool to level the playing field in education, and that words might be used to reduce violence in America’s cities. The initial Atlanta UDL was formed as a partnership between the Barkley Forum of Emory University and the Atlanta Public Schools. The concept took root and flourished, and by 1985, it was a fully established league.

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