Understanding Rural Debate
Rural education and extracurricular programming faces significant challenges compared to its urban counterpart. These challenges have long been exacerbated by a lack of attention by lawmakers, legislators, and even everyday people. Currently, rural education is characterized by a significant gap in the attainment of a 4-year college education, vastly higher rates of childhood poverty, and much less funding than urban counterparts. Two of the most pronounced challenges include:
Right now, transportation is costly for rural schools and draining to rural students. Rural residents only make up 15% of the total population while rural areas make up 72% of the land mass in the US. Students that attend rural schools often are required to travel up to 3 hours to get to school itself, while funding these transportation programs is expensive.
Teachers in rural areas often face lower salaries and larger workloads. Due to the sparse population in rural regions, rural schools struggle to find qualified teachers that will work on a committed basis at the school. For instance, science teachers are often asked to teach biology, chemistry, and physics. This means teachers face increased stress, with most rural teachers leaving after their first three years. This constant turnover presents difficulties to the school itself as well as the enrolled students.
In particular, for debate, the urban-rural difference is stark: twice as many urban schools have debate compared to rural schools. Rural debate programs often lack monitorship, resources, and are geographically isolated, making it difficult to both create and maintain a competitive debate team. As of 2024, around 20% of Eloquence Academy’s total student body and school partners are based in areas considered geographically rural. Eloquence collaborates with the Rural Debate Initiative (RuDI) to develop leading debate programming and tournaments for schools in rural areas to alleviate this gap.
The primary recent development that has aided rural education is the introduction to digital learning. The pandemic has transformed student tech access due to the frequency and use of virtual learning to prevent the spread of COVID outbreaks. Many schools modernized their virtual learning systems and were able to provide students with a digital learning device. This change will allow rural schools to access a new workforce of virtual teachers and students to access high-quality virtual learning materials.
We’ve also recently seen new legislative attention to rural education. The American Rescue Plan allocated a historic $122 billion in funding that will be used through Fall 2024, mainly for a continued investment in learning devices. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission has invested an unprecedented $20 billion to increase internet access in rural areas. That’s why we’ve already seen a 23% increase in students with a digital learning device and the percentage of total rural areas with 25/3Mbps internet.
To that end, we’d like to share a three-part plan to further bolster the prominence and success of rural debate programs.
Step 1: Centralization
A significant problem in addressing equality in the debate community is the lack of a centralized framework. Without a central point, advocacy projects become less effective due to poor coordination.
The best method for establishing a central point of contact is to partner with the largest debate organization that nearly every debater knows and acknowledges: the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA). The NSDA already hosts a vast network of coaches, mentors, and resources. This would enhance outreach and ensure that efforts to reduce rural debate inequity are efficient and impactful nationwide. The NSDA's presence in every state and its ability to offer key mentorship and centralized frameworks make it the ideal partner for this initiative.
In fact, the National Speech and Debate Association already conducts workshops and training programs for emerging debaters. This very experience with running camps and training can be leveraged when spreading these initiatives to rural areas.
Step 2: Resource Infrastructure
With the NSDA partnership, each state should establish a resource bank reserved for rural schools in their area. This could likely be an online platform for rural debaters to access high-quality debate packets, materials, evidence, and briefs, benefiting their performance in tournaments. Teams with stronger connections and money often have easier access to finding these resources in the first place..
The resource bank could be updated regularly with up-to-date information and provided at little to no cost to rural schools. The specifics of how these banks will function can be refined through state partnerships with the NSDA.
Step 3: Training
This step involves leveraging existing resources to improve training for rural debaters. The NSDA's extensive mentorship base can be used to train rural high school coaches and students. Rural schools could receive monthly trainings from NSDA mentors regarding strategy and debate information.
Training also involves setting up more competition and tournament opportunities to prepare rural debaters for national circuit debate tournaments. The NSDA should use its connections with high schools to organize intramural tournaments in rural areas, and occasionally invite experienced and larger debate programs. This will give rural schools the preparation and confidence needed for future tournaments.
Written by Akshat Anand from Atlanta, Georgia. Akshat was a Regional Director at Eloquence Academy.
