Introduction

1. Objective Education - teacher telling, lecturing and student absorbing, taking notes
2. Constructive Education - collaborative and engaging environment between teacher
and student with equal interaction, teaching each other

Topics of Interest (things to be excited about arguing!)

● Measuring intelligence
● School ownership
● Influence of capitalism on schools
● Standardized testing
● Role of federal government
● Common core and other standards
● Discrimination impacting education
● Regulating inequality
● Comprehensive sex education

A Brief History of Education Policy (YES APUSH)

1. Northwest Ordinance (1787) - required towns to set aside land and federal funding for
educational facilities in new Northwest Territories
2. Department of Education est. (1867) - created to collect info and statistics about
nation’s schools but politicians worried it would be a federal overreach, so it was soon
downgraded to just an Office of Education in 1868 where it continued to struggle to find
its place until today
a. New Trend: Battle of Federalism (powers not specified to the federal government
are given to the states, but how much power should each of them have?)
3. Smith Hughes Vocational Education Act (1917) - gave federal funding to promote
agricultural education to train people in a trade, required specific kinds of instruction, and
set standards for how students should learn, etc.
a. New Trend: Federal Regulation (does it increase or decrease quality of
instruction, or acheive the desired results? Because often it does not)
4. New Deal Educational Reforms (1933) - Roosevelt administration wanted to provide
economic relief so spend millions of dollars on education, modifying federal
government’s role in education (we’ll give schools money without regulating instruction),
giving states flexibility (most money was put into public works programs & infrastructure)
a. New Trend: Federal Education Programs (programs designed to train people in
construction, infrastructure building like CCC & PWA, etc. but faced huge
backlash from states’ rights activists)
5. Lanham Act (1941) - gave mothers training and childcare so they could work and
support the war effort in World War II, helped communities with housing & schooling
facilities needed to support war industry
6. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) - overturned Plessy v. Fergusen (1896) and
discounted “separate but equal” justification of segregation… but didn’t work because:
i. Southern states dragged their feet and took their own sweet time, and as
a result another case (Brown #2) stated they must integrate in an
expedient fashion
 ii. Schools were re-segregated through the notion of school choice (white
people chose to go to the same schools), and as a result another case
(Brown #3) stated these policies are illegal
b. New Trend: Solving Social Inequalities in Education (but it faced such a huge
backlash, especially from the South, that the Civil Rights movement was
necessary to make an actual, tangible change)
7. Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) - part of LBJ’s Great Society and
“War on Poverty,” starting with schools (set of laws designed to promote schooling).
Today frequently re-authorized under different names (Bush’s No Child Left Behind and
Obama’s All Students Succeed) and massively expanded government’s role.
a. Title I - helping impoverished and low-income schools; to receive Title I funding,
a school has to demonstrate obvious need, have a track record of being a low-
achievement school, and demonstrate an intent to improving acheivement
(measured, of course, with standardized testing)
b. Title IX - creates gender equality in student organizations and student sports; if
one gender has a sport the other has to have funding for one as well. Helped
establish lots of women’s athletics
i. Expand equal access to education with high standards
ii. Shorten or lessen achievement gaps between lower- and higher-
performing students by enforcing those standards
8. Milakin v. Bradley (1974) - can’t force students to get bussed to another school unless
you can prove schools had racist intent when drawing school districts, essentially the
end of court-ordered bussing and hurt desegregation movement
9. IDEA, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (1975)
a. Kids with disabilities can receive individualized education
b. Schools have to teach kids with disabilities in the least restrictive environment as
possible (as equal and fair as possible)
10. A Nation at Risk (1983) - report published by President Carter’s newly established (a
real one this time) Department of Education stating how the nation’s education system
was falling behind internationally, but had lots of problems
a. Countered by critics who published The Manufactured Crisis, criticizing its
entire lack of accounting for social factors like race, gender, ethnicity, etc. and
therefore misleading data
11. Educational Consolidation and Improvement Act (1981) - a re-authorization of the
ESEA (1965) that increased access to Title I funds
12. Improving America’s Schools Act aka Goals 2000 (1994) - increased local control,
lowered requirements for being a Title I school, and built in accountability methods (so if
a school isn’t showing progress the government can take away their funding), as a result
making schools afraid of losing their funding and more likely to comply
13. No Child Left Behind (2002) - created a set of measures for demonstrating that your
school is a high-quality school (schools have to demonstrate progress, and if they fail to,
the federal government can intervene or close that school). Groups the student
population as a whole as opposed to as individuals.
 a. New Trend: Standardized Testing to measure progress, because schools felt
pressure and threats to lose their funding. But lots of controversy arose from
teachers teaching “to the test”
14. The Race to the Top (2009) - if schools demonstrated “innovation,” and better
acheivement, they receive extra funding and bonuses to foster competition and increase
schools as a whole (highly capitalistic system). Out of this grew a lot of charter schools
that are theoretically “better”
15. ESSA, Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) - gave states a series of standards, but
more freedom to choose which standards to follow voluntarily, giving more room for
flexiblity and change but also some rigidity
a. New Trend: Common Core aka federal standards for education that theoretically
every student should be learning (is uniformity or individuality more important?)

Group Discussion about Quotes: What is Education?

● Foucault - a little hard to understand? Education teaches you how to be a person
● “Six Lessons” - pessimistic, 1984-esque view of education as a mode of conformity to
teach you how to be dependable on a single person and not how to be yourself
● bell hooks - optimistic view of education as freedom and a way to learn outside of
family, poverty, other external circumstances (immigrant opportunity)
● Pedagogy of the Oppressed - education ignores individual culture and background of
each student, and therefore fails even if it has good intentions
● Henry Giroux - education is critical thinking, teaching you how to question as opposed
of feeding you answers, peer pedagogy, you have a potential to make a change in the
world

The WSDI Packet and Topic Argument Overview

Government has power over...
1. Native American schools
2. Washington D.C. schools
3. Schools on military bases

Definitions
● Public school - funded by the government/public taxes and must comply with all federal
standards, most common schools are public
● Private school - doesn’t necessarily receive federal funds and are free from federal
standards, so they can create their own standards and curriculum, admit students
however they want, require tuition to attend, and may have a religious background
● Magnet school - concentrate on a particular topic of education (the arts, STEM) with
often competitive entrance requirements (lottery, application) but must comply with
federal diversity enhancement policies such as transportation to school
● Charter school - built with a specific “charter” or mission, empowered by the federal
government to meet that goal and have more accountability to perform better and have
higher test scores, but subject to less government restrictions as to how they carry out
education (and currently have no diversity enhancement policies or regulation of court-
ordered bussing)
 ○ Can be for-profit (by a company), but less common because they often failed, or
non-profit (community localized mission), which is more common
○ Seen as problematic in current administration under Betsey deVos, a huge
proponent of a free-market approach to education, with school choice and
vouchers that let you choose school
○ Charter schools are not inherently unequal; some are good and some are
terrible. This lack of cohesion has created problems, including court cases

Affirmative Advantage Areas

1. Competitiveness and economy-based, train students to become better workers to
improve nation’s economy and country as a whole
2. Curriculum-based, what should we teach students and why? Better sex ed (yeet),
education about drugs, cultural-based education, STEM education, anything content-
based
3. Rights and inequality-based, all minorities and disadvantaged groups have been hit by
the education system in some way (disability protections) and how to fix that
4. Structure-based, changing how schools work but not what they do; school lunch and
healthy meal programs (go michelle!!!), improving bussing, redrawing district lines,
standards and testing, even a 13th year of school (?? wtf no)
5. Department of Education, federal government’s role in education; security guards,
testing, etc.

Negative Arguments I (disads)

● Money - spending DA, budget tradeoff DA
● States’ rights - federalism DA
● Political ramefications - politics DA, trump DA
● Balance between types of schools - does helping public schools disadvantage charter
schools? Which type of school is the best?

Negative Arguments II (kritiks)

● Capitalism/neoliberalism - schools indoctrinate a capitalistic belief system
● De-schooling movement - getting rid of schools entirely
● Biopower (?), Foucault - kritiks of conformity
● Antiblackness - racial inequalities are expressed in the education system
● But also literally every kritik has some link to education

Negative Arguments III (counterplans)

● States CP - by far will be the most common; affs must prove the fed HAS to do the plan
Camp Affirmative Overview
● Charter schools are currently heavily segregated (predominantly black or white) because
they can ignore the federal requirements established in Brown v. Board 1954
● Diversity is good for education; students in diverse environments learn better, are better
critical thinkers, and perform better on tests
● Charter schools are the least common type (3 million existing) but it’s currently
expanding as a solution to “traditional” types of education
 ● Should demonstrating a commitment to diversity be an important part of their “charter” or
construction of the school? Active recruitment of diverse populations, transportation of
said students to school, etc. If charter schools get more money as an incentive to do
that, would they diversify?
● The country would have a better economic standing in the world as a result of a more
diverse and education populace

What else is in the camp packet?

● Politics DA
● Federalism DA
● States CP
● Neoliberalism K
● Antiblackness K