Crowds of Lincoln High School students flooded the sidewalks along Broadway recently as another school day came to an end. But 16-year-old Tania Navarro wasn't in the crowd. She sat inside one of the school's bungalow classrooms, tapping her pencil against the sheet of paper in front of her.
"I love to argue," she said.
But her penchant for verbal confrontation hadn't landed her in detention hall.
She and nine of her classmates are part of the back-in-vogue world of high school debate, long a staple of American high schools until falling out of fashion in the 1980s. Educators and others are hoping the art of forceful and reasoned argument will once again sweep into many of Los Angeles' high schools.
"For many of our students, English is a second language, and many of them are poor . . . and debate has nothing to do with that," said Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, who was a member of his college debate team. "They learn, in the end, that they can succeed with their words even when society tells them they can't."
Some schools have individual debate teams, but their numbers are spotty and they frequently depend on the dedication of one teacher.
The National Assn. of Urban Debate Leagues, which includes the Los Angeles chapter, is a nonprofit network of policy debate teams made up mainly of minority students from urban high schools in 24 large cities, including New York, Boston and Chicago.
"Too often students are inactive, passive recipients of the educational system and its process," said Brett Flater, director of Los Angeles Urban Debate League, which was launched in the fall. "When they understand they have a voice, a drastic change occurs: they're suddenly engaged. You don't have to train students to get up and express an opinion -- they're full of them."
In 1999, the Southern California Urban Debate League was established to support economically underserved schools in Orange County. Debate teams are relatively scarce in other urban districts, where dropout rates are high, test scores are low and a large majority of students qualify for reduced-price lunches.
The Los Angeles debate league serves more than 80 students -- a number organizers hope to increase to 300 students in 30 schools in the next three years. The L.A. chapter's $326,000 budget comes mostly from Los Angeles Unified School District funds and donations from members of a local advisory board.
