Clay Stewart

Debate Team

September/ October LD Debate Kritik (Neg)

The problem with my opponents case is not that he does not advocate the use of
standardized testing, it is that he does so within the public school system. Because
this system is destroying our country academically, socially, and economically, I
negate.

Contention One: The Public School System is Destroying Our Country Academically

Subpoint One: Government Monopoly of Education is Harmful

An intrinsic facet of public education is that the government is the sole supplier.
This means that there is no competition, and therefore no decent incentive, for
government schools to improve. Within public education, we see none of the innovation
and market-driven competition that makes other American industries strong. ABC’s
Stossel explains, “American schools don’t teach as well as schools in other countries
because they are government monopolies, and monopolies don’t have much incentive to
compete.” As a result, according to Nobel Prize Winner Milton Friedman, “The quality
of schooling is far worse today than it was in 1955”, with both achievement and
graduation rates remaining flat. Other countries, however, which do not have a
government monopoly of education, or have cultural incentives to compete, perform
better than American students. For example, a study at the American Institutes of
Research finds that, “students in Singapore and several other Asian countries
significantly outperform American students[,]”, in conjunction with an ABC news study
which found that students in Belgium also perform better than their American
counterparts. To further, according to a report, Tough Choices or Tough Times, “Thirty
years ago, the United States could lay claim to having 30 percent of the world’s
population of college students. Today that proportion has fallen to 14 percent and is
continuing to fall.” Other countries continue to outperform us while we utilize a system
that has not increased overall performance in the last thirty years.

1. Subpoint Two: Government Centralization Leads to More Powerful Teaching Unions

With government centralization has come the increased power of teacher unions.
Friedman II concludes that the, “National Education Association and the American
Federation of Teachers, [are] together the strongest political lobbying body in the
United States.” The government is utterly beholden to these groups, a situation that has
led to both a lower quality of instruction in our schools, and a lack of accountability.
The primary objective of any union is to better its own members, not necessarily,
within context, increase scholastic performance. According to one Harvard economist,
unions hinder productivity by increasing schooling inputs while simultaneously
decreasing student performance. According to the American Economic Review, due to
union pay scales which reward seniority and factors which are not statistically related to
student performance, the earnings of the highest aptitude teacher compared to that of the
average teacher’s earnings are almost exactly the same. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein
explains, “[w]e tolerate mediocrity [because] people get paid the same, whether they’re
outstanding, average, or way below average.” Given that, how can we expect increases
in student performance? The majority of our teachers, according to Tough Choices or
Tough Times, are actually being drawn from, “the less able of the high school students
who go to college.”
Unions have also decreased accountability among teachers by reducing the ability
of schools to fire unsatisfactory teachers. For example, one New York teacher who
sexually solicited a student took over six years to fire as a result of union regulations.
This lack of accountability has resulted in, according to a report by the CATO Institute,
both higher rates of teacher absenteeism, and lower levels of teaching activity compared
to private schools, where teachers can and will be fired if they fail to perform. The
stunning thing is that this report specifically focused on private schooling in poverty-
ridden areas in third world countries such as Indian slums and Ghana for its comparison,
despite using data from the U.S. This means that private school teachers in third world,
poverty-stricken countries rife with civil war, teaching in bullet-ridden buildings, are
outperforming the United States.

Contention Two: Public Education Harms the Economy

Subpoint One: Government Control Causes Inefficiency

In every other American industry, efficiency is a necessity, due to a limited source

of funding. This both rewards efficiency and innovation doing more with less.
However, because the government has a virtually unlimited source of funding, efficiency
and innovation are not necessary, because more money can always be allocated. As a
result, our system is becoming progressively more inefficient. According to a 2009
report by Andrew Coulson, “If public schools had just managed not to get any less
efficient over the past 40 years, we’d be saving $300 billion annually. Our education
monopoly is a luxury we can no longer afford.

Subpoint Two: Public Education is Reducing Economic Competitiveness

With the advent of a highly technological, and increasingly mobile society,

corporations, as well as workers, are in direct competition with workers around the globe.
In addition, with the technological revolution, it is becoming less expensive and more
efficient to automate functions, causing an increased demand for highly educated
workers, and a lower demand for menial labor. As a result, our education system is
destroying our economy, because American workers are actually less qualified than their
foreign counterparts. According to Tough Choices or Tough Times, “Over the past 30
years, one country after another has surpassed us in the proportion of their entering
workforce with the equivalent of a high school diploma, and many more on the verge of
doing so.” According to Gary W. Phillips, author of a study at the American Institutes of
Research, “[o]ur Asian economic competitors are winning the race to prepare students
in math and science.” As a result, according to Tough Choices or Tough Times, “it
makes sense to ask how American workers can possibly maintain, to say nothing of
improve, their current standard of living…If we continue on our current course…the
American standard of living will steadily fall relative to those nations, rich and poor, that
are doing a better job.”

Conditional On Judge
Contention Three: Our Current System Greatly Harms Our Society

According to the U.S. Census Bureau , 43.9% of monetary funding for the public
education system comes from local sources. Nobel-Prize Winner Milton Friedman
explains the consequences, “We all know the dismal results: some relatively good
government schools in high income suburbs and communities; very poor government
schools in our inner cities with high dropout rates[,] lower performance, and
demoralized students” despite Federal efforts to the contrary. This inherent disparity has
two major consequences.

Subpoint One: Disparate Funding Causes Social Stratification

One of the effects of having two systems of education in America is that the poor
receive low-quality education, making them less and less attractive to an economic
system which increasingly requires highly educated workers, while the affluent receive
better education and are more attractive to employers. This difference in quality of
employment is known as the wage differential. Friedman explains the consequences. “If
the widening of the wage differential is allowed to proceed unchecked, it threatens to
create within our own country a social problem of major proportions. We shall not be
willing to see a group of our population move into Third World conditions at the same
time that another group… becomes increasingly well off. [S]tratification is a recipe for
social disaster. The pressure to avoid it by protectionist and other similar measures will
be irresistible.” These policies will destroy the most fundamental values of America,
transforming our capitalist society into a socialist regime where individual success is
despised by the average workers.
In addition, the disparities in funding perpetuate ethnic and racial divides, by
disproportionately affecting minorities. Galston, the Director of the Institute for
Philosophy and Public Policy, explains, “If we do not close the gap between the two
systems of public education in America, …then we will be condemning our society to the
perpetuation of the… inequalities across lines of race [and] ethnicity… that we’ve been
struggling to overcome”.

Contention Three: Privatization Will Help our Education System

Because the public education system is destroying us academically and

economically, the resolution has inherency, in that action is required. I therefore propose
the privatization of education in America via a voucher system, in which the money spent
on education in America is equally divided amongst students so that these students can
purchase private education. Given that the public system spent $8,701 per student in
2005, while the average tuition for a private school is approximately a third of that
number, privatization is, according to a CATO report, “basically a revenue-neutral
change.”
I offer three examples of this. Private parochial school in low-income areas, the
system of Education in Belgium, and the Milwaukee Voucher system, all of which
significantly outperform public education students, even when accounting for
socioeconomic factors. Because privatization involves competition, emphasis is placed
on innovation, creativity, accountability, and efficiency. In addition, private schools are
not beholden to teaching unions for their existence. As a result, it does not incur the
adverse economic and academic impacts aforementioned. In addition, because funding is
being distributed evenly, we avoid adverse social impacts.
Prepared Topicality/ Burden of Negative/ Theory Argument:

Van Eemeren I, Professor of Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric at the

University of Amsterdam1, explains, “A debate in the North American style is centered
around “propositions”… The affirmative…defends the statement in conflict; the
negative…attacks it. The affirmative has the burden of proof… The negative has no
burden of proof; their only task is to attack the proposition.” What we must realize is
that the affirmative has contextualized the proposition within his advocacy as stated in
the 1AC. The debate is no longer about the resolution, but the context that the
affirmative gives it.
Van Eemeren II furthers, “In a debate the negative side has no burden of proof
for the opposite standpoint. In a discussion, the party attacking a standpoint has no
burden of proof for the opposite standpoint.” This means that the negative is not bound
to defend the use of standardized tests. Therefore, the negative’s only burden within the
round is to disprove the affirmative’s proposition.
Van Eemeren III concludes, “In a debate, the affirmative side should justify all
positive answers to make the proposition acceptable to the judge…”. Conversely, the
negative must show how the affirmative’s given context of the resolution should not
occur. “ If they…[do] so, the proposition becomes unacceptable to the judge.” This
means that if I show that either the affirmative incurs impacts that greatly outweigh
affirmative benefits, or that the negative counteradvocacy does not incur these impacts,
we immediately vote negative.

1
(Crucial Concepts in Argumentation Theory, p. 39-40)