This study adds to the limited literature base on extracurricular debate by using doubly robust inverse probability treatment weighting to estimate the average treatment effect for the treated of preadolescent debate participation on a variety of academic and engagement outcomes among a 10-year longitudinal sample of Baltimore City Public School System students. The effect of preadolescent Baltimore Urban Debate League participation for debaters was associated with increases in standardized test scores, a decreased likelihood of chronic absenteeism, and an increased likelihood of attending a selective entrance criteria high school. Although there is a mounting body of research that suggests participation in debate is associated with increases in positive outcomes for high school students, this research constitutes the first quantitative study to examine these relationships among elementary and middle school students. Policy implications for educational interventions that seek to attract low-income students of color in urban areas and influence their trajectories at earlier stages of student development are discussed.

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This chapter summarizes the extant sociological literature on the interactive nature of school and teacher effects on student learning. It explains why the most recent literature on teacher sorting demands the attention of more sociologists of education, and it demonstrateswhat is revealed about patterns of teacher sorting using the type of data most commonly analyzed by sociologists of education. Throughout, the chapter discusses the methodological requirements of research that can and cannot disentangle teacher effects from school effects, and it considers how teacher and school effects may be evolving in the changing landscape of K---12 education in the United States. School and Teacher EffectsFor studies of school performance and student learning, the sociology of education has a long history of research on the effects of teachers. Most of the specific literature on these effects predates the recent push to encourage effective teaching in the United States through accountability policies. In fact, as we will discuss in this chapter, sociologists have contributed very little to the recent debate on the validity of models and measures that seek to identify effective teachers, including methods that (1) infer effective teaching from growth in pupil test scores or (2) assess teacher performance through systematic classroom observation. Instead, these debates have been dominated by economists and policy researchers who have demonstrated little interest in drawing insight from the extant sociological literature on either teacher effects or school effects.Although the lack of broad engagement among sociologists in the most recent debate on effective teaching might be considered a failing of the sociology of education, it also reflects a healthy skepticism about the worth of engagement in a debate over methods, such as value--added models (VAMs), thought very likely to fail on their own anyway. Even with this rationalization, now is the time for sociologists to join fellow social scientists and policy researchers in a reconstruction of the literature on teacher effects. Not only is there good reason to expect that the monitoring of effective teaching may have altered the relationships between teachers and other school actors, the debate itself appears to be in a phase transition to more reasonable modes of analysis and interpretation. Scholars of all types seem now to recognize that teacher effects vary fundamentally because of their entanglement with effects generated by Source: High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) Notes: The partial correlation coefficients are adjusted for school type (whether the high school is a charter or magnet school), and the data are weighted to the populations of ninth graders enrolled in math and science classes, respectively. The standard errors are heteroskedasticity---consistent and are adjusted for the clustering of students within teachers.

Non-cognitive skills (NCS) contribute to variation in how students respond to challenges inside the classroom and beyond. Competitive policy debate is a co-curricular activity that both encourages cooperative learning and is hypothesized to promote NCS. The goal of this pilot was to examine the relationship between debate participation and change in four NCS among high school students over the course of an academic year. Two surveys (Fall and Spring) were administered during the 2017/18 academic year to students who participated in the Chicago Debate League (n=102). Surveys assessed demographic factors, characteristics of debate participation, and four indicators of NCS each measured using established scales: Growth mindset, grit, mood, and civic engagement. Paired t-tests were used to quantify change in NCS over time. Linear regression was used to assess the relationship between characteristics of debate participation and change in NCS. In the Fall, median length of debate participation was 6.2 months. Average age was 16, most (82%) participants were non-White and 52% were female. Over the academic year, growth mindset increased (Δ=0.29 (95% Confidence Interval (CI): 0.10, 0.48) while grit declined (Δ= -0.17, 95% CI: -0.34, -0.01). Civic engagement and mood were unchanged. Duration of participation was associated with increased change in grit (β=0.04, p≤0.01), but was unrelated to the other NCS. Motivation for joining debate did not explain variation in any NCS. Debate participation is associated with improvement in some NCS. Findings have implications for scalable interventions to promote NCS in the context of cooperative learning.