TEAM PROFILES
New York City’s Middle School Quality Initiative Embraces Debate to Improve Literacy by Sean Lee
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n 2011, the Middle School Quality Initiative (MSQI) was launched by the Department of Education in New York City. The MSQI, which primarily serves students in Title I and underserved schools, was part of a larger effort to improve literacy skills and achievement among middle school students.
“The ultimate goal of the program is to graduate middle school students reading at or above grade level,” says Nicholas Kuroly, Director of Debate and Literacy Coach at the MSQI. The decision to create a debate program for these schools was born out of MSQI instructional resources. One program that MSQI uses to promote literacy is the Word Generation program, which Kuroly describes as
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Students from Ann Mersereau Middle School in the Bronx (photo courtesy of Rafael Ossorio)
“an academic vocabulary curriculum where students engage in small format debates as part of the program.” After noticing high levels of student engagement with classroom debates through Word Generation, a decision was made to expand the program to a larger, more competitive debate league that gave students access to more serious debate opportunities, Kuroly explains.
ROSTRUM | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022
Ben Honoroff, principal at Middle School 50 (MS 50) in Brooklyn and founder of the MSQI debate program, saw an opportunity for debate to connect the 90 schools already participating in Word Generation. “As a former debate coach, I saw an opportunity where if 90 schools are doing the same curriculum all centered around high-interest debates, we could have them prepare for a debate tournament,” he says. “We chose Public Forum as the
format because it was probably the easiest one to teach and also the one that was most aligned to the debate topics that were part of the Word Generation curriculum, and we made tournaments that aligned with where the curriculum would be.” The league started in 2013 with about six schools, and has quickly grown to around 50 schools and hundreds of students around the city, Honoroff says.