Debate in Public Versus Independent Secondary Schools in New York City: Post-COVID-19 Health literacy and Equal Access to Basic Educational Opportunities

Speech and debate (referred to hereafter as debate) has the potential to play an integral role in increasing the health literacy of secondary school students, yet we did not identify published studies examining the prevalence of debate programs in public and independent secondary schools. The purpose of this study was to describe the presence of debate in a probability sample of public and independent secondary schools in New York City (NYC) and explore whether there were differences in the availability of debate programs when schools were classified based on public versus independent status, school enrollment, borough location, and proportion of non-white students enrolled. The sampling frame was constructed using NYC Open Data for the public schools and the publicly available membership directory of the New York State Association of Independent Schools. This cross-sectional study included a ~ 30% random sample comprising 255 public and 17 independent secondary schools. To identify whether schools offered debate programs, school websites were reviewed and follow-up calls were conducted to verify the information online. Independent one-tailed t-tests (a = 0.05), showed that access to a debate program was associated with public/independent status (p = .0000), larger enrollment (p = .0046), borough location (p = .0392), and proportion of non-white students enrolled (p = .0000). Schools with a higher proportion of non-white students were less likely to offer debate programs. Compared with students in public schools, students attending independent schools were more than three times as likely to have debate opportunities. These findings have implications for health literacy and educational equity.