For Educators & Administrators
Debate is the highest-impact thinking class in a school.
Debate works. Forty years of research says so. What schools cannot supply is judges, coaches, and enough rounds. We cover that part.
Debate works. Forty years of research says so. What schools cannot supply is judges, coaches, and enough rounds. We cover that part.
Debate moves reading, GPA, and graduation.
Most schools cannot staff it.
We supply the room: an opponent any hour, a judge on every round.
Coaches stay in charge. A pilot is one email.
Most of school trains students to reproduce a correct answer. Debate makes them build an argument, defend it on a clock, and give up the parts that do not survive.
Urban debate league studies show a 25% reading-comprehension gain and about half a letter grade of GPA over similar non-debate peers. That beats most single-subject interventions.
Students learn to argue the other side properly, find the weak link in their own case, and concede without losing the room. Most people just double down.
NAUDL data shows the effect on graduation, college enrollment, and GPA is strongest for low-income and first-generation students. The students reform spends the most trying to reach.
Every consequential profession (law, policy, medicine, science, journalism, engineering) requires building a case for one position, anticipating pushback, and revising when better evidence arrives. Debate is the only high-school activity that trains that whole loop.
Running a competitive program requires a coach who knows the format, a judge pool, practice partners, and a travel budget. Lose any one and the chain breaks. That's why most schools without a debate culture never start one: the unit economics don't close.
The block was never whether debate works. It is supply.
Debatable adds practice volume, not curriculum. The coach still decides what the team works on. The AI makes the rep available at scale.
The same motion you'd assign for a real practice round. APDA, PF, LD, Policy, Congress, Parli, or Worlds.
Full format with real timers, POIs, cross-ex, and AI speeches that are format-native, not generic LLM filler.
Structured RFD, speaker points on the 25–30 scale, the user's best line, what they should have said, and their critical drops.
Every round exports as a flowable transcript. Use it for a 10-minute 1:1 or a team debrief. The rep did the reps; you do the teaching.
NAUDL has tracked it for a decade: debate moves graduation, GPA, and college enrollment more than almost anything else schools can spend on. The block is supply, not funding. Debatable drops the bill to a per-student subscription a PTA could cover with one bake sale.
A high-schooler in a rural district, a magnet student at a school without a program, a homeschool co-op student. Anyone who has the interest and none of the infrastructure. They can start tonight.
You can't personally practice-round with every student twice a week. Debatable handles the volume so you can focus on strategy, drill design, and the kids who need in-person attention most.
The difference between a novice who's run four practice rounds and one who's run zero is enormous, and it's almost all comfort with the format. Debatable closes that gap before the first round of competition.
Topic changes monthly in PF, each round brings new angles, and you can't always wait for a coach window. The AI is an always-on sparring partner for iterating on a case the day before a tournament.
Students who score 27.0 or higher on the academic 25-30 speaker-points scale, the median varsity speech at a real tournament, earn a tiered Debatable credential: Novice, Varsity, Circuit, or Champion. Below 27 is participation, not a credential, and we don't issue. Each issued credential lives at a public verify URL. Free. Verifiable forever by anyone, no contact required.
For schools, this turns informal practice into a documentable program. Students stack credentials as their rounds get tighter; admissions readers and English-proficiency reviewers click a link to verify. It pairs with co-curricular records, ESL portfolios, and the "show me what you've done" question that comes up in college applications and first-job interviews.
Any student can try Debatable at no cost. Schools that want it in the program get a flat per-school license covering every student, plus coach dashboards, round archives, and format-specific curriculum packs.
No. And if it were, we wouldn't ship it. Coaches do the irreplaceable human work: identifying what a student is working on, choosing drills, reading a kid's confidence, building team culture. Debatable exists to handle the rep volume a single coach physically can't deliver to thirty students twice a week.
APDA, British Parliamentary, Asian Parliamentary, World Universities (WUDC), Lincoln-Douglas, Public Forum, Policy (CX), Congressional Debate, and Model UN. Plus a casual Quick Clash format for first-time students who don't know the jargon yet. Each one is judged by format-native criteria. LD is framework-first, Policy is tech-over-truth, PF defaults to lay accessibility.
At the end of every round the student gets a structured ballot: winner, speaker points on the 25–30 scale, decision paragraph written in real RFD voice, a key-clash summary, per-speech strengths and weaknesses, their single best line from the transcript, the line they should have said, critical arguments they dropped, and one concrete drill to practice next. Then a three-judge panel deliberates with distinct paradigms so students see how different judges read the same round.
The tool is a practice partner, not a case-generator students hand in. Coaches can review the full transcript of every round, the opposite of a typical LLM-cheating posture. It imitates a live opponent, and no student has ever handed in a live opponent as homework.
That's the strongest use case. A teacher who wants to start a club but has no judge pool, no travel budget, and no feeder school across town now has a way for students to run full rounds and get real feedback from day one. Several of our pilot schools started their entire program around the AI practice loop.
Debatable was built by a UChicago parliamentary debater who has run competitive rounds since high school. Every prompt, format rulebook, and judge paradigm was written by someone who has stood at the podium. The voice banks are curated from thousands of real rounds, not scraped from the internet.
Evaluating Debatable for a district? Forward this section to your IT and legal contacts. Every claim links to its source document.
Student profiles, saved rounds, and ballots are stored in Google Firebase on US multi-region infrastructure. Voice audio is not retained; only the speech transcript is. Full detail in the privacy policy, sections 1 and 5.
The service is built for users 13 and older. Schools enrolling students under 13 should obtain parental consent in line with their existing COPPA/FERPA-aligned processes before account creation. Voice rounds and the learning loop only activate for signed-in accounts.
Coaches with a school team account can review every round transcript, ballot, and drill a student runs. By design: the practice room should be transparent to the coach. Students can also export their own history.
No advertising network is integrated. Student prompts, transcripts, and ballots are never sold or shared with third parties for marketing purposes. We do not authorize sub-processors to use private content to train their public foundation models.
The AI is a practice partner, not a primary source. Ballots are pedagogical feedback, not adjudicated tournament results. Where the AI cites evidence, students are expected to verify it before using it in a graded round, the same expectation a coach would set for any debater.
Students can delete their account at any time from the profile page; that wipes saved rounds, ballots, and style fingerprints from Firestore. Schools can also request a roster-level export or deletion via aidandavidhollinger@gmail.com. Unrated, unsaved rounds are auto-pruned after 12 months.
Sub-processors: Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (GPT and Realtime voice), Google AI (Gemini), xAI (Grok), DeepSeek, OpenRouter (Open Lab pool), ElevenLabs, Inworld, Cartesia. Each operates under its own enterprise-grade privacy policy; the full table is in privacy policy section 3.
A practice partner, not a homework engine. Coaches can audit every transcript a student generated. We refuse use cases that frame the tool as a graded-work substitute.
The coach picks drills, sets the rotation, runs the team culture. The AI handles rep volume, the thirty-rounds-a-week practice a single coach physically cannot deliver. The intended replacement is missing practice partners, not missing pedagogy.
Authentication via Google (Firebase Auth). Sensitive endpoints are gated by Firebase App Check and rate-limited per IP and per account. Payments, if and when activated, go through Stripe; the platform never sees card numbers or bank credentials.