Knowledge & Research · Data essay · June 2026
The Debate Years
Jennifer Umanzor · High-school Public Forum · 2014–2016
Nine monthly resolutions, argued from both sides across two seasons, recovered from the original Google Drive files and turned into data. This is the whole run: every case, every side, and every cited card kept exactly as it was written, down to the typos nobody fixed.
“It’s a date. PF is a date with your judge.”from the guide her team wrote
A debate career, counted
Read in order, the archive is a record of someone getting better at something. The first topic survives in three drafts; the earliest still reads like a persuasive essay. By 2016 the cases are clipped, framed by an explicit cost-benefit standard, co-authored with a partner, and closed with a clean vote-PRO. Counting the cards makes the shape of it visible: where the evidence piled up, which sides got built, and where the record simply stops.
Figure 1
What survived, by topic: pro case, con case, and rebuttal blocks
Each bar is the number of cited evidence cards that survive for that topic, split by where they sat in the file. Standardized testing is short on case cards but carries the deepest block files in the archive; the April 2016 case never got written.
Figure 2
Both sides, or just one: pro case cards against con case cards
Each topic's case cards, con to the left, pro to the right. The one-sided rows are where a file was lost or never written: carbon tax is all pro, the Russia outline all con, reparations almost entirely pro after its con case vanished.
Figure 3
Proof it's from then: every case, by the date Google Drive first saved it
Hard provenance: the horizontal position is each topic's earliest save-date, the circle sized by how many cards survive. Two summers of work, from the first Sahel draft in July 2014 to the case that stops mid-sentence in April 2016. The dashed line marks the decade to now; each topic's card below adds where the issue actually stands in 2026.
The receipts
The save-dates are the hard proof. The soft proof is the texture only a teenager leaves behind: the Northern Africa research deck that ends its works-cited list with a National Geographic URL, “Various news sources,” and “Jenn’s awesome and magical brain”; the team guide on persuading a judge (“NECESSARRYRYRYRYRYR. SO NECESSARY.”); the July 2015 brief filed under “House A.” The typos were left exactly as written, because in a debate file the typo is part of the proof: “Abbot” for Greg Abbott, “Sustein” for Cass Sunstein, a file titled “REPARATION DEFINTION.”
The nine resolutions
Development Assistance in the Sahel
Development assistance should be prioritized over military aid in the Sahel region of Africa.
"363,200" died as a result of communicable, maternal, prenatal, nutritional conditions, and non communicable disease in Sudan alone [in 2008]. Conversely, "22,300" people died as a result of war and violence.World Health Organization, 2011 report on 2008 data
Her first case. The first-draft con argues in full sentences a first-year would write: "Military aid is like a blanket of security."
A decade on, the central Sahel is the world's deadliest terrorism hotspot. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger fell to military juntas, formed the Alliance of Sahel States, and quit the regional ECOWAS bloc in January 2025.
Public Subsidies for Pro Sports
On balance, public subsidies for professional athletic organizations in the US benefit their local communities.
the Super Bowl at Cowboys Stadium in Texas was the single-largest human trafficking event in the United States.Greg Abbott, Attorney General of Texas (spelled “Abbot” [sic] in the original)
A working note survives in the card bank, shouted in caps: "FIND AUTHOR AND CREDIILITY" [sic].
Public stadium subsidies keep breaking records even as economists stay near-unanimous they do not pay off. In 2023 Nashville approved the largest taxpayer handout in US sports history, for the Titans.
Genetically Modified Foods
On balance, the benefits of genetically modified foods outweigh the harms.
Cry1Ab toxin was detected in 93% and 80% of maternal and fetal blood samples, respectively and in 69% of tested blood samples from nonpregnant women.Aris & Leblanc, Reproductive Toxicology, February 13, 2011
One pro file was uploaded twice and saved, immortally, as "Pro Case - GMO's.docx.docx."
Mandatory US labeling of bioengineered food took effect in 2022. Golden Rice, the case's flagship example, won approval in the Philippines and was then halted by a 2024 court order that still stands.
UN Peacekeepers
Two resolutions: that UN peacekeepers should have the power to engage in offensive operations, and that the UN should discontinue its peacekeeper forces.
Several said they even saw the U.N. soldiers flashing "thumbs up" signs to the kidnappers as the buses drove off. The U.N. personnel peacekeepers... "did nothing."Colum Lynch, “They Just Stood Watching,” Foreign Policy, April 7, 2014
The July 2015 brief is filed under "House A," with Pat Johnson.
Mali's junta expelled the UN's MINUSMA peacekeeping force, which finished withdrawing on December 31, 2023, and UN peacekeeping has contracted worldwide since.
Reparations to African Americans
The United States Federal Government ought to pay reparations to African Americans.
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy.Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, 2014
The con case file was a Drive shortcut that no longer resolves. The prep doc keeps its original misspelled title, "REPARATION DEFINTION."
California issued the first state reparations report in 2023; a formal state apology passed in 2024 while direct-payment bills stalled, and Evanston, Illinois became the first US city to actually pay.
Standardized Testing
On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K-12 education in the United States.
In 2009-10 the national graduation rate for White males was 78% compared to only 52% for Black male students.Holzman, “The Urgency of Now,” The Schott Foundation for Public Education, 2012
The deepest block files in the archive. The main con case truncates the Texas figure at "$88"; Michelle Robert's copy completes it as "$88 million in 2011."
COVID pushed most colleges test-optional, then several reversed course: MIT brought back the SAT in 2022, and Dartmouth, Yale, Brown, Harvard, and Caltech reinstated it in 2024, citing its predictive value.
Economic Sanctions on Russia
On balance, economic sanctions are reducing the threat Russia poses to Western interests.
Germany gets more than 30% of its oil and gas from Russia... The EU's trade with Russia - worth nearly 270bn euros in 2012 - dwarfs US-Russia trade.BBC (uncited in original)
Co-authored with Michelle Robert. The con outline survives; the pro was never written down.
After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine it became the most-sanctioned country on earth, with roughly $300 billion in central-bank assets frozen abroad, yet its wartime economy proved more resilient than the West expected.
A Federal Carbon Tax
The United States federal government should adopt a carbon tax.
British Columbia's 2008 revenue neutral carbon tax... charges $30 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions and has so far reduced fuel consumption by more than 16% without harming the Canadian province's economy.Chelsea Harvey, Washington Post
Her most built-out pro. Author typos kept as found: "Sustein" for Cass Sunstein, "Donlad Marron" for Donald.
Ten years later there is still no US federal carbon tax; the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act spent about $370 billion on clean-energy subsidies instead, and Canada scrapped its own consumer carbon charge in 2025.
Infrastructure vs. Welfare
To alleviate income inequality in the US, increased spending on public infrastructure should be prioritized over increased spending on means-tested welfare programs.
Saved April 11, 2016 and abandoned after a single definition: the last timestamp in the archive.
The case stops mid-draft, but both of its levers were later tested for real: the $1.2 trillion 2021 infrastructure law, and the expanded Child Tax Credit, which cut child poverty to a record low before it lapsed.
Sources & method
Built from the original Google Drive files. Every quote and citation is reproduced verbatim from the source documents, with nothing paraphrased, corrected, or invented; where a card had no citation, it is marked as such. Multiple saved drafts of the same case were de-duplicated to the most complete one, and the card counts above are taken from those. The gaps are real and left as gaps: the reparations con case and a peacekeepers block file were Drive shortcuts that no longer resolve, and the April 2016 case stops after one definition. The full card-by-card archive, all 235 cards across the nine resolutions, lives alongside this as a separate keepsake.