Unlocking the Curriculum
Johnson et al.
achievement among deaf students are depressed by comparison to hearing norms, according to
which much higher grade-equivalents are necessary to be included in the 93rd to 98th percentiles.
These results appear not to be restricted to children who have been exposed to any one of
the several "methods" for educating deaf children currently in use in the United States. Each
method is more accurately described as a policy about how teachers and students should interact
and communicate with one another. These approaches to communication include oralism, total
communication, simultaneous communication, artificially developed systems for coding English,
and Cued Speech. In the end, regardless of the particular method selected by parents or educators,
the results are less than adequate.
'This conclusion is even apparent to laypersons who examine deaf education from the
outside. A recent segment of The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour (1988) concluded that each of the
major approaches to educating deaf children in America (private oral programs, residential Total
Communication programs, and public mainstream programs) is "seriously flawed."
They observed that the problems persist in spite of the fact that classes for deaf students
are small compared with classes for their hearing counterparts. A class size of eight to ten is typical.
Moreover, teachers of deaf students are highly trained, and typically hold an MA or MEd degree
from a program which provides specialized training in deaf education. In addition, the cost of
educating a deaf student in specialized programs is quite high when compared to that of educating
hearing, public school students. How is it possible that such a well-developed, costly, and elaborate
system has failed?
The Reasons for Failure
It is our position that the failure of deaf education to live up to its promise results, first,
from deaf children's fundamental lack of access to curricular content at grade level, and, second,
from the general acceptance of the notion that below grade-level performance is to be expected of
deaf children. The first of these problems --access-- is in our opinion largely a language-related
issue. The second --low expectations-- is, we believe, primarily an issue of values and attitudes
that have developed among those who educate deaf children.
Linguistic Access to Curricular Content
The issue of linguistic access to curricular material has been at the heart of all discussions
about pedagogy in deaf education since about 1870. Most proponents of one methodology or
another have used access to educational and social benefits as the underlying justification for their
proposals. Most arguments about pedagogy have centered on what means of communication
should be implemented or inspired in deaf children in order for them to match more closely the
normative linguistic and behavioral expectations of hearing children.
However, it is not the case that the developmental history of deaf children is linguistically
like that of their hearing peers. It is unusual for a hearing child to reach the age of four or five
without having acquired at least the rudiments of a natural language. Even severely mentally
retarded children develop rather sophisticated linguistic competence at an early age.
It is usually the case, however, that deaf children of hearing parents have not developed a
sophisticated competence in any native language (signed or spoken) by the time they enter
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