Inclusion and Segregation: Separate and Unequal

Inclusion and Segregation: Separate and Unequal As we lurch along in our uncertain way, trying to develop appropriate policies and procedures to serve deaf and hard of hearing children in public school settings, it seems to me that professionals in more and more programs are feeling overwhelmed by forces beyond their control. Many of these, of course, are at the state-wide level. To cite recent examples from just two of our most populous states, Texas has dismantled its system of support for regional day school programs throughout the state and Illinois has eliminated Special Education as a free standing unit within the state department of education. In the case of Texas, the regional offices were closed with little or no warning and it is not clear what kind of structure, if any, will be developed to provide the services previously offered through the regional centers. In Illinois, the implication is that local school districts will play increasingly stronger roles. This may be fine in most cases, but the low incidence of deafness, fewer than one child in a thousand, means that most individual school districts have few deaf children and even fewer resources . Texas and Illinois, as we all know, are not isolated cases. We are at crisis levels in several states. Organizations such as the Conference of Educational Administrators Serving the Deaf (CEASD), the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDE), and the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) must play a much more active and even aggressive role in advocating for deaf children if we are to avert disaster. Issues may be more narrowly defined, but they are just as critical at the local level. Although our intentions are to serve all children to the best of our abilities, conflicting forces are leading us to act frequently in illogical and inconsistent ways. In many cases the outcome falls under what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has characterized as the Law of Unintended Consequences. Acting in good faith, we implement practices that may end up harming those we meant to help. I believe this is happening in many programs that are trying to move from the concept of mainstreaming to the much more encompassing philosophy of total inclusion , while at the same time clinging to allegiance to outdated and unacknowledged myths and biases regarding communication. The clearest example of this is the by now relatively common practice of "co-teaching" in which groups of deaf and hearing children are taught in the same classroom by a general education teacher and a teacher of the deaf. Although implementation varies, in theory teaching is shared and deaf and hearing children are expected to interact. Research on this practice is limited—indeed it is almost non-existent—but there are certainly strong feelings about its efficacy. In some quarters it is felt that the teachers of the deaf become interpreters and that the deaf and hearing children remain separate, with the gap growing with age. However this is opinion. The practice itself is not data based, nor are the criticisms. It does not surprise me that some school districts are experimenting with co-teaching or other models of "inclusion ." This is predictable given general trends in American education. What amazes me is that some school districts are doing this while at the same time segregating deaf children from each other on the basis of classroom mode of communication! We are faced with the anomalous situation in which deaf and hearing children are integrated in "oral" classes and deaf and hearing children are integrated in "Total Communication" classes, but deaf children in the two categories are segregated from each other, sometimes in separate classes and sometimes in separate buildings (None of the classes that I know of uses ASL. That is an issue for a later editorial). I have received no logical explanation for this type of segregation, but I suspect that it is a remnant of the prejudice against signing, with the unsupported belief that deaf children who sign will never speak. The establishment of two-track integrated/segregated separate but unequal programs can have all kinds of unforeseen results. Their existence for children as young as two or three...