Turning the Tide: Making Life Better for Deaf and Hard of Hearing School Children

4: K–12 Interpreters and Other Placement Issues

67 4 K–12 Interpreters and Other Placement Issues “Mainstreamed students, current or former, are grossly misinterpreted (pun unintended).” (Survey respondent) With the implementation of the Education for all Handicapped Children law (P.L. 94-142) in 1975, a new position was created: that of educational interpreter. Students with disabilities—including deaf and hard of hearing students— were to be educated in the “least restrictive environment (LRE)” and provided with a “free and appropriate education (FAPE).” Appropriate supports and accommodations for learning meant that deaf students needed to be provided with interpreters within their classrooms and/or the services of a teacher of the deaf, and/or a speech therapist, if it was so stipulated in their individualized educational programs (IEPs). Since 1975, federal policies, state policies, school districts , teachers, parents, and educational interpreters have been trying (in various degrees) to “get it right” so that deaf and hard of hearing students actually are benefitting from inclusive education. We have a long way to go! Over time, scholars in the area of deaf education came to refer to an education provided through the services of a sign language interpreter as an “interpreted education” and later as a “mediated education.” A mediated education—as opposed to education that is received directly—refers to instruction 68 Turning the Tide that was received secondhand, through a sign language, oral, or cued speech interpreter. It also can refer to instruction received through text such as CART, C-print, or Typewell. These practices, as well as the practice of pull-out—removing students from their regular classroom to work with audiologists, speech therapists, teachers of the deaf, or other specialists—all emerged after the passage of IDEA.2 In Chapter 5, we discuss current issues related to how mediated education has evolved in practice and share stories from teachers of the deaf and K–12 interpreters who serve deaf and hard of hearing students in our nation’s public schools. We also share the relevant contributions of our research participants. The stories of their mediated educations will illuminate how often the policies and practices are resulting in positive outcomes for children (rarely) and where they are failing (much too often). It is only with this knowledge that we can create positive changes for the future. As part of this discussion about mediated education, we also need to say very clearly that little is actually known about how deaf children learn. We know that young deaf children do not get adequate exposure to language (any language) during the critical language period prior to age 5 and thus enter school linguistically deprived (Humphries et al., 2012). They are then faced with the challenge of learning language, academic content and skills, and social skills, all at the same time. We know that a multitude of factors makes visual learning in general education classrooms difficult (much of this is detailed in Ramsey, 1997), and we know that literacy for deaf and hard of hearing children remains far from the ideal, stubbornly staying at the third and fourth grade level for an 18-year-old (Marschark, 2007; Morere, 2011). Experience with Interpreters Interpreters who work in public schools have been called both educational interpreters and classroom interpreters. However our review of recent research and publications has shown that these two terms also refer to interpreting 2. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was revised in 2004 and is now entitled the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA), but it is still commonly known as IDEA so we use that term. K–12 Interpreters and Other Placement Issues 69 in postsecondary settings. To distinguish these very different categories, we choose the term K–12 interpreters. In planning this book, we sensed that K–12 interpreters and the services they provide would be a strong theme. In fact one of the reasons we wanted to write this book was to see how well students were faring with this mediated education, a component that was almost completely missing for participants in Oliva’s first study who were in school between the years of 1976 and 1995, even though P.L. 94-142 was passed in 1975. In Oliva’s study, only five out of 60 of the participants ever had the services of an interpreter (Oliva, 2004). In our current study, 62% of our focus group participants and 36% of our survey respondents used an interpreter at least for part...