In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Equality inEducaiiond opportunities: The rneqfve;rsfon SAMUEL SUPALLA anguage is an essential ingredient of education. When children arrive in school, they generally have mastered the spoken language used by their particular linguistic community. The language the child brings to the classroom is usually the same as that of the teacher. These two conditions of basic language competence and use of common language, prerequisites for an effective learning environment, are presumed to apply to most children in the United States. For children corning from linguistic-minority homes, only the first assumption may be true, however, and children who are deaf may not even be competent in any language. Even if they are fluent in American Sign Language (ASL), their teachers probably are not. Thus, neither of these prerequisites is being met for most deaf children. The right of deaf children to have access to a language they can acquire and master (e.g., ASL) is an issue that policymakers have never adequately addressed. This right is further obscured by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA; formerly titled the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, or P.L. 94-142), which is typically interpreted as fostering mainstreaming in regular hearing public schools for many deaf children, while totally disregarding their unique linguistic needs. The intent of this law is to provide handicapped children with appropriate education within the least restrictive environment. The bottom line is that desegregation in education for children with disabilities means equality in educational opportunity, just as it did for AfricanAmericans in earlier decades. Evidence shows that this is not necessarily true for deaf children. The Commission on Education of the Deaf (COED) Report (1988) concluded that the emphasiS on mainstreaming encouraged by IDEA has been more detrimental than beneficial for many deaf children. "Barriers" and "least restrictive environments" need to be interpreted differently for deaf people than for members of other groups with disabilities. For deaf people, the barrier is communicative as well as physical in origin. The impact of modality on the development and use of language must also be considered, however. Deaf children are generally unable to learn spoken languages, such as English, naturally. ASL, on the other hand, is a fully accessible language in terms of learnability and use. With two languages in mind, should deaf children then be provided bilingual education? If so, they might be placed under the protection of the Bilingual Education Act, with other After this paper was presented at The Deaf Way, it was updated with new citations for publication in A Free Hand: Enfranchising the Education of Deaf Children, 1992 (Silver Spring, MO: T.J. Publishers, Inc.). The editors of this volume have chosen to present here the revised version, with references that postdate The Deaf Way. Equality in Educational OpportWlities linguistic minority children. Would this Act effectively meet the educational needs of deaf children? This is another question we need to address. These two questions are complex, and one implies the other. As previously pointed out, deaf children entering school frequently do not have ASL as a native language, or any language for that matter. Thus, many of them need to learn two languages instead of one-two languages that differ in modalities. Are these differences significant enough to disallow any formal link between bilingual education and education of deaf children? That remains to be seen. The Existing Situation: A Policy Analysis Deaf children require qualitatively different services than hearing children who, handicapped or not, generally begin school with well-developed competence in spoken English.This competence makes that language utilizable as the medium of their instruction and for the development of reading and writing skills. Deaf children, on the other hand, often lack skill in English when beginning school (Moores and Kluwin, 1986). Their patterns of English language learning resemble those of children learning English as a second language (Quigley and Paul, 1984). More importantly, there are indications that ASL promotes the learning of English as a second language for deaf children in a way similar to the way that bilingual situations promote learning for hearing linguistic minority children. In the case of deaf children, the need to develop a "mother tongue" (e.g., ASL) is stressed in order to facilitate the learning of a second language (e.g., English) within the context of bilingualism (Johnson, Liddell, and Erting, 1989). In short, their educational situation shares more common features with linguistic minority children than with children with physical or mental handicaps. Residential Schools: Language Acquisition and...

Share