Jonathan Henner claims to be writing an article entirely about numbers (which means no opinions, right?), but with a title like “Numbering Our Flaws,” it’s hard to believe him: he’s putting the responsibility on the Deaf community. Our kids have educational problems, he seems to be saying, and it’s our fault: our focus should be on these problems, but we’re not working on it. Bad us.
Except it’s a confusing statement for any writer to make. The fight over AB 2072, continual arguments about identity and education at Gallaudet, various blogs discussing educational issues, and even a major amendment by the RID on educational interpreting, shows how not only Deaf people but their associated communities are concerned about education and the raising of children, and how to help Deaf children of all flavors have as many options as possible.
The problem is, throughout the article, Henner shows hints he KNOWS otherwise. He points out that many Deaf people “toil in obscurity while hearing people use our work to advance in fields rightfully ours…” and notes that “Educational policy for the deaf is dictated by hearing administrators and hearing researchers, many with shaky grasps of visual language and limited knowledge of the challenges faced by those they purport to support and nurture.” He even realizes that “the focus of educational research remains speech, language, reading and writing, whereas the skills required by our workforce: math, science, and technology, are often ignored or left on the wayside.” So he clearly sees that there’s oppression throughout the system, and the focus of the educational system itself is even in question.
But he still engages in “blame the victim” phraseology, using overblown rhetoric to make his point. “The numbers hang there, unchained and improperly defined; they are wasted opportunities to seize the crux of the deaf community’s failure to educate itself and unbind our prophesied failures,” he challenges, discussing percentages demonstrating the low achievement of Deaf children across the board in public schools (yes, the ones we don’t run, in many cases aren’t even allowed the opportunity to run).
The numbers he uses to describe student achievement are real. I am, as a teacher, highly concerned about them. But they are not in context, and so it is easy to blame the Deaf community for these numbers, even though we are, as we were in Milan and other conventions, often kicked out of or limited in our participation in the discussion. First, we see that similar numbers obtain for other minorities (check out this recent list from 2008 about hispanic students in America) and even groups such as women, whose lack of achievement in Math and Science has raised national concern. It’s clear that there are achievement problems in the U.S. for many groups.
Secondly, we see that we fare better than other groups classified as “disabilities” (and remember, most employers do see us as disabled). A recent study by Cornell (in 2008) shows that only 37% of eligible, disabled Americans are employed. In context, we realize the percentage of the Deaf community entering education (he states 15%) is higher than that of other minorities. According to the Occupational Employment Statistics Survey of 2008, “Data also shows that 9.3% of elementary and middle school teachers are black, and 7.1% are Hispanic. The Asian community is even less represented, with 2.4% of teachers at this grade level being Asian. These figures draw concern since they are not in keeping with the racial makeup of the United States. Schools that are predominantly Hispanic or black might be lucky to have one or two teachers who are from their culture, and thus represent role models for a community.” Based on these numbers, should we be congratulated for being a minority that fights to be represented in education even more than most “mainstream” minorities? Either way, it’s clear there’s a problem with the American educational system as a whole – something that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who reads the news.
To make things worse, Henner gets completely ahistorical in his conclusion:
How many of our community activists collect welfare? How many are content to produce videos and artwork and columns and never progress past goading others into action? Hearing researchers in deaf education and deaf policies often bemoan the fact that there aren’t enough deaf people in their field. When so many schools and programs for the deaf lack qualified teachers, an extremely small number of deaf people are entering the field. I would argue that as a community, we have more value than teaching hearing people our language, and selling VRS products to our community. We are better than cannibalizing our intellectuals for not being deaf enough, or for not following a particular form of deaf epistemological philosophy. We should be shoring our best, those who were lucky enough to graduate high school and college, into deaf education and deaf-related research fields. Perhaps it’s too late to do much for our generation, but if we heed the numbers, future generations of deaf children can be spared our failures.
What a mess! Yes, it’s true a small number of Deaf people are entering Deaf education, but there’s plenty of activists and column-writers (yours truly included) who are also educators. Or let’s look deeper: what percentage of Deaf people work in mainstream schools (probably close to zero, since most of us experience discrimination when we try to be hired in a mainstream environment)? Finally, let’s look even deeper: who’s hiring us? I know Deaf kids who say I’m the first Deaf adult they’ve met in mainstreamed schools. I know certified teachers in NYC who are being denied employment because they’re deaf. We are not in charge of that many schools, or the Department of Education, although the NAD does a job of fighting for improvement. And we know Deaf people are routinely excluded from early education, and have been since Milan; a big part of our “battles” this century have been getting our feet back in the door and ensuring Deaf children get some form of real education.
Plus, teachers have been losing certification since 2007, a fact not reflected in Henner’s research. The Deaf/Hard of Hearing license is expiring in many states or considered invalid, but many Deaf people go that route in education, concerned about issues that surround Deaf children’s lives. Not to mention career mobility – since very few public schools hire Deaf people to teach full time, so the available number of possible jobs is tiny. (A hearing person with a DHH license or other could easily transition to a public school, but a Deaf person? Try getting them to pay for interpreters.) To ignore these outside factors – many of which are outside of our control, although NAD and other organizations try to stay on top of everything – and lay the blame at the feet of the Deaf community, or any single institution such as Gallaudet, is to remain blind.
I’d even argue that all the concerns over identity development began and will end with discussions about school and education – and that to pretend the discussion about identity and understanding each other isn’t important is facetious, especially in terms of children, who must form identities to learn and become adults!
Henner makes a great point when he says our community is crippled by the infighting, yes. But he does the same thing, by blaming the Deaf community instead of looking at America as a whole and seeing how we’re influenced by, and influence, other communities and ideas. No man is an island – but no community is, either.
References
Myers, Linda “Employment and People with Disabilities” Cornell, 2005 http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/oct05/disab.work.rpt.html
Bureau of Labor Statistics “Occupational Employment Statistics” http://www.bls.gov/oes/
