NY schools teaching deaf kids in ASL

08-27-2007, 11:55 AM

New York to Teach Deaf in Sign Language, Then English - New York Times

Quote:

By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: March 5, 1998

In what is being hailed as a landmark change in the education of deaf students, the city's only public school for the deaf will be overhauled so that all teachers will teach primarily in a sign language based on symbols and gestures, rather than an English-like sign language based on sounds, or other methods like lip-reading and pointing.

Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew will take direct control of the school, now called Junior High School 47 but extending from pre-kindergarten to 10th grade, with a planned expansion to 12th. It is at 225 East 23d Street, at Second Avenue, in Gramercy Park.

With the move, to be announced today, New York City, the nation's largest school system, is embracing an approach that has gained currency among many educators and advocates for the deaf. They say that research shows that the primary language of deaf people is visual, not verbal, and that schools using their preferred method, called American Sign Language, educate students better than other schools do.

They say deaf students should be treated like bilingual students, not disabled ones. In their view, students first need a primary language -- American Sign Language -- before they learn a second language, in this case, English.

The advocacy of bilingual education as a model for deaf people is an integral part of their growing campaign for recognition of a deaf culture with its own rituals and beliefs. Martin Florsheim has been applauded as the first deaf principal in J.H.S. 47's 90-year history.

''I think Public School 47 is in the vanguard of a movement,'' said Harlan Lane, a Northeastern University professor who teaches deaf culture and was a consultant to J.H.S. 47. ''The present system, to put it tersely, is a failure. Deaf kids are not getting an education. Deaf kids went into the trades, historically.''

But opponents of embracing American Sign Language as the best method contend that it fails to prepare deaf people adequately for a hearing world and that it applies one methodology to a group of people with a wide range of skills.

''The idea that you can learn sign language as your first language and it'll solve problems of education and socialization is utter nonsense,'' said Arthur Boothroyd, a Distinguished Professor of speech and learning science at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. ''First of all, A.S.L. is not a written language, which limits access to the world's knowledge. I don't want to decry the value, the beauty or the power of sign language, but the issue is how you go about giving a deaf child what they need to have a satisfying and fulfilling life.''

Students at the school will for the first time be offered New York State's college preparatory curriculum and a diploma. Now, many deaf students get a watered-down version of a general education curriculum with modifications, education experts said. Under the new plan, American Sign Language will be used to teach reading and writing English, and all other subjects.

''It's an exciting opportunity for a community that needed a chance to acquire the same academic skills provided at any of our other schools,'' Dr. Crew said yesterday.

The State Legislature has also set aside extra money to improve the school's crumbling physical condition and train the staff and parents in American Sign Language.

The changes are a culmination of three years of study of deaf education by school alumni and experts from across the nation under the direction of Assemblyman Steven Sanders, a Manhattan Democrat who is chairman of the Assembly's Education Committee.

Alumni found that the school had been reflecting the same failures that had left hearing-impaired students behind both academically and socially nationwide. For instance, a 1988 report by the Council on Education of the Deaf, a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve educational opportunities for deaf and hearing-impaired children, found that by the end of 12th grade, children deaf or hard of hearing children were reading on average at a fourth-grade level and doing math at a sixth-grade level.

Some advocates for hearing-impaired and deaf people attribute those statistics to efforts by the hearing to force deaf and hearing-impaired people to communicate in the same manner as they do.

''They've tried to make us poor imitations of hearing people,'' said Joel Goldfarb, president of the J.H.S. 47 alumni association, who is deaf and spoke through an interpreter. ''No matter how they try, we'll remain deaf.''

There has been research since the 1960's supporting the idea that American Sign Language is a separate language, with its own grammar and syntax. The basis of the language is gestural symbols that represent whole words or even sentences. The shape of the hands, speed and direction and the movement of face, head and body are part of the language. Raised eyebrows, for example, can mean a question.

Like J.H.S. 47, many schools for the deaf and hard of hearing use a combination of informal sign language, lip reading, American Sign Language, captions and amplification. New York State does not require teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing to know sign language, an issue Mr. Sanders plans to address.

''It is the first public school that will grant a diploma with the same standards that we grant the rest of the population,'' Mr. Sanders said. ''The teachers will have the ability to instruct at the pace of the students, which means they have to communicate in the language of A.S.L., which is the language of deaf people.''

There are 4,000 to 5,000 children in New York City who are hard of hearing or deaf, Mr. Florsheim estimated. Most attend special programs in mainstream schools, and some are enrolled in special state-supported schools, like the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens.

There are an estimated half-million to one million deaf people in the United States and about 20 million with severe hearing impairment.

Junior High School 47 has 277 students, and the expansion will make room for an additional 25 to 40 students, Mr. Florsheim said.

A handful of state-supported schools in places like California and Indiana have taken the lead in using American Sign Language as the language of instruction. Charter schools in Minnesota and Colorado that use A.S.L. primarily have been started in the last five or six years.

''Deaf children tended historically to be viewed as defective beings who needed to be fixed without regard to deaf children's preferred language, which is American Sign Language,'' said Russell Rosen, a Columbia University specialist in deaf education who prepared the 1996 report that went to Steven Sanders. ''Deaf children could not understand their hearing teachers, which has produced failure after failure.''

In 1867, all 26 schools for the deaf in the United States used A.S.L. By 1907, all 139 such schools had forbidden its use in an effort to make the deaf more like hearing people. Instead, they were taught to read lips or to speak. New York's embrace of American Sign Language reflects a pendulum swing back.

''There is no single method by which all deaf kids can be educated,'' said Keith Muller, executive director of the League for the Hard of Hearing, the nation's oldest and largest hearing rehabilitation and service league. ''I'm supporting the effort to improve the facility for sure and to upgrade the staff -- that's all glorious,'' Mr. Muller said of the changes. ''The question becomes one of diagnosis and placement decisions.''

Aspiring · 09-02-2007, 02:41 AM

Now that's a school I would like to work at!

Miss-Delectable · 09-02-2007, 02:51 AM

A good start! Maybe others will start to emulate this sort of philosophy & raise the standard in deaf education.

**shel90** · 09-02-2007, 07:53 AM

Wow! That's great news! Thanks for sharing this with us.

jillio · 09-02-2007, 01:22 PM

Wonderful news! Someone is paying attention! Thanks for the article, rd.

**deafskeptic** · 09-02-2007, 01:26 PM

oh yeah.

deafdyke · 09-03-2007, 11:24 PM

Very Cool!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Boult · 09-06-2007, 03:33 AM

But this is a 1998 article. about 10 yrs ago! Can any of you find out if they are still doing that?

09-06-2007, 09:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Boult

But this is a 1998 article. about 10 yrs ago! Can any of you find out if they are still doing that?

good question. And if not it would be interesting to know why they stopped. I'll see if I can dig up some current info on that school.

09-06-2007, 01:16 PM

I went to their website but I couldn't find anything on the teaching methods. Based on that I really can't say if they are still teaching using ASL.

jillio · 09-06-2007, 05:31 PM

The only indication I got was that there was signing in all of the pictures of classroom activities.

rick48 · 09-06-2007, 07:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rockdrummer

I went to their website but I couldn't find anything on the teaching methods. Based on that I really can't say if they are still teaching using ASL.

Found 3 articles doing a quick google search. One from the New York times on 7/2/00 that the Deaf Principal tried to fire 35 tenured teachers but the Union prevented her from doing so. a quote from the Union President along the lines that there are other methods of teaching the deaf but that the Principal only wants to use one method. Another from 6/22/00 also from the NYT mentions the school and also the fact that Cued Speech has proven helpful to some deaf children. Finally a 6/27/07 article from the NY Daily News mentions that due to declining enrollment the school started accepting hearing kids and this was their first mixed graduating class.

Rick

09-06-2007, 08:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rick48

Found 3 articles doing a quick google search. One from the New York times on 7/2/00 that the Deaf Principal tried to fire 35 tenured teachers but the Union prevented her from doing so. a quote from the Union President along the lines that there are other methods of teaching the deaf but that the Principal only wants to use one method. Another from 6/22/00 also from the NYT mentions the school and also the fact that Cued Speech has proven helpful to some deaf children. Finally a 6/27/07 article from the NY Daily News mentions that due to declining enrollment the school started accepting hearing kids and this was their first mixed graduating class.

Rick

Thanks Rick. I admit I am search criteria challanged and couldn't find (or didn't page enough to find) those articles. Any chance you could provide the links for future reference?

jillio · 09-06-2007, 09:24 PM

Here's one of the articles, rd. Its the one mentioned regarding CS. There are several misconceptions in there, but I am simply going to post as retrieved. Still working ont he other 2. Both have to be accessed from my university library account, or require a paid membersip to read the article in its entirety. The only thing you can get from Google is condensed headlines. Doesn't give you much info, as I'm sure you already know.

22, 2000
Among the Deaf, Ubiquitous Sign Language Faces a Challenge
By LYNETTE HOLLOWAY
After decades of intensive lobbying, deaf Americans have gained a place in the national consciousness. American Sign Language interpreters seem to be everywhere, from the State of the Union address to the Miss America pageant. Many universities and high schools now offer sign language as a foreign language course.
But some advocates for the deaf say that a fervent devotion to the exclusive use of sign language by many of the deaf has helped foster a little known and surprising problem: The average 18-year-old deaf American reads at a fourth-grade level.
Whether the problem is because of reliance on sign language, as they say, or stems from other causes, these advocates are seeking to lead a revolution in deaf education through a 34-year-old method called cued speech. The supporters of cued speech say the overreliance on sign language fosters a kind of false pride in deaf separatism.
Others counter that the poor literacy of the deaf does not stem from reliance on sign language but from the fact that the vast majority of the deaf are born to hearing parents who do not know how to guide their deaf children academically. About 90 percent of the quarter-million Americans who were born deaf or became deaf early have hearing parents.
Crisscrossing the nation like evangelists, the advocates of cued speech, both the deaf and the hearing, are splitting deaf Americans, their families and other advocates in a way that is reminiscent of an earlier battle within black America over whether integration was the best course.
''Some people say using cued speech would make someone more hearing in the mind, like a black person trying to be white,'' said Alina Engelman, 18, a deaf student of Brooklyn who uses cued speech.
American Sign Language, called signing, bears no relationship to English, its spelling, syntax or grammar. On the other hand, cued speech, which advocates want to be a supplement to sign language, breaks words into syllables and conveys them with hand signals and lip reading, so that a deaf person can link visual signs and sounds to the language as it is written and spoken. For example, rather than milk being rendered as the act of milking a cow, as it is in sign language, cued speech spells it out letter by letter through lip reading and hand movement, so that when children begin to read and write, they do not have to learn a new language.
Cued speech is being used in a few public school systems across the country, including in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles.
And in some cases, its advocates say, it has helped floundering students move to grade level quickly.
''In the first six months of using cued speech, we made a smooth transition from signing to cueing, and my son learned 500 new words,'' said Sarina Roffe, executive director of New York Cued Speech Center.
Ms. Roffe is a hearing parent whose 24-year-old deaf son, Simon, graduated from one of the city's most selective high schools, Stuyvesant, and then New York University. He began using cued speech when he was 3 1/2 years old.
The deaf felt they had won a degree of autonomy with the official adoption of the American Sign Language, but some now see that autonomy threatened by what they say is an attack on sign language. Others say it is time to face the academic failing of the deaf and focus on their individual learning needs of the children.
The push for broader teaching and use of cued speech comes at time when vocational jobs often filled by the deaf, like printing and data entry, are being replaced by high-technology jobs that require greater literacy, and when technology is making it increasingly possible for deaf children to gain partial hearing through cochlear implants, a surgical procedure that makes verbal communication easier and facilitates cued speech. The implant resembles a thumb-nail-size piece of Play-Doh with a narrow wire that runs behind the ear and an attachment in the hair.
Other methods for helping the deaf communicate have also been advocated over the years. One is oral-auralism, which is essentially lip reading with the help of hearing aids, and was the main teaching tool for generations when sign language was banned from schools in an effort to make them more like hearing children. Another is signing exact English, which is using a type of sign language to depict English just as it is spoken. Still another method is auditory verbal therapy, which teaches the maximum use of hearing aids without lip reading.
Some schools are using American Sign Language for instruction and conceptual understanding of material and one of the other methods to teach reading and writing.
No studies exist showing that one method works better than another, said Jane Fernandes, provost of Gallaudet University, a college for the deaf in Washington.
''After all these years, people are finally realizing that deaf children can't read, and this is the way they can learn,'' Mrs. Roffe said of cued speech. ''We aren't saying that deaf people should not learn American Sign Language. We are saying that the deaf should know both. Sign is not spoken, has no written form and thus has its own syntax. It is incompatible with spoken or written English, making it difficult to learn to read and write. Cued speech helps the deaf to get around that.''
Earlier this month, about 100 families spent a weekend at a campsite beside a sun-dappled lake in Warwick, N.Y., to improve their skills in cued speech. Older students trained toddlers on grassy knolls and parents sat in hot classrooms for hours learning the finer points. Several more camps, run by different advocacy groups for the deaf, are scheduled this summer around the nation. Learning the basics of cued speech takes about 20 hours.
Neither the National Cued Speech Center in Rochester nor the New York Cued Speech Center in Brooklyn has figures on how many people use the system. But Mrs. Roffe estimates that more than 3,000 people have been trained in it.
Opposition to cued speech is strong. Susan M. Mather, a professor of American Sign Language, linguistics and interpretation at Gallaudet, said the poor literacy rate had nothing to do with sign language but was the result of low involvement from hearing parents with their deaf children from the very beginning.
''These children are not getting the attention they need from the start,'' Professor Mather, who is deaf and has deaf children, said through a translator. ''Hearing parents are afraid if their kids learn A.S.L., they will never see them again. They will only be involved in the deaf world. That is not true.''
The deaf children of deaf parents perform slightly better in school than deaf children of hearing parents, experts say, because they learn American Sign Language earlier. While they still encounter the problems of reading and writing, they have the confidence to overcome it because they have been socialized differently than children of hearing parents, the experts say.
Robert R. Davila, vice president of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, said methods like cued speech should be used to improve literacy because they required the entire family to get involved. But Dr. Davila disagreed that American Sign Language was the cause of poor literacy among the deaf.
''Many deaf individuals are bilingual in A.S.L. and English just as many Hispanic children are bilingual in Spanish and English,'' said Dr. Davila, who is Mexican-American. ''It is wrong to blame A.S.L. for having poor English. We don't blame Spanish for having poor English.''
Cued speech was invented by R. Orin Cornet in 1966 shortly after William C. Stokoe Jr., a linguistics professor, successfully pushed for signing to be recognized as a language and helped end a century-long banishment of signing from classrooms.
Cued speech was dwarfed by the focus on signing, but Dr. Cornet, a physicist and mathematician with hearing, pressed on to improve literacy among the deaf students. Even then, deaf educators realized that something needed to be done about the literacy rate of the deaf. So Dr. Cornet developed a system where people could see the spoken word.
Dr. Cornet set up a department at Gallaudet and the technique spread slowly. Small programs were started in Washington and adjacent Montgomery County, Md. Studies showed that deaf children using cued speech had comparable language skills as their peers with hearing. Today, Montgomery County has one of the largest cued speech public school divisions in the country, along with Minnesota and North Carolina.
Today, however, many doctors are recommending that cued speech be used with the cochlear implants, which increase hearing and help people with lip reading.
In cued speech, the cues are quick strokes of the finger across the cheek, the neck and chin. And it encourages users to use their voices.
Carol Sereda, 39, a hearing parent, said: ''If I want to say, 'If you want to go out to play, you have to eat your crackers first,' in sign language, 'I would sign, cracker, eat, finish, play, can. With cued speech, I would cue it in plain English. It's great.''
Teaching children to write through cued speech is easier, said Karen Doenges, a speech-language specialist in Rosemount, Minn.
''If I want to teach a child to write milk in cued speech, it would not be difficult,'' Ms. Doenges said. ''But in American Sign Language the symbol for milk looks like you're milking a cow. When they are trying to figure out the 'm' on the page and the 'i' and 'l' and 'k,' there is no code to match it up with. What cued speech does is try to match the sounds of the language and turn it into a visual thing.''
In the classroom, cued speech requires a person to translate, or cue, what the instructor says. Ms. Engelman, the deaf student, has had translators since kindergarten. ''I would be at a disadvantage without cued speech because I would learn only American Sign Language and everyone would be communicating in English,'' she said. ''That is not to say that I don't like A.S.L. But I would be like, where do you put the 'a' and 'the.' It would be hard.''
Correction: June 28, 2000, Wednesday A chart on Thursday about cued speech, a method of communication used by deaf people, omitted a source. In addition to the National Cued Speech Association, information for the chart was drawn from the online instructional guide ''The Art of Cueing'' by J. Frisbie.

rick48 · 09-06-2007, 09:55 PM

I think I googled junior high school 47 new york deaf Also if you click on those condensed headlines the article should pop up.

rick48 · 09-06-2007, 10:02 PM

Here's page of 1 of one article

Union Thwarts Effort to Replace Teachers in School for Deaf
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By LYNETTE HOLLOWAY
Published: July 2, 2000
The New York City teachers' union has thwarted a plan by the principal of the School for the Deaf to replace 35 teachers who are not proficient in American Sign Language with those who are, officials said.

Martin Florsheim, the principal, told 35 teachers on Tuesday that they would be working at new schools in the fall, said Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, the teachers' union.

Union representatives quickly intervened, tentatively negotiating the number to about 10, said Ms. Weingarten, who added that principals did not have the authority to remove tenured teachers. Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Board of Education, said officials were investigating the incident.

Dr. Florsheim's efforts are representative of a larger debate about the education of deaf students.

The average deaf 18-year-old American cannot read above the fourth-grade level. Some advocates for the deaf say the problem lies in the fact that American Sign Language, called signing, bears no relationship to English in syntax, grammar or spelling. Ms. Weingarten said last week that methods of teaching deaf students other than sign language should be explored. But proponents of sign language, like Dr. Florsheim, who is deaf, say the problem is not with sign language but with the people teaching it.

The Board of Education made American Sign Language the primary language of the deaf school in 1998, after vociferous complaints from some parents about the quality of teaching there. The school, also known as Junior High School 47, runs from prekindergarten to grade 12.

Barbara Fass, a deaf mother of two deaf daughters, Esther, 7, and Adele Idy, 4, was one of the complaining parents. Both children attend the school. Ms. Fass said on Friday that she was disappointed that Ms. Weingarten had prevented Dr. Florsheim from replacing the teachers.

''I completely disagree with Randi Weingarten's comment that there are other methods of teaching,'' Ms. Fass wrote in response to a question. ''A.S.L. is a language, and how is that possible for her to say that there are other methods? Is she fluent in A.S.L., and if not, what right does she have?''

Terri Thomson, the Queens representative on the board, spearheaded the effort to make sign language the primary language at the school.

She said on Friday that though she was not familiar with what had happened on Tuesday, she was aware of continuing staffing changes to ensure that students were well educated.

''At each of our public agenda meetings, a group of parents would come to testify because their children were getting poor educations,'' Ms. Thomson said. ''Some were being taught through sign language interpreters who were not teachers, and the quality was poor. We heard from students who told of failing tests. Many said they felt isolated going to school, walking around with sign language interpreters. What they cried out for was a program where they could be taught in their home language -- A.S.L.''

Dr. Florsheim, the first deaf principal of the school, has mostly hired teachers fluent in sign language to his staff of 87 since becoming principal in 1996. The school, which is on East 23rd Street at Second Avenue in Manhattan, has about 300 students.

American Sign Language is an important touchstone to the deaf. It had been banned from schools for more than a century in an effort to make deaf students learn and behave more like hearing children. In the late 1960's, William Stokoe Jr., a linguist at Gallaudet University, a university for the hearing-impaired in Washington, pushed for it to become recognized as a language.

But now, at a time when high-technology jobs are increasingly replacing vocational jobs, and when medical technology is making it possible for deaf children to gain partial hearing through cochlear implants, some parents and educators are pushing for broader forms of communication.

Another method is cued speech, which can supplement sign language. It breaks words into syllables and conveys them with hand signals and lip reading, so that a deaf person can link visual signs and sounds to the language as it is written and spoken. Others include oral-auralism, which essentially is lip reading with the help of hearing aids; signing exact English, which is using a type of sign language to depict English just as it is spoken; and auditory verbal therapy, which teaches the maximum use of hearing aids without the lip reading.

rick48 · 09-06-2007, 10:04 PM

Here's page 2, didn't realize it was only one paragrah oops

Union Thwarts Effort to Replace Teachers in School for Deaf
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By LYNETTE HOLLOWAY
Published: July 2, 2000
''I'm exasperated by this situation,'' Ms. Weingarten said of the incident at the school. ''Here's a school designed to help kids who are deaf or hard of hearing, and one of the approaches is supposed to be A.S.L. Dr. Florsheim believes that A.S.L. is the only way. It's a good method, but it is not an exclusive method. There are some kids who will benefit from others. That is not something he understands.''

rick48 · 09-06-2007, 10:10 PM

RD,

The school is still there as the 6/07 article is about the first hearing/deaf graduating class. There are at least four other schools for the deaf in NYC: an oral school in Brooklyn, a Moog school in Manhattan, the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens and St. Joseph School for the Deaf in the Bronx.

But I cannot find anything to say if they still only teach ASL.
Rick

PS in the Cued Speech article above the boy mentioned went to Stuyvesant HS and then NYU. Stuyvesant is one of, if not the elite HS in the NYC school system. You don't just go there, you have to take a test to see if you can be selected for it.

jillio · 09-06-2007, 10:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rick48

Here's page of 1 of one article

Union Thwarts Effort to Replace Teachers in School for Deaf
Print
Single-Page
Save
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By LYNETTE HOLLOWAY
Published: July 2, 2000
The New York City teachers' union has thwarted a plan by the principal of the School for the Deaf to replace 35 teachers who are not proficient in American Sign Language with those who are, officials said.

Martin Florsheim, the principal, told 35 teachers on Tuesday that they would be working at new schools in the fall, said Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, the teachers' union.

Union representatives quickly intervened, tentatively negotiating the number to about 10, said Ms. Weingarten, who added that principals did not have the authority to remove tenured teachers. Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Board of Education, said officials were investigating the incident.

Dr. Florsheim's efforts are representative of a larger debate about the education of deaf students.

The average deaf 18-year-old American cannot read above the fourth-grade level. Some advocates for the deaf say the problem lies in the fact that American Sign Language, called signing, bears no relationship to English in syntax, grammar or spelling. Ms. Weingarten said last week that methods of teaching deaf students other than sign language should be explored. But proponents of sign language, like Dr. Florsheim, who is deaf, say the problem is not with sign language but with the people teaching it.

The Board of Education made American Sign Language the primary language of the deaf school in 1998, after vociferous complaints from some parents about the quality of teaching there. The school, also known as Junior High School 47, runs from prekindergarten to grade 12.

Barbara Fass, a deaf mother of two deaf daughters, Esther, 7, and Adele Idy, 4, was one of the complaining parents. Both children attend the school. Ms. Fass said on Friday that she was disappointed that Ms. Weingarten had prevented Dr. Florsheim from replacing the teachers.

''I completely disagree with Randi Weingarten's comment that there are other methods of teaching,'' Ms. Fass wrote in response to a question. ''A.S.L. is a language, and how is that possible for her to say that there are other methods? Is she fluent in A.S.L., and if not, what right does she have?''

Terri Thomson, the Queens representative on the board, spearheaded the effort to make sign language the primary language at the school.

She said on Friday that though she was not familiar with what had happened on Tuesday, she was aware of continuing staffing changes to ensure that students were well educated.

''At each of our public agenda meetings, a group of parents would come to testify because their children were getting poor educations,'' Ms. Thomson said. ''Some were being taught through sign language interpreters who were not teachers, and the quality was poor. We heard from students who told of failing tests. Many said they felt isolated going to school, walking around with sign language interpreters. What they cried out for was a program where they could be taught in their home language -- A.S.L.''

Dr. Florsheim, the first deaf principal of the school, has mostly hired teachers fluent in sign language to his staff of 87 since becoming principal in 1996. The school, which is on East 23rd Street at Second Avenue in Manhattan, has about 300 students.

American Sign Language is an important touchstone to the deaf. It had been banned from schools for more than a century in an effort to make deaf students learn and behave more like hearing children. In the late 1960's, William Stokoe Jr., a linguist at Gallaudet University, a university for the hearing-impaired in Washington, pushed for it to become recognized as a language.

But now, at a time when high-technology jobs are increasingly replacing vocational jobs, and when medical technology is making it possible for deaf children to gain partial hearing through cochlear implants, some parents and educators are pushing for broader forms of communication.

Another method is cued speech, which can supplement sign language. It breaks words into syllables and conveys them with hand signals and lip reading, so that a deaf person can link visual signs and sounds to the language as it is written and spoken. Others include oral-auralism, which essentially is lip reading with the help of hearing aids; signing exact English, which is using a type of sign language to depict English just as it is spoken; and auditory verbal therapy, which teaches the maximum use of hearing aids without the lip reading.

This is exactly why tenure is not always a good thing. And also why hearing administrators who have no experience in deaf education should not be making decisions regarding deaf students. The parents and the students spoke out regardingtheir needs, a deaf pricipal attempted to fulfill those needs, and hearing administrators have agian stepped in to protect the hearing, notthe deaf. Its a shame that all the Deaf teachers who lost their jobs to hearing professionalized oral techers of the deaf in the late 19th and early 20th century didn't have tenure to fall back on!

**shel90** · 09-07-2007, 05:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jillio

This is exactly why tenure is not always a good thing. And also why hearing administrators who have no experience in deaf education should not be making decisions regarding deaf students. The parents and the students spoke out regardingtheir needs, a deaf pricipal attempted to fulfill those needs, and hearing administrators have agian stepped in to protect the hearing, notthe deaf. Its a shame that all the Deaf teachers who lost their jobs to hearing professionalized oral techers of the deaf in the late 19th and early 20th century didn't have tenure to fall back on!

Yea..

09-02-2007, 02:51 AM	#3 (permalink)
Miss-Delectable V.I.P. Member Join Date: Apr 2004 Posts: 17,175 Blog Entries: 3	A good start! Maybe others will start to emulate this sort of philosophy & raise the standard in deaf education. __________________ "Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light." - Helen Keller

09-02-2007, 07:53 AM	#4 (permalink)
shel90 Let It Snow!!!! Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: A place where crabs are popular Posts: 39,239 Blog Entries: 3	Wow! That's great news! Thanks for sharing this with us. __________________ "Wine improves with age. The older I get, the better I like it." --- Anonymous

09-02-2007, 01:26 PM	#6 (permalink)
deafskeptic Premium Member Join Date: Sep 2006 Posts: 14,495	oh yeah. __________________ Left ear implanted with Med-El on April 24 2007. Activated on May 9th. Upgraded to Opus 2 9/10/2010 Think Pink. FREE JILLIO!

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09-02-2007, 02:41 AM	#2 (permalink)
Aspiring Registered User Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Cali Posts: 24	Now that's a school I would like to work at!

09-02-2007, 01:22 PM	#5 (permalink)
jillio Banned Join Date: Jun 2006 Posts: 60,296	Wonderful news! Someone is paying attention! Thanks for the article, rd.

09-03-2007, 11:24 PM	#7 (permalink)
deafdyke Registered User Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Trebekistan Posts: 11,640	Very Cool!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

09-06-2007, 01:16 PM	#10 (permalink)
rockdrummer Guest Posts: n/a	I went to their website but I couldn't find anything on the teaching methods. Based on that I really can't say if they are still teaching using ASL.

09-06-2007, 05:31 PM	#11 (permalink)
jillio Banned Join Date: Jun 2006 Posts: 60,296	The only indication I got was that there was signing in all of the pictures of classroom activities.

09-06-2007, 09:24 PM	#14 (permalink)
jillio Banned Join Date: Jun 2006 Posts: 60,296	Here's one of the articles, rd. Its the one mentioned regarding CS. There are several misconceptions in there, but I am simply going to post as retrieved. Still working ont he other 2. Both have to be accessed from my university library account, or require a paid membersip to read the article in its entirety. The only thing you can get from Google is condensed headlines. Doesn't give you much info, as I'm sure you already know. 22, 2000 Among the Deaf, Ubiquitous Sign Language Faces a Challenge By LYNETTE HOLLOWAY After decades of intensive lobbying, deaf Americans have gained a place in the national consciousness. American Sign Language interpreters seem to be everywhere, from the State of the Union address to the Miss America pageant. Many universities and high schools now offer sign language as a foreign language course. But some advocates for the deaf say that a fervent devotion to the exclusive use of sign language by many of the deaf has helped foster a little known and surprising problem: The average 18-year-old deaf American reads at a fourth-grade level. Whether the problem is because of reliance on sign language, as they say, or stems from other causes, these advocates are seeking to lead a revolution in deaf education through a 34-year-old method called cued speech. The supporters of cued speech say the overreliance on sign language fosters a kind of false pride in deaf separatism. Others counter that the poor literacy of the deaf does not stem from reliance on sign language but from the fact that the vast majority of the deaf are born to hearing parents who do not know how to guide their deaf children academically. About 90 percent of the quarter-million Americans who were born deaf or became deaf early have hearing parents. Crisscrossing the nation like evangelists, the advocates of cued speech, both the deaf and the hearing, are splitting deaf Americans, their families and other advocates in a way that is reminiscent of an earlier battle within black America over whether integration was the best course. ''Some people say using cued speech would make someone more hearing in the mind, like a black person trying to be white,'' said Alina Engelman, 18, a deaf student of Brooklyn who uses cued speech. American Sign Language, called signing, bears no relationship to English, its spelling, syntax or grammar. On the other hand, cued speech, which advocates want to be a supplement to sign language, breaks words into syllables and conveys them with hand signals and lip reading, so that a deaf person can link visual signs and sounds to the language as it is written and spoken. For example, rather than milk being rendered as the act of milking a cow, as it is in sign language, cued speech spells it out letter by letter through lip reading and hand movement, so that when children begin to read and write, they do not have to learn a new language. Cued speech is being used in a few public school systems across the country, including in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. And in some cases, its advocates say, it has helped floundering students move to grade level quickly. ''In the first six months of using cued speech, we made a smooth transition from signing to cueing, and my son learned 500 new words,'' said Sarina Roffe, executive director of New York Cued Speech Center. Ms. Roffe is a hearing parent whose 24-year-old deaf son, Simon, graduated from one of the city's most selective high schools, Stuyvesant, and then New York University. He began using cued speech when he was 3 1/2 years old. The deaf felt they had won a degree of autonomy with the official adoption of the American Sign Language, but some now see that autonomy threatened by what they say is an attack on sign language. Others say it is time to face the academic failing of the deaf and focus on their individual learning needs of the children. The push for broader teaching and use of cued speech comes at time when vocational jobs often filled by the deaf, like printing and data entry, are being replaced by high-technology jobs that require greater literacy, and when technology is making it increasingly possible for deaf children to gain partial hearing through cochlear implants, a surgical procedure that makes verbal communication easier and facilitates cued speech. The implant resembles a thumb-nail-size piece of Play-Doh with a narrow wire that runs behind the ear and an attachment in the hair. Other methods for helping the deaf communicate have also been advocated over the years. One is oral-auralism, which is essentially lip reading with the help of hearing aids, and was the main teaching tool for generations when sign language was banned from schools in an effort to make them more like hearing children. Another is signing exact English, which is using a type of sign language to depict English just as it is spoken. Still another method is auditory verbal therapy, which teaches the maximum use of hearing aids without lip reading. Some schools are using American Sign Language for instruction and conceptual understanding of material and one of the other methods to teach reading and writing. No studies exist showing that one method works better than another, said Jane Fernandes, provost of Gallaudet University, a college for the deaf in Washington. ''After all these years, people are finally realizing that deaf children can't read, and this is the way they can learn,'' Mrs. Roffe said of cued speech. ''We aren't saying that deaf people should not learn American Sign Language. We are saying that the deaf should know both. Sign is not spoken, has no written form and thus has its own syntax. It is incompatible with spoken or written English, making it difficult to learn to read and write. Cued speech helps the deaf to get around that.'' Earlier this month, about 100 families spent a weekend at a campsite beside a sun-dappled lake in Warwick, N.Y., to improve their skills in cued speech. Older students trained toddlers on grassy knolls and parents sat in hot classrooms for hours learning the finer points. Several more camps, run by different advocacy groups for the deaf, are scheduled this summer around the nation. Learning the basics of cued speech takes about 20 hours. Neither the National Cued Speech Center in Rochester nor the New York Cued Speech Center in Brooklyn has figures on how many people use the system. But Mrs. Roffe estimates that more than 3,000 people have been trained in it. Opposition to cued speech is strong. Susan M. Mather, a professor of American Sign Language, linguistics and interpretation at Gallaudet, said the poor literacy rate had nothing to do with sign language but was the result of low involvement from hearing parents with their deaf children from the very beginning. ''These children are not getting the attention they need from the start,'' Professor Mather, who is deaf and has deaf children, said through a translator. ''Hearing parents are afraid if their kids learn A.S.L., they will never see them again. They will only be involved in the deaf world. That is not true.'' The deaf children of deaf parents perform slightly better in school than deaf children of hearing parents, experts say, because they learn American Sign Language earlier. While they still encounter the problems of reading and writing, they have the confidence to overcome it because they have been socialized differently than children of hearing parents, the experts say. Robert R. Davila, vice president of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, said methods like cued speech should be used to improve literacy because they required the entire family to get involved. But Dr. Davila disagreed that American Sign Language was the cause of poor literacy among the deaf. ''Many deaf individuals are bilingual in A.S.L. and English just as many Hispanic children are bilingual in Spanish and English,'' said Dr. Davila, who is Mexican-American. ''It is wrong to blame A.S.L. for having poor English. We don't blame Spanish for having poor English.'' Cued speech was invented by R. Orin Cornet in 1966 shortly after William C. Stokoe Jr., a linguistics professor, successfully pushed for signing to be recognized as a language and helped end a century-long banishment of signing from classrooms. Cued speech was dwarfed by the focus on signing, but Dr. Cornet, a physicist and mathematician with hearing, pressed on to improve literacy among the deaf students. Even then, deaf educators realized that something needed to be done about the literacy rate of the deaf. So Dr. Cornet developed a system where people could see the spoken word. Dr. Cornet set up a department at Gallaudet and the technique spread slowly. Small programs were started in Washington and adjacent Montgomery County, Md. Studies showed that deaf children using cued speech had comparable language skills as their peers with hearing. Today, Montgomery County has one of the largest cued speech public school divisions in the country, along with Minnesota and North Carolina. Today, however, many doctors are recommending that cued speech be used with the cochlear implants, which increase hearing and help people with lip reading. In cued speech, the cues are quick strokes of the finger across the cheek, the neck and chin. And it encourages users to use their voices. Carol Sereda, 39, a hearing parent, said: ''If I want to say, 'If you want to go out to play, you have to eat your crackers first,' in sign language, 'I would sign, cracker, eat, finish, play, can. With cued speech, I would cue it in plain English. It's great.'' Teaching children to write through cued speech is easier, said Karen Doenges, a speech-language specialist in Rosemount, Minn. ''If I want to teach a child to write milk in cued speech, it would not be difficult,'' Ms. Doenges said. ''But in American Sign Language the symbol for milk looks like you're milking a cow. When they are trying to figure out the 'm' on the page and the 'i' and 'l' and 'k,' there is no code to match it up with. What cued speech does is try to match the sounds of the language and turn it into a visual thing.'' In the classroom, cued speech requires a person to translate, or cue, what the instructor says. Ms. Engelman, the deaf student, has had translators since kindergarten. ''I would be at a disadvantage without cued speech because I would learn only American Sign Language and everyone would be communicating in English,'' she said. ''That is not to say that I don't like A.S.L. But I would be like, where do you put the 'a' and 'the.' It would be hard.'' Correction: June 28, 2000, Wednesday A chart on Thursday about cued speech, a method of communication used by deaf people, omitted a source. In addition to the National Cued Speech Association, information for the chart was drawn from the online instructional guide ''The Art of Cueing'' by J. Frisbie.

09-06-2007, 09:55 PM	#15 (permalink)
rick48 Banned Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Proud to be one of "those four" Posts: 1,898	I think I googled junior high school 47 new york deaf Also if you click on those condensed headlines the article should pop up.

09-06-2007, 10:02 PM	#16 (permalink)
rick48 Banned Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Proud to be one of "those four" Posts: 1,898	Here's page of 1 of one article Union Thwarts Effort to Replace Teachers in School for Deaf Print Single-Page Save Share Digg Facebook Newsvine Permalink By LYNETTE HOLLOWAY Published: July 2, 2000 The New York City teachers' union has thwarted a plan by the principal of the School for the Deaf to replace 35 teachers who are not proficient in American Sign Language with those who are, officials said. Martin Florsheim, the principal, told 35 teachers on Tuesday that they would be working at new schools in the fall, said Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, the teachers' union. Union representatives quickly intervened, tentatively negotiating the number to about 10, said Ms. Weingarten, who added that principals did not have the authority to remove tenured teachers. Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Board of Education, said officials were investigating the incident. Dr. Florsheim's efforts are representative of a larger debate about the education of deaf students. The average deaf 18-year-old American cannot read above the fourth-grade level. Some advocates for the deaf say the problem lies in the fact that American Sign Language, called signing, bears no relationship to English in syntax, grammar or spelling. Ms. Weingarten said last week that methods of teaching deaf students other than sign language should be explored. But proponents of sign language, like Dr. Florsheim, who is deaf, say the problem is not with sign language but with the people teaching it. The Board of Education made American Sign Language the primary language of the deaf school in 1998, after vociferous complaints from some parents about the quality of teaching there. The school, also known as Junior High School 47, runs from prekindergarten to grade 12. Barbara Fass, a deaf mother of two deaf daughters, Esther, 7, and Adele Idy, 4, was one of the complaining parents. Both children attend the school. Ms. Fass said on Friday that she was disappointed that Ms. Weingarten had prevented Dr. Florsheim from replacing the teachers. ''I completely disagree with Randi Weingarten's comment that there are other methods of teaching,'' Ms. Fass wrote in response to a question. ''A.S.L. is a language, and how is that possible for her to say that there are other methods? Is she fluent in A.S.L., and if not, what right does she have?'' Terri Thomson, the Queens representative on the board, spearheaded the effort to make sign language the primary language at the school. She said on Friday that though she was not familiar with what had happened on Tuesday, she was aware of continuing staffing changes to ensure that students were well educated. ''At each of our public agenda meetings, a group of parents would come to testify because their children were getting poor educations,'' Ms. Thomson said. ''Some were being taught through sign language interpreters who were not teachers, and the quality was poor. We heard from students who told of failing tests. Many said they felt isolated going to school, walking around with sign language interpreters. What they cried out for was a program where they could be taught in their home language -- A.S.L.'' Dr. Florsheim, the first deaf principal of the school, has mostly hired teachers fluent in sign language to his staff of 87 since becoming principal in 1996. The school, which is on East 23rd Street at Second Avenue in Manhattan, has about 300 students. American Sign Language is an important touchstone to the deaf. It had been banned from schools for more than a century in an effort to make deaf students learn and behave more like hearing children. In the late 1960's, William Stokoe Jr., a linguist at Gallaudet University, a university for the hearing-impaired in Washington, pushed for it to become recognized as a language. But now, at a time when high-technology jobs are increasingly replacing vocational jobs, and when medical technology is making it possible for deaf children to gain partial hearing through cochlear implants, some parents and educators are pushing for broader forms of communication. Another method is cued speech, which can supplement sign language. It breaks words into syllables and conveys them with hand signals and lip reading, so that a deaf person can link visual signs and sounds to the language as it is written and spoken. Others include oral-auralism, which essentially is lip reading with the help of hearing aids; signing exact English, which is using a type of sign language to depict English just as it is spoken; and auditory verbal therapy, which teaches the maximum use of hearing aids without the lip reading.

09-06-2007, 10:04 PM	#17 (permalink)
rick48 Banned Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Proud to be one of "those four" Posts: 1,898	Here's page 2, didn't realize it was only one paragrah oops Union Thwarts Effort to Replace Teachers in School for Deaf Print Single-Page Save Share Digg Facebook Newsvine Permalink By LYNETTE HOLLOWAY Published: July 2, 2000 ''I'm exasperated by this situation,'' Ms. Weingarten said of the incident at the school. ''Here's a school designed to help kids who are deaf or hard of hearing, and one of the approaches is supposed to be A.S.L. Dr. Florsheim believes that A.S.L. is the only way. It's a good method, but it is not an exclusive method. There are some kids who will benefit from others. That is not something he understands.''

09-06-2007, 10:10 PM	#18 (permalink)
rick48 Banned Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Proud to be one of "those four" Posts: 1,898	RD, The school is still there as the 6/07 article is about the first hearing/deaf graduating class. There are at least four other schools for the deaf in NYC: an oral school in Brooklyn, a Moog school in Manhattan, the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens and St. Joseph School for the Deaf in the Bronx. But I cannot find anything to say if they still only teach ASL. Rick PS in the Cued Speech article above the boy mentioned went to Stuyvesant HS and then NYU. Stuyvesant is one of, if not the elite HS in the NYC school system. You don't just go there, you have to take a test to see if you can be selected for it.