Mainstreaming and Social Capital

Mainstreaming, in general, has had a negative impact on the socioemotional lives of deaf children. Knowledgeable advocates predicted with the first passage of the IDEA law in 1975 that this erosion of the educational experience would take place, and indeed it has. The system for educating deaf children that has evolved since that year is sorely deficient in its ability to provide these children with the social capital they need for fulfilled and successful adult lives. As a result of spending all or most of their K–12 years in general education settings, many if not most Deaf adults view their own K–12 experiences as “mainstreaming experiments” and can clearly articulate the deficiencies in the system.

Proponents of mainstreaming, since the first IDEA was passed in 1975, have had the misguided idea that for deaf children to be educated in the same neighborhood school as their siblings and neighbors is always and in every way superior to having them educated in a state school for the Deaf. This misguided idea is based on the notion that a child with any kind of disability will always be better served by education in the most “normal” environment. The terminologies in the law “least restrictive environment” and “free appropriate public education” in just a few decades evolved to mean “the neighborhood school” (e.g., the school most geographically proximate to a child’s family home).

The word disability came to denote any kind of disability on a very wide spectrum, including developmental disabilities, conditions on the autism spectrum, physical disabilities such as spina bifida and cerebral palsy, and learning disabilities such as dyslexia. The term sensory disability came to include variations in ability to see and hear. So children who had any degree of sensory difference also came under this broad umbrella of “disability.”

The error of considering children who are deaf under this broad umbrella has its root in the fact that any individual with an intact sense of hearing can never fully fathom the absence of information input that the deaf child experiences day in and day out. Most teachers (and parents) have little understanding of what inadequate substitutes hearing aids and cochlear implants are for normal hearing. In the 21st century, hearing aids and cochlear implants do a better job than those of decades ago. But what so many people fail to realize is that they still do not enable a child to hear in noisy situations (and what school situation is not noisy?), and they very frequently do not enable a child to hear well enough to be accepted as an equal in most adolescent circles. They do not provide an equal form of hearing in terms of clarity and cognitive register.