Shortcomings in Schooling for Deaf Students Lamented

By Debra Viadero

WASHINGTON--Little has changed for hearing-impaired schoolchildren in the four years since a federal commission concluded that the education of deaf students was "unacceptably unsatisfactory,'' witnesses last week told a House panel beginning work on extension of federal deaf-education programs.

"Most deaf children now going through the public schools will never be a college graduate,'' said Frank G. Bowe, who served as the chairman of the Commission on Education of the Deaf. "We have tremendous investment in higher education for these kids but no investment whatsoever in the kids who haven't made it there.''

The testimony came at the first of three scheduled hearings before the House Subcommittee on Select Education on reauthorization of the Education of the Deaf Act. The 1986 law established the Commission on Education of the Deaf, whose work ended with its 1988 report, "Toward Equality:...