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.”



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