That conclusion made is one very good reason why, not coming from a household that has been fluent in ASL for generations, much less one generation, for my family, it was critical that my daughter be raised with both ASL and spoken English accessed via CIs. We want her to have full access to language: including exposure to fully developed literacy and fluency in the home and in her community as well as in her schools.
If we had chosen not to implant, she would be living in a home without a sophisticated or even adequate level of vocabulary and input as we were learning basic ASL alongside her, with language gaps all around her, given that family, friends, and neighbors did not immediately begin ASL classes. If we had opted for just spoken language, we would have significantly extended an already too-long period without full language input during a very critical developmental period, and we would not have provided her with a very powerful means of communicating not only with other deaf friends and teachers, but with her family as an alternative to spoken language or when her CIs are not on, which, when you tally up bath time, swimming time, bed time, etc, is pretty significant.
If I were from a Deaf family and environment, or had no access to the ASL resources I have in my location, our decisions may have taken us in other directions. But that's not the case, literacy is critical to us, and I've read the various reports we've all seen, including
Gallaudet's literacy evaluation giving 17-18 YO deaf students a median score at the level of a typical hearing 4th grader (that is, half of those 17-18 YOs scored lower than the typical hearing 4th graders, half scored higher). Which is pretty damning. I want my daughter to have the opportunity to read and write at the same level of a typical hearing child her age.
But I'm from a hearing family in which building our daughter's vocabulary and love for literature requires us as parents to be able to make the distinctions between filly, colt, stallion, mare; sea spray, seafoam, waves, shoals; grains of sand, dunes, beach, etc. (we're currently reading the Misty of Chincoteague books to the wee one) -- I simply don't have the vocabulary in ASL yet to do that, my level of horse and beach and ocean are fine for the board books, which we can read in ASL, (although my ASL instructor gave up on finding a sign for Armadillo for one of Li's favorites from last year, so that one is "lost"
. I rely heavily on her school to provide the sophisticated ASL vocabulary I lack.
Closing the achievement gap takes a lot more than just getting new smart white boards into the rooms (which are very cool, by the way, I've played with those a bit).
