I found this article in the November, 1996 issue of the Braille Monitor, published by the National
Federation of the Blind. You can view the entire issue by going to 
http://www.nfb.org/bm/bm96/brlm9611.htm.

IS IT TOO LATE TO RESCUE BRAILLE LITERACY?
                       by Emerson  Foulke
    From the Editor Emeritus: Dr. Emerson Foulke is a long-time
Federationist and one of the leaders of the National Federation
of the Blind of Kentucky. He is also a brilliant scholar and an
authority in the field of Braille reading and writing.
  Dr. Foulke received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from
Washington University in St. Louis and shortly thereafter (1959)
accepted a position as a psychologist at the Veterans Hospital in
Knoxville, Iowa. In 1961 he went to Louisville to accept
employment at the American Printing House for the Blind and the
University of Louisville. In 1961 he joined the faculty of the
University of Louisville full-time as a professor of psychology.
He became director of the Perceptual Alternatives Laboratory at
the University of Louisville in 1969 and continued in that
position until his retirement in 1992.
  For Dr. Foulke retirement has not meant reduced activity. He
now serves as director of the International Braille Research
Center and does extensive writing and research. The following
paper is illustrative. It was given in March of this year at the
World Forum on Literacy in Montevideo, Uruguay. Here it  is:
  Next to print, Braille is, to my knowledge, the best reading
and writing system ever devised. It is often read more slowly
than print because the finger tip's field of view is smaller than
the eye's field of view and because reading fingers cannot move
as fast as eyes. However, like print, Braille is displayed
spatially on the page. Consequently, the advantage realized by
print readers because they can use spatial cues to search,
retrieve, and read selectively is also realized by Braille
readers. The alternative approaches to reading that blind
children are too often encouraged or required to learn do not
share these advantages.
  For blind persons Braille is the path to literacy and all of
the advantages conferred by literacy. Blind persons who are good
Braille readers have opportunities not available to blind persons
who read Braille poorly or not at all. They have generally become
educated and are engaged in productive employment. Although the
advantage conferred by Braille has always been obvious to anyone
who took the trouble to notice it, it is only recently that
studies have been undertaken to gauge the value of Braille to
those who are competent in its use.
  The results of recent research (Schroeder, 1994; Ryles, 1996)
are beginning to confirm what competent Braille readers have
always known. The findings of these investigators indicate that
blind persons who are competent Braille readers are also much
more likely to have had a good education, to spend more time
reading, to be productively employed, to be financially self-
sufficient, and to have higher self-esteem than blind persons who
read Braille poorly or not at all. A survey conducted by Kirchner
(1988) revealed that 70 percent of the legally blind persons in
the nation are unemployed. Findings reported by Ryles (1996)
suggest that the 30 percent who are employed are much more likely
to be Braille readers than the 70 percent who are not. Spungin
(1989) reported a study undertaken by the American Foundation for
the Blind in which the database it maintains, called the Careers
and Technology Information Bank (CTIB), was examined and revealed
that 85 percent of the blind persons in this database who are
primarily Braille readers are also employed.
  In 1995 the Library Division of the Canadian National Institute
for the Blind (CNIB) conducted a survey of its blind patrons in
order to assess the impact of Braille literacy on the library
services offered by CNIB to blind Canadians. Survey results
indicated that only 6 percent of its Braille-reading patrons were
unemployed: 52 percent had incomes higher than $25,000 per year,
and 14 percent had incomes higher than $50,000 per year. Eleven
percent held one university degree, and of that group 14 percent
held more than one degree (CNIB, 1995).
  The significance of these results can be gauged by comparing
them with the results of a survey conducted by Statistics Canada,
which found that 10 percent of all Canadians of employable age
(sighted, blind, or otherwise) were unemployed, and that only 10
percent of all Canadians reported incomes higher than $25,000 per
year. The study further indicated that only 8.8 percent of all
Canadians held university degrees (Statistics Canada, 1990). As
another indication of the advantage gained by using Braille for
reading, the unemployment figure of 6 percent for Braille-reading
patrons of the CNIB Library should also be compared with the
unemployment figure of 75 percent for all blind Canadians of
employable age that was found in another survey reported by
Statistics Canada (1993).
  The reason for the findings reported by Schroeder, Ryles,
Spungin, and CNIB are obvious. Education and the work people are
able to do because they are educated are predicated on the
ability to read. Reading is the basic tool on which all education
depends, because those who learn to read can then read to learn,
and it is the reading of Braille that allows blind persons to
become literate.
  When I began my education sixty years ago, most blind and
visually impaired children received their education in
residential schools. Because these schools were relatively few in
number, they could easily reach an agreement concerning the
school books their students would use, and they could therefore
place book orders with a Braille printing house that were large
enough to make their production economical. Because all of the
students would be depending on Braille for their reading and
writing, they received intensive instruction in its use; and all
of their teachers, not just their Braille teachers, were expected
to know how to read and write Braille as well. Furthermore, the
teachers expected their students to become good Braille readers
and insisted on a high standard of reading performance, and with
few exceptions the students learned to read well and enjoy
reading.
  In view of the role of Braille in making the option of literacy
available to blind persons, one would naturally suppose that the
public schools, where most blind children now receive their
education, place as much emphasis on the provision of adequate
instruction in learning to read Braille as on learning to read
print. Sadly, this is not the case. From the time the enrollment
of blind children in public schools became the general practice
to the present, there has been a continuous decline in Braille
reading ability (Rex, 1989; Mullen, 1990).
  The Federal Quota Registry, maintained and published annually
by the American Printing House for the Blind (APH), is an
enumeration of the legally blind children in the nation,
classified by reading ability and the type of reading in which
they engage. Examination of this registry reveals that the number
of legally blind children increased from 17,330 in 1963 to 52,791
in 1993. During this period the fraction of registered students
who were taught to read Braille declined from 57 percent to less
than 10 percent, and the fraction of legally blind students
classified as nonreaders rose from a little over 0.10 percent to
more than 45 percent (American Printing House for the Blind,
1963-1993). Some of this increase is due to the increased
enrollment in public schools of blind students who have other
handicaps, but it is clear that there has been a steep increase
in the fraction of legally blind children who are taught to read
by listening to recorded or live speech, or by reading large
print or magnified print, or who do not read at all.
  It is noteworthy that, although the APH Registry classifies as
readers not only those who use Braille for reading but also those
who read by listening or by visual perception of large print or
magnified print, it is only those who use Braille for reading
that realize the advantages generally associated with literacy.
The findings just cited urge the conclusion that the public
school system de-emphasized the reading medium that gives blind
persons the opportunity to become literate and emphasized the
reading media that have been shown to be ineffective in achieving
literacy (R. Ryles, personal communication, 1996).
  As the increase in the number of blind children who read
Braille slowly and inaccurately or not at all continued, the
demand for books in Braille decreased. The declining demand for
Braille books caused by inadequate instruction of blind children
led to decreased production of Braille books, and because persons
who do not read Braille well or do not read it at all do not ask
libraries for books in Braille, libraries included fewer and
fewer Braille books in their collections.
  The reasons for the changes just indicated are not hard to
find. When blind children started going to public schools in
large numbers, there were dramatic changes in the way they were
educated. These changes had far-reaching effects, some of which
were not anticipated and were far from desirable. The wish to
have blind children educated in public schools was doubtless
motivated by the best of intentions. It was held that blind
children would reap the benefits of living with their families
during their formative years and that their socialization would
be facilitated by contact with their sighted classmates. They
would become integrated into the society of the sighted, and the
negative stereotypes concerning the blind would vanish.
  With little in the way of analytical thinking, it was tacitly
assumed that blind children would receive adequate instruction in
tool skills such as reading and writing Braille. Unfortunately,
in far too many cases this did not happen. There were not enough
competent teachers of Braille to meet the instructional demands
imposed by the influx of blind children (Stephens, 1989;
Schroeder, 1989; Caton, 1991; Willson, 1993), and even if such
competent teachers had been available, there was not enough money
in school budgets, short of a radical change in priorities, to
hire the number of properly prepared teachers required.
  The result was that in many schools throughout the nation blind
children received poor and infrequent instruction in Braille
reading and writing. It was taken for granted that sighted
children would require intensive daily instruction in print
reading and writing, but in view of the shortage of teachers who
knew Braille well or who knew it at all, and doubtless in view of
the modest expectations held by school personnel concerning the
possible achievements of a blind child, it was too often decided
that the needs of blind children would be met well enough by as
few as two instructional periods a week in the use of Braille.
  This regrettable situation was made worse by the lure of
specious alternatives. Anyone who could read aloud could record a
book on tape for use by a blind student. Ordinary print could be
enlarged by a copier or magnified by a lens, or a computer with
the requisite software could be used to increase the size of the
print displayed on the screen of the computer monitor (Paul,
1993). Perhaps the most important consideration was the belief
that, if legally blind children could be taught to read print at
all, their teachers could read what they were reading and could
work with them more effectively.
  Apparently people failed to notice that many of the legally
blind children who were required to read print were reading
slowly and inaccurately and that they found reading fatiguing.
Why were these problems not noticed? Could it be the belief that
the performance standard expected of sighted students should not
be expected of students with an affliction as severe as blindness
--regardless of the reading medium they  used (Koenig, 1992)?
Could it be that the poor reading of legally blind children
required to read print went unnoticed because to notice this fact
would have required schools to take remedial steps they were
neither prepared nor willing to take?
  What were the consequences of this failure to provide adequate
instruction in reading Braille? It is now not at all difficult to
find legally blind students who have been graduated from high
school, often with good grades, who read print with difficulty
and Braille not at all, who cannot pass any of the tests of
achievement administered to high school students, who are
unemployed, who cannot find a place in competitive employment,
and who are functionally illiterate. It would not be at all
difficult to find teachers who finally woke up to the fact that
there were blind students in the sixth grade or higher who were
not able to do the work expected of them because they could not
read.
  In many such cases school administrators abandoned the pretense
of educating these children and solved the problem by arranging
for their transfer to the residential school for the blind. When
this happened, teachers at the residential school had the
unenviable task of working with students who were twelve years or
older and who did not know how to read in any meaningful sense--
students who, if given a grade placement commensurate with their
current level of performance, would have to be placed in the
second grade.
  How could this happen? Could it be that there were teachers in
public schools with very low expectations of the performance of
which a blind child would be capable? Could it be that these
teachers were prepared to praise blind students for performance
that would have been unacceptable for a sighted student--teachers
who, as an act of charity, gave them passing grades?
  Some of the integration that was supposed to be the result of
having blind children educated in public schools probably did
take place, but it would not be surprising to find a school for
the blind within the walls of a public school, where blind
students spend most of each day in the resource room and have
little social contact with sighted students.
  An even more common case is the legally blind student who is
the only blind person in the public school he attends. He has
been taught to read large print or print enlarged by
magnification. Because he reads slowly and inaccurately and
cannot read very long without experiencing fatigue and headaches,
he has been falling farther and farther behind, month by month
and year by year. His teacher, motivated by pity, has been giving
him passing grades, but his self-esteem is low because he knows
that his performance is poor and his grades unearned. His sighted
classmates know that his performance is poor, too, and they are
not surprised. They have brought to school with them the negative
stereotypes concerning blindness taught to them by their culture.
They see him as different, handicapped, and simply unable to keep
up with the rest of the class. Because they perceive him this
way, integration has not occurred, and he is socially isolated.
  The consequences of inadequate instruction in reading Braille
would have been obvious to public school administrators and
teachers if they had been inclined to make the relevant
observations, but these consequences failed to attract their
attention.
  For schools that were not prepared to offer adequate
instruction in Braille, it was easy to conclude that, because
there were less expensive; more convenient; and, as they saw it,
more effective alternatives, Braille had limited utility
(Thurlough, 1988). It became common practice to recommend
instruction in Braille only as a last resort. Children with
little vision were urged to read large print or magnified print,
in spite of the fact that they read slowly and found reading
fatiguing, and even though in many cases visual acuity would
eventually decrease, culminating in total blindness.
  True, when blind children first began going to public schools,
it was difficult to get books in Braille. Because the number of
public schools attended by blind children is much larger than the
number of residential schools such students formerly attended, it
is not feasible to seek an agreement concerning the textbooks to
be used in the courses offered. Because the number of students
needing any particular book was small, the book could not be
transcribed into Braille economically by a Braille printing
house.
  If Braille books were used, the solution would have to be to
rely on volunteer transcribers, teacher's aides, and resource
teachers for the production of Braille textbooks; but at the
beginning of the migration to public schools, the equipment
available to transcribers was relatively primitive. By the time a
book could be provided in Braille, the need for it was often
past.
  This excuse for not providing books in Braille is no longer
available. Scanner/OCR systems can now capture the text on the
printed page and save it in disk files. Translation programs can
generate a Grade II translation of the text. The translated text
can be sent to a Braille embosser connected to the computer. It
is now relatively easy and inexpensive to produce even a single
copy of a Braille textbook needed by a blind student.
  In spite of the equipment now available for producing Braille
efficiently, its declining use continues in many school districts
throughout the nation (American Printing House for the Blind,
1994). It is difficult to escape the conclusion that public
school systems are guilty of perpetuating a self-fulfilling
prophecy. They appear to reason that Braille is no longer as
useful as it was when there were no alternatives because, as they
see it, the alternatives to Braille now available have proved to
be more effective. The declining demand for and use of Braille is
the inevitable consequence.
  As these schools see it, Braille had a role to play in bygone
years, but it is well on its way to becoming an obsolescent
reading medium that is little used and no longer needed (Mack,
1984). They do not consider the possibility that the use of
Braille is declining because it is regarded by too many teachers
and administrators as the reading medium of last resort. They do
not consider that Braille would be a more effective reading
medium if it were taught more frequently by more competent
teachers. It has apparently not occurred to them that students
who have received poor and infrequent instruction in the use of
Braille for reading are not likely to express much demand for
reading matter in Braille.
  As a result of this vicious downward spiral, we ultimately
reached a point at which there was reason to fear that Braille
would lapse into disuse and would no longer be available.
Fortunately, steps have been taken to reverse this dismal trend.
Braille readers themselves have, by political action, caused
bills to be passed in twenty-seven of the states in the United
States (Schroeder, 1992). These bills require public schools to
offer instruction in Braille that is adequate in both quality and
frequency of instruction to the blind children who should be
learning Braille. There are even signs that the educational
establishment is at last becoming aware of the importance of
Braille and the wrong done to blind children by neglecting it. We
are beginning to reverse the downward spiral and to restore
Braille to the position it deserves and never should have lost.
  The list of problems to be solved is formidable. Nevertheless,
we must begin to seek their solutions immediately if we are to
make literacy a generally available option for blind children.
  To begin with, not enough teachers know how to teach Braille.
The reason is not hard to find. As already mentioned, the number
of blind children registered by APH increased from 17,330 in 1963
to 52,791 in 1993. During the same period the Office of Education
was gradually withdrawing the support it had been providing for
the university programs that prepare students to teach blind
children. As a result several teacher preparation programs were
terminated, and others experienced a reduction of staff. Some of
the surviving programs have a staff of one (Head, 1992).
  One reason for this pernicious inverse correlation between the
need for teachers who can teach children to use Braille for
reading and the availability of such teachers is the belief
promulgated by the Office of Education and various organizations
representing the interests of high-incidence disability groups
that the educational needs of blind children can be met
adequately by teachers who have been trained as generalists in
special education. This belief is simply wrong. If blind children
are truly to compete in public schools, they must have mastered
the necessary tools.
  The schools they attend must give them the opportunity to
become skillful Braille readers, skillful practitioners of
independent mobility, and knowledgeable users of assistive
technology. Generalists in special education are unprepared to
teach these skills, and blind children who receive all of their
instruction from generalists are almost certainly doomed to
failure. This belief must be eradicated and replaced by the
awareness and conviction that blind children must be prepared for
success in the public school environment by specialists who can
help them acquire the skills on which their success in school
will depend. Placing blind children in public schools that cannot
meet their instructional needs makes a mockery of "most
appropriate placement." They are, in fact, the victims of "most
inappropriate placement."
  In order to restore Braille to its rightful place, the teachers
and administrators in public schools must change their attitudes
and expectations. When the staff in a public school attended by
blind students believe that blind children cannot be expected to
perform at the level of their sighted peers and believe that
allowances must be made for blind children because the severity
of their disability will inevitably subject them to lives of
dependency, the resulting climate is devastating to their morale
and self-esteem. The teacher who expects little in the way of
performance from a blind student is willing to accept minimal
performance. She asks for little, and of course she gets what she
asks for. The fact is that children learn to expect of themselves
what others expect of them and to accept the beliefs of others
concerning their abilities and their worth.
  Changing attitudes is difficult, but there are steps that can
be taken. As a start the resource teacher, if there is one, or
the itinerant teacher can express positive beliefs about the
blind children in the school. He or she can talk with other
teachers in the school, give them constructive articles to read,
and try to persuade them to raise their expectations and demand
better performance. Some teachers may come to understand that
providing a positive educational experience for a blind child is
an interesting challenge rather than an unwelcome burden. Of
course, the resource or itinerant teacher must genuinely believe
that blind children have abilities and that they will respond
positively to more demanding expectations. And the resource
teacher must not only know Braille in theory but must also be
efficient in its use, both in reading and writing. Unfortunately,
this is not always the case.
  Here is a possible interim solution to the shortage of
competent Braille teachers. I know a Braille teacher who is
extraordinarily competent, highly motivated, and possessed of the
ability to engender in her students her own enthusiasm for
Braille. She found herself in the familiar situation of facing a
critical shortage of teachers who could actually teach children
to read Braille. She solved the problem by training teacher's
aides to teach Braille.
  She had impressive success, and she believes that other
dedicated Braille teachers could do what she did--but only if the
necessary conditions are present. Many teacher's aides either
cannot or do not want to learn to teach Braille, and the Braille
teacher must participate in the selection of the teacher's aide
who is given that assignment, instead of merely accepting a
person assigned at random by an uninformed administrator.
  In addition, the Braille teacher must provide close supervision
of the teacher's aides she has trained. This approach will not,
by any means, eliminate the shortage of Braille teachers, but it
may be worth a try. And we may do well to remember that the
university is not the only place a person can learn Braille and
learn how to teach it.
  The university programs where students receive the education
that prepares them for work as resource or itinerant teachers
often graduate students who have low expectations concerning the
abilities of the blind children with whom they will be working,
and these university programs must share some of the
responsibility. The student teachers in these programs often
learn from their professors and from the courses they are
required to take that Braille is a last resort to be considered
only if reading print by any means is impossible. The faculty
members in these programs may communicate their own low
expectations to the students they teach, and the courses they
offer rarely provide for experiences that could convince their
student teachers of the abilities of competent blind persons.
They do not often provide opportunities for their student
teachers to associate with competent blind adults and discover
their capabilities. These are program defects that can be
corrected by program directors if they can be made to believe in
the necessity of making the corrections.
  The students who enroll in teacher preparation programs usually
receive inadequate preparation for teaching children to use
Braille for reading. A student who has had a one- or two-
semester course in Braille is not a Braille teacher, and
certainly such a person is not likely to be a competent Braille
user. A Braille teacher must know Braille thoroughly. A Braille
teacher must have learned what is known about reading in general.
A Braille teacher must be thoroughly familiar with all of the
methods of teaching Braille that we currently know about and must
be able to employ them selectively and appropriately. A Braille
teacher must be able to motivate the children he or she teaches
and must be able to convince them that learning to use Braille
for reading is one of the most important skills they will ever
learn. Above all, the Braille teacher must believe in the
importance of Braille and must know how to communicate this
belief, not only to the students he or she teaches but also to
the teachers and administrators in the school or schools where he
or she works.
  The teacher who can meet these requirements is the teacher who
not only will teach children to use Braille for reading but also
will teach them to be self-motivated because they enjoy reading.
In short, a Braille teacher is a specialist, and to become a
specialist a student teacher must complete a program that
includes more course work and training than is provided by the
typical teacher preparation program.
  One way to accomplish this might be to organize courses of
study leading to the master's degree. Such courses would be taken
by those students in special education who intend to become
specialists. These students would take the courses not provided
by the ordinary teacher preparation curriculum, would receive the
training that gives them a thorough mastery of Braille, and would
serve an internship under the supervision of a master teacher of
Braille.
  Implementing solutions to the problems just discussed will have
a high cost. Finding and training enough Braille teachers will be
expensive. Providing the assistive technology that makes it
easier for blind students to be competitive in the public school
environment will be expensive, and teaching them how to use such
technology will be expensive. Organized efforts to change the
attitudes and expectations of public school teachers and
administrators will also be expensive. The implementation of
these measures will require money--a lot of money. We will not
undertake the changing of our priorities that would be required
in order for us to find the money we need to prepare Braille
teachers, or teachers of any kind for that matter, until we
become convinced that an educated citizenry is a nation's most
valuable resource, and there is reason for skepticism on that
score.
 References
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[PHOTO/CAPTION: Susie Stanzel]