Tales of a fourth-grade nothingburger: a critical inquiry into deficit-framed research

Deaf education research has long been preoccupied with the literacy levels of deaf students, particularly related to the idea that the average deaf high schooler graduates reading on the fourth-grade level. This statistic has been a rationale for countless interventions aimed at improving a so-called performance gap between deaf and hearing students. However, this statistic has also caused harm to deaf individuals, as research continues to frame the reading achievement of this population as a deficit in need of remediation. In this article, we performed a qualitative analysis of 14 articles published in the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education that used research on the fourth-grade reading level statistics as a basis for their work to understand the theoretical frameworks, results, implications for practice, and overall article approach of these works. We found that the majority of these works tended to use a negative, deficit framework for understanding deaf students' reading and made recommendations that maintain a hearing status quo. We close by arguing for research that adopts more revolutionary and evolutionary frameworks that challenge the status quo and support researchers in understanding deaf students' reading development separate from how it compares to hearing students.