My background is in early childhood ed -- educationally and professionally -- and I've worked with deaf kids, studied deaf culture, and I continue to have friends who are literate deaf adults. I said:
How does that explain that statistically, some of the best English use comes from deaf kids who grow up in deaf, ASL-only families and goes to deaf schools?
From a language learning and an early childhood education standpoint (I've been teaching in early childhood since the early eighties, and it's been the focus of my own education, including continuing education), the most important thing isn't which language a kid learns, but the quality of the language they learn. Good English (signed English, which is *hard* to maintain efficiently and accurately) or oral English (if it works for all deaf kids, and it doesn't -- some do well, not all; good lip-reading is a talent like perfect pitch, which can be honed but not created) are helpful, good ASL is helpful. Bad English or stilted ASL aren't so helpful.
Statistically, deaf kids from deaf families with good ASL have stronger English skills later on. If having mostly or only ASL during childhood is somehow a bad thing, this wouldn't hold true.
Preschool is an incredibly important time in a child's language development. To deny them English during this incredibly critical time is to stunt their abilities in English forever.
That's basically untrue. To deny them language during this critical time is to stunt their language learning forever. But kids who are exposed to English after preschool can often learn it just fine, if it's taught well (through both English-immersion and ASL-to-English teaching). It's truly unfortunate that there aren't better methods for teaching English to deaf kids. But whatever you want to blame it on, it won't hold water if it doesn't come from accurate information, and you seem to have received inaccurate information from somewhere.
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