NCEO Joins New National Deaf Center

ICI's National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) is joining with the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk (MCPER) and the University of Texas (UT) in the newly-established National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes.  UT and MCPER are the lead organizations for the new center and NCEO will serve as the Task Force lead for the Assessment Task Force and the State Education Agency Task Force. This five-year project launched on January 1, 2017 and is funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs.

A primary goal of the new center is to increase the number of deaf individuals who are admitted to, persist in, and complete postsecondary education or training - without requiring remedial coursework. Other goals include improving collaborations between community organizations, institutions, and state-level agencies; increasing institutional capacity to implement evidence-based practices and strategies; increasing knowledge on how to use technology to promote access and provide accommodations; and disseminating lessons learned.

The center will provide professional development opportunities, intensive training, live chat support, dissemination of promising models, and community engagement activities. It will support the mobilization of local resources, as well as national task forces and state collaboratives. Further, it will produce national data reports and support research-to-practice activities. "NCEO is excited to be working with the National Deaf Center on assessment issues in postsecondary education that face students who are deaf," says NCEO director Martha Thurlow.