The role of languages is a central issue in deaf education. The function of sign languages in education and deaf students' opportunities to develop linguistic abilities in both sign languages and the dominant language(s) of a society are key considerations (Hogan-Brun 2009; Reagan 2010, 53; Swanwick 2010a). Accordingly, what Kaplan and Baldauf (1997, 122-23) term language-in-education planning--planning that deals specifically with education--is a fruitful area of inquiry for sign language policy and planning. It is in this vein that the authors provide a comparative policy analysis of national education policies that create a context within which sign languages exist and operate in the educational systems of two countries--Sweden and the United States. The purpose of this study, then, is to offer a cross-national analysis that examines how sign language status and acquisition planning (Cooper 1989) are represented in U.S. and Swedish policy documents. The authors begin with an overview of deaf-education policy in both polities, which is followed by a discussion of principles of status and acquisition planning as they relate to education. They then present their textual analysis, focusing on the ways in which status and acquisition issues are characterized in the policies of each country. Finally, they consider the different implementational spaces (Hornberger 2005; Johnson 2009) that these policies make available for multilingual education. (Contains 1 figure and 12 notes.)