We need to talk about accommodations. Like puppies or grandma’s cookies, they are treated as unmitigated goods—at least in my experience. Should we not support all students? Should we not provide differentiated instruction? Who in their right mind could oppose offering accommodations, leveling the playing field, and helping students with special needs?
In the media, a dash of skepticism has breached the surface. In an essay for The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch reported on how “students with disabilities” now more often entails “rich kids getting extra time on tests” than “kids in wheelchairs,” which puts “the entire idea of fairness at risk.” At elite universities and law schools, upwards of forty percent of students now qualify for accommodations, and an increasing number for mental health issues such as anxiety or depression.
Reflecting on a similar situation at the high school level, The Wall Street Journal’s Emma Camp argued that “When a third of a high school’s students count as ‘disabled,’ the definition of disability has grown so broad as to become nonsensical.”
Without getting into fights over the fairness of accommodations or the veracity of diagnoses, I want to ask a question about how accommodations affect the students who receive them. Do they actually help?
In a compelling article, “Enabling or disabling: Observations on changes in special education,” the late scholar of special education James Kauffman expressed a similar concern that providing accommodations “is not always in the students’ best long-term interests.” Indeed, accommodations too often amount to “freedom from expectations of performance” that can “set that same student up for failure later in life.”
He runs through the list of popular accommodations. More time on tests or extensions on assignments can enable avoidance tactics, which in turn means assignments pile up, the student gets further behind and struggles to comprehend current content. Reading aloud “can be beneficial” but well-meaning proctors may read with inflection, define vocabulary, or provide extemporaneous explanations. Changing tests to open-notes or open-books “breaches good-faith test proctoring.” Scribing for a student can also be useful but a teacher should ensure they only scribe what the student says (with no corrections) and ultimately encourage students who are able to master writing for themselves.
“‘Saving’ a child from his or her own negative behavior,” Kauffman explains, “reinforces that behavior and makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy,” and both parents and teachers confuse making life easier with making it better.
As one concrete example, I had a student whose grades began to slip as classwork got harder in middle school. He didn’t complete his homework, didn’t study, made no use of his planner, and never took notes. He usually spent class time disassembling pens and doodling. Even before requesting an IEP, his parents always sought more and more support—extra time on tests, teacher assistance filling out his planner, regular notebook checks, and other such assistance—while his teachers thought that he needed to feel the pressure of poor grades.
I do not have the pedigree to diagnose whether he had ADHD or a learning disability. But I do question whether accommodations would have helped him in the long run. Cognitively, he could perform, but his habits kept him back. Extensions, extra time, and extra assistance meant he could continue with poor organizational habits, inattention, and reliance on adults to save the day. What incentive is there to try hard the first time—or at all for that matter—so long as he receives such supports?
There are some policy tweaks that can flow from this analysis. I would point readers to Miriam Freedman’s excellent writing on the topic in Fordham’s own pages: curtail the overdiagnosis of students with mild or moderate needs, focus on outputs instead of inputs, and remove the litigious nature of the law that sets parents against teachers.
But first, a change in perspective is requisite. With regard to more severe behaviors, we accept how “helping” someone can do long-term harm. The financial provision of a doting parent can bankroll the destructive behaviors of their adult child, for example.
While academic behaviors and their subsequent consequences are less severe, the same principle applies. When overapplied, they only foster the very behaviors that got students poor marks in the first place, thereby getting them a higher grade in the short term but doing them a disservice in the long term.
That’s not to say we do away with all accommodations. A fierce critic, Kauffman acknowledges there are obvious supports that students with severe disabilities need—braille for blind students, preferential seating for students who are hard of hearing, or dictation devices—and even the more controversial examples have a place. For example, “if a student is clearly working hard, then extensions may be appropriate,” he writes.
But in every IEP meeting, there needs to be an acknowledgement that there’s a negative side to accommodations.
