Alan Levinovitz wrote an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Are Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong? (September 25, 2024).
« Higher ed’s maximally inclusive approach hurts those it attempts to help. »
« Disability accommodations in American higher education are skyrocketing. In the past decade, the proportion of colleges with more than 10 percent of students registered as disabled has quintupled, and accommodation requests have followed the same pattern. Despite increased staff and resources, disability-service providers are overwhelmed, and it’s common for a single staff member to be tasked with serving 500 students. Faculty are also reporting increased workloads as they find themselves continually adjusting teaching and assessment practices. »
« The most commonly reported disability in North American higher education is ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), and Harrison’s 2022 study set out to determine how Canadian disability-services offices would treat a hypothetical student’s request for accommodations that had no objective evidence whatsoever of disability… 49 of 50 institutions replied to the request… Not only did 100 percent of decision makers approve the request, but many suggested additional accommodations, including distraction-reduced testing, extensions on assignments, and access to funds for students with disabilities. »
« I asked Harrison if she thought the results would be similar in the United States. She told me that she had in fact gotten the idea for the study from an American researcher who ran the same experiment, and “found almost perfect compliance. However, he was too afraid to publish for fear of institutional backlash against him. So yes, the exact same findings in the States, just not published.” (The researcher Harrison mentioned refused to speak with me for this article.) »
« “The ADA sets a floor, not a ceiling,” Lissner said. “Are you an institution that wants to say no when you can and yes when you have to? Or do you want to say yes when you can and no when you have to?” »
« Although it is widespread, not every institution takes a maximalist approach. At the University of Virginia, official documentation of a diagnosis is often required, and even that doesn’t guarantee accommodations. “Having a diagnosis doesn’t necessarily mean you have a disability,” said Barbara Zunder, director of UVA’s Student Disability Access Center. “What we’re looking for is documentation about duration and severity. We’re very mindful and discerning when it comes to that.” »
« Even with a team of nine and a neuropsychologist on staff, processing thousands of requests is extraordinarily time-consuming. In 2023, Zunder’s office sent out an astonishing 21,527 accommodation letters to instructors, 1,300 more than the year before. (UVA has a total of about 25,000 students.) “They’re terrific at the Student Disability Access Center,” said Michael J. Kennedy, professor of special education and the former chair of UVA’s faculty senate. “But they’re largely understaffed, and as a result of it, they have a hard time keeping up, not through any fault of theirs, they don’t have the space or the people.” »
« Nor is pushing back an appealing task, even for those with the expertise required to do so. At Boston University, the neuropsychologist Lorre Wolf, whose scholarly focus is learning disabilities, was fiercely criticized for her stricter approach to accommodations, which included asking some students with diagnoses to be retested, and occasionally denying requests. The student newspaper suggested that her actions might constitute a violation of students’ civil rights, and excoriated her for being dismissive and unempathetic. (Wolf retired in 2024; a successor has not been named.) »
« The need for efficiency also leads to generic, standardized interventions: time-and-a-half on all exams, a note taker, distraction-free testing, and extensions. Everyone I interviewed was frank about the arbitrariness of these common accommodations. There are no methods in place to determine exactly how much time a certain student needs, or which specific circumstances require a note taker. “In North America it’s 50 percent extra time,” Harrison said. “It’s not based on any research.” To show how arbitrary the numbers are, Harrison compared North American policy to other countries: “In Great Britain it’s 25 percent, in Australia it’s 15 percent.” These numbers are not supported by any rigorous research on how much extra time students with specific disabilities might need: “It’s just throwing darts.” (Researchers have long known the numbers are unscientific.) »
« Influential researchers like the dyslexia expert Sally E. Shaywitz, have argued extra time is only beneficial if you have a disability, a position that is widely accepted in disability studies »
« In fact, there is considerable evidence to the contrary. In review after review, it is clear that with very few exceptions, extra time benefits students without learning disabilities the same amount that it does those with disabilities. Ironically, in some cases extra time may help students without disabilities more. Benjamin Lovett, a professor of psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and a leading expert on disability accommodation, put it bluntly to me. “On time-pressured tests, extended time tends to help students both with and without disabilities. Students know this intuitively, and they’re right, and it should be scandalous that some disability advocates claim otherwise.” »
« The ADAA defines disability as substantially limiting an individual compared “to most people in the general population.” To accurately assess someone’s relative level of impairment, clinicians would need to compare self-reports with other evidence like grades and evaluations from teachers. Gathering that information is very labor-intensive. “Oftentimes [a patient’s] retrospectives are being colored by how they’re feeling now,” said Awais Aftab, a practicing psychiatrist who writes about mental-health diagnoses. More context and evidence is required to make a reliable diagnosis of ADHD or a learning disability. “But I’m not going to go chase down their parents,” Aftab told me. “I’m not going to chase down their school teachers.” »
« The 2019 Varsity Blues admissions scandal highlighted egregious examples of clinical malpractice, when it came out that wealthy families had paid psychologists to provide disability diagnoses. I brought this up with multiple forensic psychologists who review suspicious accommodation requests for testing agencies like the College Board and state medical boards. They told me a similar kind of practice remains commonplace, where simply going to get tested and paying the substantial fee will almost always result in a diagnosed disability. One New York-based assessment company boasts “a 95 percent success rate in getting learning disability accommodations” for the people who come in to get tested. On YouTube, the owner says, “I can’t even think of a case” — out of over 4,000 clients — “where we have not been granted accommodations.” »
« There’s another question that those committed to the current disability-services approach may be reluctant to ask: Do disability accommodations even work? Here, too, the data is discouraging. Researchers have studied a range of common accommodations, and their findings are bleak: In almost all cases, evidence for the effectiveness of these accommodations is nonexistent, or mixed at best. Distraction-free environments, for example, do not appear to benefit students with ADHD. Extra time benefits students on standardized tests that are time-pressured, but in the context of college classes it frequently goes unused, which means its primary function is to relieve anxiety, not to remediate a disability like dyslexia. »
« Lovett, Harrison, and other accommodations researchers I spoke with were stunned and disappointed by this development. “The criteria for diagnosing these disabilities has gradually expanded, little by little,” said Richard Sparks, emeritus professor of education at Mount St. Joseph University, who has researched language-learning disabilities for over 40 years. “At some point everybody will have a disability.” »
« The equity problem should be clear: If accommodations help everyone, and we relax the diagnostic criteria necessary for securing them, wealthier students will experience even more of an advantage, which is precisely what we are seeing. Accommodations are disproportionately secured by the highest performing students, further increasing the achievement gap. »
« The second problem is that misdiagnosis can be harmful. Medical diagnosis is, itself, a medical intervention, and medical interventions have potential side effects. Sociologists of medicine have shown that people interpret diagnosis of a mental-health disorder according to a biogenetic model of the mind, and emerging evidence suggests that embracing this model as an explanation of one’s suffering is a “mixed blessing.” Although official diagnosis can provide relief and a sense of not being to blame (“it’s not me, it’s my disorder”), it can also induce prognostic pessimism, a helpless sense that one’s “real” identity is disordered or disabled and can never be changed. In the context of higher education, it will mean some students come to believe, erroneously, that they are intrinsically incapable of succeeding without accommodations — accommodations that are unavailable in a work world where deadlines are not flexible and attendance, so to speak, is mandatory. »
Articles of Interest 