Under-Accommodation Nation
How a focus on the disability practices of selective colleges distorts our understanding
Even though it was a gentle warm May day when I left the office of the Assistant Headmaster, I pulled my cardigan close, my arms wrapping my body to ward off an undeniable chill. Students poured out of the academic center, parting around me as they made their way across the lush green quad to the dining hall. The meeting had been a disaster. I had asked for help and received platitudes and denials. They weren’t to blame, the school wasn’t responsible, they hadn’t done anything wrong, they were doing everything, it would be fine, don’t worry, I’m sure everyone is doing the best they can, and on and on and on. They didn’t care, I realized. I was alone, on my own, again, to solve this problem.
The school had failed to secure extra time accommodations from The College Board for my oldest daughter. She was scheduled to take two Advanced Placement exams in just a week. It was a technical glitch, a holdover from a long history. I had homeschooled her through middle school. At eight years old, this bright, engaging child still could not read. I solved that problem too. I taught her myself over many slow years and provided the enriched academic environment that even our supposedly top-notch public schools could not offer. I didn’t allow her to fall behind just because it took longer for her to learn to read and write.
She is dyslexic. I knew then she was dyslexic, but she wasn’t officially diagnosed until age thirteen. It wasn’t necessary. Because we homeschooled, I could remediate and accommodate and individualize her education. But I knew she would need a diagnosis when she started school, so I had her evaluated. She could read and write by then, but she was still slow to work and process written language and math. High IQ, gifted in reasoning, but she needed that bit of extra time to read and write and calculate. When I look back on it now, it seems such a small thing to ask.
At age fourteen, I applied to the College Board for extra time accommodations on the SAT, as was recommended in her report. They denied us.
“Keep at it,” other homeschoolers told me. “They always deny the first time.”
It was a game the College Board played. Make it as hard as possible and save yourself the trouble of carefully evaluating a lot of applications. This was the environment in 2014 and 2015. So, I did. I appealed, I called, I requested to talk to an evaluator. “More testing,” they told me, more documentation. So, I did that too. In 2017, I had her evaluated again. Thousands of dollars to get a more comprehensive evaluation including all the tests The College Board demanded. The results were the same. I had my two younger children evaluated at that time as well, a preemptive strike. I could have waited until they were in school, but then they would have had to fail before receiving an evaluation.
By this time, Jesse, my oldest, was already in high school, already receiving school accommodations based on her first evaluation. When, as a rising junior, she transferred to the private high school where her father worked, where we had lived since she was six months old, where she had grown up, where she could go tuition free because she was a faculty child, I thought I could turn over the work of managing her learning disability to the school. I delivered all the paperwork to the Academic Dean.
“No problem,” he said with a dismissive wave. “I do this all the time.”
That was September. It was now May. He hadn’t done it, and he hadn’t told me. Because we had previously applied as homeschoolers and been denied, he couldn’t figure out how to upload her materials to the digital portal. He made a few calls, it didn’t work, and that was it. It was Jesse who told me, one afternoon as I picked her up. She had been nagging him for months as the exams approached. She was a self-reliant teen. She hadn’t wanted to worry me.
“I just don’t think he is going to get this done,” she said as she turned her head away from me to look out the window, probably to hide tears she didn’t want me to see. She had worked so hard in her US History and AP Lit courses. Her teachers had thought she could get top scores on the exams. She had been practicing with the 50% extra time the school had granted her. She had to work at it, but she could finish.
I spent hours, over a hundred hours, fixing this problem — on the phone with the byzantine bureaucracy of The College Board, gathering even more documentation from current teachers as well as all the way back to her elementary years. I got records from a tutor she had when she was eight years old and her pediatrician. I listed every reading, writing, spelling and handwriting program we had used, all the books we had read, and how long it took her to complete assignments. It was arduous and absurd.
She was eventually approved, in the summer, too late for the AP exams that year. You might think this was a unique situation. We were previously homeschoolers after all. But it wasn’t. The College Board even changed their policies in 2017, purportedly to make approvals easier, because there had been so many thousands of complaints. Yet, years after that policy change, with my younger children in public schools, we still faced partial approvals and inexplicable denials of basic accommodations.
Gaining accommodations IS NOT EASY. Schools require kids to fail before they will evaluate them. Sure, if you are wealthy, you can hire an ed consultant for tens of thousands of dollars to navigate the process, but that’s not most kids. The process of gaining accommodations and ensuring their faithful implementation was exhausting and anxiety-producing, for me and my children. All this for something as banal as a little extra time or the right to use a keyboard—something that is crucial for a dyslexic student and pretty inconsequential for everyone else. Using accommodations is not easy either. Teachers do not implement them seamlessly. Students feel shamed and embarrassed. Students must manage scheduling time to stay after school and complete tests. Parents must arrange transportation. SATs take five hours. My dyslexic kids were typically the only students in their honors and AP courses with accommodations. Teachers were befuddled. “They’re smart enough,” they would say. “Why do they need them?” “Can’t they just try it without them?”
They need them because they are dyslexic. You don’t grow out of dyslexia, even after you learn to read and write. Dyslexic brains are different from birth. They use more energy for cognitive tasks. They are also often smart and capable and creative and even brilliant. They just need a little extra time.
That’s why this week’s article in The Atlantic, “Accommodation Nation,” stuck such a nerve. The article highlights the surge in the use of accommodations at some selective universities such as University of Chicago and Berkeley and Stanford. It reads as an exposé — unscrupulous parents and students gaming the system to get an advantage, especially as colleges make the process of getting accommodations easier. The unspoken subtitle: look at this broken system.
Unsurprisingly, the story went viral with all sorts of people chiming in that we should eliminate accommodations altogether, ginning up public sentiment for some sort of “if you can’t hack it too bad” meritocratic argument. Even a well-known education reporter chimed in with the whine that “in many high NYC schools” half the kids get accommodations. A vague, nonspecific charge followed by her hunch that anyone can pay $5000 and get an anxiety diagnosis. “Which high schools?” I wanted to ask.
Is abusing the accommodations system bad? Yes. But who is doing this? And why? In an era where we regularly bemoan the extraordinary increases in childhood anxiety are we surprised more kids are being diagnosed with anxiety? I’m sure the author of the article and the editors of The Atlantic are thrilled with the furor—a “varsity blues” scandal but with accommodations. Click Bait for the rich and powerful.
A part of me wants to say, “who cares?” This is the equivalent of reporting on a cult, a miniscule segment of highly privileged and wealthy families doing crazy things to get even more advantage. The real story is in the final paragraphs, the part no one ever gets to. This phenomenon isn’t happening at the bulk of colleges, especially community and junior colleges where most of the kids with a history of needing LD accommodations end up. It is not “Accommodation Nation.” It is, like The Hunger Games, the Capitol District behaving bizarrely.
Down on the ground, where the population actually lives, we are actually under-accommodating! Far more children need educational evaluations and diagnoses and accommodations than are currently receiving them, Why? Because it is so brutally hard to get them.
But, like The Hunger Games, the antics of the Capitol District blow back on the rest of us. This “varsity blues” discourse around accommodations will taint all those kids, dyslexic, ADHD, autistic and otherwise, who desperately need a little extra time — not because they are not capable or even brilliant but because, regardless of their talents, the system they must navigate to survive was not built for them.
It’s tempting to write off the craziness of the Ivy Leaguish schools. But as Evan Mandery writes in Poison Ivy, the practices of these institutions harm us all. They are not, as philosopher John Stuart Mill might say, only self-regarding actions. They do not only impact students at highly selective institutions. To the extent that the actions of this elite group poison the waters for kids who need accommodations, to the extent that they, with the help of news outlets like The Atlantic, fuel a backlash against accommodating difference and a political environment hostile to diagnosis and accommodations, they are directly harming all the kids that need these very simple alterations in their learning environment. This selective college nonsense would be much less powerful were it not amplified by a gawking media. Outlets like The Atlantic need to own the harm they are creating.
As Jesse, now a 25-year-old with a Master’s degree and a professional career, said to me recently, not once in her work life has anyone asked her to solve 120 math problems in 60 minutes. The extra time she received is irrelevant to her day-to-day life. As a skilled adult, she makes her own accommodations, giving herself a little extra time when she needs it, taking advantage of spelling and grammar tools, organizing her day to manage the cognitive exhaustion dyslexia creates. There is no important weeding out filter that time pressure on school tests provides. It’s just institutional convenience. The faster kids aren’t necessarily smarter or more thoughtful or more creative, they’re just faster. Schools in the US sort for secretaries and executive assistants, people who are organized and quick and accurate. But who wants a society with only secretaries? We would all be poorer for that.
