If you missed the front end of my diatribe on the faulty paradigm that special education has been spoon fed to unassuming parents and children, you may want to read this post first for some context before my next illustration of the absurdity of it all. Let’s talk about accommodations. Accommodations are the adjustments to the learning or assessment format that doesn’t change the expectations around the curricular objective. Modifications are the adjustment in the curricular objective to meet the needs of someone with a disability, we’re not talking about modifications. Accommodations are the changes to the method we teach and test to level the playing field. Accommodations are protected under IDEA for kids with disabilities in public school and under Section 504 and ADA for college students. In both cases, the student must first prove they have a specific disability that requires the need for accommodations. Students without disabilities have to play by the same flawed rules. So let’s do a little deep dive into how ridiculous this is and the tragedy of further ostracizing students with disabilities for providing them with what every student should have access to.
The learning process is quite simple. I tried to ingrain this with my education students to demystify, ultimately, what their job would be as a teacher. First of all we have students. We know that students have diverse learning preferences, strengths and weaknesses, and interest and engagement. So what about students with disabilities? They are the same, save for some fancy label describing their specific challenges. Assumption number one: all kids need different things.
Next there is the curricular objective, or what we want the students to know, comprehend, and apply. In its simplest form, I would frequently use the example of cookie baking. We have a classroom full of diverse students. We want them to learn how to bake a cookie. The teaching and learning happens through our instruction in cookie baking. So the teacher spends days contemplating the best method to teach their students how to bake a cookie, they brush up on their teaching ideologies and approaches, whether it be experiential or systematic or conceptual, and they write their cookie making lesson plan. They gather their students and implement the lesson. 75% of the students bake a delicious cookie, but 25% make a bad cookie. So the teacher determines that these hopeless cookie makers will never be able to make a delicious cookie.
However, a good teacher will ask the question, “what did I do wrong?”. They will examine their lesson plan and make adjustments to it. The bad teacher will double down on their teaching methods and blame the students. When exploring the best teaching methods, I would often ask my students to tell me what they believed was the best teaching method. The answer was simple, “whatever works for that child”. Whatever works. Seems simple enough but some teachers are often overly personally invested in their own teaching style to put their egos aside long enough to consider this.
So what’s the best way to teach the art of cookie baking? Whatever works. We will still hold the same curricular expectation that each student knows how to bake a cookie, but we need to be flexible in our approach based on the learning diversity of the students in the classroom. Now, some students will need a step by step, some will need to get their hands doughy, some students will need the directions written down, some will need pictures, and some may need more time. Does any of that matter if at the end of the day they make a tasty cookie? Nope.
So the accommodations we make in the learning process in pursuit of a curricular objective are simply the means to the end of whatever works for that child. Why would someone need an exception to be provided with an instructional method that helps them learn? And, why would only students with disabilities need these exceptions? If our job as teachers is to promote learning, why would we build barriers requiring exceptions/accommodations to the learning strategies we are responsible for creating? Why does it matter how a student learns, if our objective is what a student learns. Assumption number two: all students can learn if we provide them with the instructional strategies that work for them, disability or no disability.
Here’s where we get into the tricky bits (my new favorite British phrase). We need to hold our teachers and students accountable for meeting these curricular objectives, so we have to give assessments. In cookie baking, it’s simple and delicious. Can the student make a delicious cookie on their own? However, school isn’t just baking cookies, it also involves abstract concepts that can’t be put in the oven. So we have to create ways to evaluate a student’s comprehension. What’s the goal of the assessment? The goal of the assessment is to accurately reflect what the student knows and understands, hopefully so we can provide additional instruction if necessary. Assumption number three: Assessments are meant to accurately reflect what a student actually knows and understands. However, this isn’t quite as straightforward.
Oftentimes, our assessments are actually the barrier to our efforts at truly assessing a student’s comprehension. We have ALL been there. Remember the test you failed even though you knew the topic forwards and backwards? Or the test you aced when you didn’t know Shinola about the topic? Imagine now that we take our cookie bakers and have them take a timed multiple choice test (while eating their cookies) to assess whether they learned how to bake a cookie. Yes, it’s redundant. Now we learn that only 75% of the students actually learned how to bake a cookie, while they were eating their cookies. What’s flawed in this situation? Did the students fail or did the test fail the students?
This is where our illustrious accommodations come to save the day. Alas, maybe some students actually know how to bake a cookie, but our assessment got in the way. So those students who have the requisite diagnosis, now get the opportunity to show what they understood in a different way. Whereas, the others are stuck being tested the way we think they ought to be tested and judged by the contrived methods of the assessment. In one case we can admit to the bias in the assessment, in the other case we stand by it. Yet, assumption number one says (all) students need different things.
Try fighting with a professor over the validity of their assessments and you’ll see how far heels are dug in. One professor I worked with came to me upset that the average grade on his 100 question, 60-minute multiple choice test was a 65%. He went on and on about the problems with the students. What I reflected back was that only two things could be true. 1. He did a lousy job teaching. Or, 2. He did a lousy job assessing learning. Additionally, he believed that providing ubiquitous accommodations would make his test easier. Easier for students to communicate their comprehension? Huh? He didn’t seek my advice moving forward, but what else could we gather from this situation? Blaming students is a dead giveaway to bad teachers.
So back to the accommodations for assessment. If we are in pursuit of accurately reflecting what a student truly knows, why does the method of doing so matter? Why does it matter that some students take longer to express their comprehension and some students need quieter spaces and some students need to use a keyboard? If our goal is validity, the only variable that can be changed is the measurement tool. Yet, we see schools making this mistake every day. When we know that timed tests are only valid for assessing fluency, we still see schools allowing teachers to implement timed tests for comprehension, when the timed nature of the test actually reduces validity. It’s literally asinine. Moreover, we see high stakes assessments that do little to accurately reflect comprehension, but also do little in the ways of mitigating factors like anxiety and inattention which can greatly impact validity. Yet, we still only provide those accommodations, the accommodations meant to improve validity, to students with the requisite label. Some need different things, but the rest need the exact same thing? Hmmm.
Accommodations are a fallacy. They are the exceptions to the rules we have created. This is not gravity to which there are no accommodations, these are the methods and assessments we have devised. Why would we create them for 80% of our students, but then admit that we may need to adjust them for some, without starting with the fact that we need to create methods that can be adjusted for all? We further ostracize our youth with disability by making them think they NEED something different, when something different could have been provided for everyone in the first place.
Accommodations benefit all students because accommodations are the result of us doing whatever works. Kids with disabilities and their families shouldn’t have to fight for accommodations anymore than the kids who would benefit from different instructional methods or assessment practices. If our goal is truly to guide students to comprehension and use assessment to inform that process, then how you get there doesn’t and shouldn’t matter. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.