Reply to Wall Street Journal on rampant growth in percentage of college students with “disabilities”

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As the dyslexic mother of a dyslexic child, it is awful to read what you all think of kids with accommodations. My kid is so ashamed already by his accommodations that he often refuses to use them. He has an IQ of 130 but struggles to pass classes. When you have a kid like mine it becomes blindingly obvious that our educational system isn’t serving our kids well - the typical kids or mine. Why should all school work reward working memory and processing speed and ignore problem solving? It’s wacky. Just like I did, my kid is going to struggle to get through school, but will flourish in a career. And for the person wondering how those stupid dyslexics could have made it into Pomona...a characteristic of dyslexia is high intelligence and problem solving, but a different brain wiring that also makes reading difficult to learn and usually comes with working memory deficits. Many of us dyslexics make it to prestigious colleges by working twice as hard as everyone else. I did.[/quote]

Then how do you explain the extraordinary increase at these competitive colleges such that 25% of students are labeled disabled?[/quote]

I’m an epidemiologist not an educator. How should I know? But seriously, a few thoughts. First, people like me weren’t diagnosed in the 80’s and 90’s and earlier. If we were lucky we figured it out, and we had parents who were relentless cheerleaders and helpers to get us through. But it was brutal, demoralizing and humiliating for me every single day at school. A kid like me is now diagnosed in elementary school. So the percentage of dyslexics goes up in the population as a whole. Second, dyslexics who didn’t have supportive parents, of those who just were profoundly dyslexic, didn’t ever learn to read well and dropped out of school in highschool. There is now evidence based teaching for dyslexia that helps tremendously, and there is text to speech, speech to text, spell check, and audiobooks that make learning possible for even profound dyslexia. So those smart kids are now going to go to college rather than dropping out. The percentage of college kids with dyslexia goes up. It’s a really good thing![/quote]

Did someone say that dyslexia should not be diagnosed or treated?

The issue is not that these students have issues. The problem is that the current solution is to basically lower the bar in a way that is unfair to other students. I have no problem with people who have issues being treated for them. It is important that they are either treated or develop skills to workaround these issues. The real world does not give you extra time to complete tests.[/quote]

It is not lowering the bar.  My DC has dyslexia and dysgraphia and has extended time, he also has reader and a scribe.  When you take a test with a reader and a scribe it simply takes longer to complete. It has to go through two brains.  If he has an electronic reader and keyboarding, it takes extra time for the technology to work together as it is clunkier than you would think it should be in 2018. He is not allowed to use word predictive software- which slows him down, but in the “real world”, he would have that predictive software.  Technology is the leveling for him once he graduates, but testing in college still frequently uses old forms.

He has also had an accommodation of a 4 function calculator, because it takes him longer to recall simple math facts.  Most people I know in the “real world” use calculators- so again, it is an accommodation for test taking only.  He has an extraordinary math brain for advanced math, but for whatever reason he has a glitch in the basic multiplication tables.   The brain is weird sometimes.  He is a math major in college.  After 3rd grade, he has not met a math class in which he did not excel.    As a freshman in college, he was taking sophomore and junior level courses and still was at the top of his classes.

He is at a disadvantage without the accommodations.  With the accommodations, it is closer to a level playing field.

In the “real world”, he will do fine.  [/quote]

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