Reply to Integration and DC Schools -- A high priority? Yay or nay?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This whole line of conversation is ridiculous. One person after another saying,

"Those entitled people advocating for their spoiled kids to get an education even though the kids are already on grade level!  So selfish!  They should settle for whatever is right for my kid and people just like my kid.  It's a public school, so how dare they expect it to meet all kids needs when it should just meet my kids' needs."[/quote]

Nobody is criticizing accommodations that provide students with access to appropriate education. They're criticizing accommodations that give students a real or perceived advantage in selective admissions processes.

It's not easy to separate though, since the accommodations come from within the public school system and the selective admissions exist largely outside of it.[/quote]

To be honest, I'm not even criticizing accommodations that give kids a "real or perceived advantage." I'm comfortable with where my kid is at and don't worry much that a kid is going to get "ahead" because of extra time for an ADHD diagnosis.

It's more that I am concerned about a culture where whenever a kid is struggling, the solution is to pursue a medical diagnosis and accommodations. And, to get back to the subject of the thread, I think this is one of the problems when wealthy and/or UMC families dictate how public schools work. Middle and working class kids need to learn resilience and how to adapt to the world around them. UMC and wealthy families often expect the world to adapt to their kid. It's a fundamental difference in approach that burdens middle/working class families.[/quote]

Could you say more about how it burdens middle/working class families? Decreased resources for struggling students without an IEP? The need to teach and reinforce resilience and adaptability outside the school environment? Or something else?[/quote]

I think we need to rethink accommodations to focus them back on access, not achievement.

The original point of disability accommodations was to ensure all kids had access to education. Whether that meant ensuring a school could provide a textbook in braille or providing an aide for a child with an intellectual disability that would meant the difference between that child being able to participate in school or not. The goal was to give kids an opportunity to get an education and "even the playing field" for kids who have bigger obstacles to overcome just to participate.

When that's been extended to kids with mild ADHD which in previous generations would not even have been diagnosed as a discernible disability, and when the accommodations are more about maximizing comfort and minimizing challenge than they are about making sure everyone can participate, this skews heavily in favor of wealthy students who's parents are willing to pay to get them tested and retested and who have the time and bandwidth to keep pushing the schools for more "accommodations."

I also think people should consider the degree to which this sort of accommodation, designed not to provide access but to provide achievement, is impacting curriculums in ways a lot of us hate. For instance, do schools stop assigning full books in favor of short passages because that's what teachers want, or what schools want, or does avoiding long texts just make it easier to accommodate the myriad of IEPs and 504s the schools are navigating? To what degree is the shift towards EdTech and using screens and apps in the classroom the result of schools looking to free teachers up for the extra time IEPs demand, or to make it easier for the students with IEPs at the cost of challenging other kids?

The problem is that wealthy parents often can't accept that their kids are average, and they look for medical explanations for their averageness, and then demand the school accommodate their "limitations" which I think sometimes are just the normal limitations of being a human being. When 30-40% of a school population has ADHD, can you really describe that as "neurodivergent"?

Anyway, waiting for the people who feel uncomfortably seen by this comment to yell at me in 3, 2, 1...[/quote]

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