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][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]

Love how your last line seeks to make anyone who wants to comment immediately suspect and disparaged before they even speak.

Well, I don't have kids in DCPS with ADHD, and my wonderful kids were pretty darn average, and I'm an empty nester. So let's get that "seen" bull pucky out of the way, shall we.

I disagree with your premise that these accommodations are not about accessing the curriculum. The fact that you say so makes clear you don't understand ADHD. I know what ADHD is, and that a kid with ADHD does need accommodations to access the curriculum consistently. Their brains randomly turn on and off or scramble. The best analogy I've heard from a person with ADHD is that it is like selective brain blindness and brain deafness that comes and goes randomly, and that's without the impulse control layer. Sometimes they are aware of what is going on around them in the classroom and sometimes they miss up to 70% of the content and don't even realise it. They think they heard it all, until they compare their notes to the accommodation provided notes and see just how much they didn't see or hear during class, even though they thought they were paying attention. So for them, studying means essentially re-doing the whole class on their own as homework via the accommodation of written or recorded notes. And it will take them twice as long as the kids who don't have accommodations because they face the same hurdles outside of class.

Accomodations are designed to prevent the brain from glitching as much as possilbe (seating, quite rooms for test, etc.), reset it when it happens (teacher awareness, reminders, intentional interruptions, tap on the shoulder, post it notes on teh desk, visual cues), and allow them to access the learning, to do the school work and show what they are learning or not learning in spite of that happening in their brains (class recording, provided notes, audio books, ability to take computer notes, extra time for tests, so they might get the full time even when their brain shuts off mid exam, etc.). So if you are OK with allowing access for those with vision and hearing impairments, seizure disorders, etc., then you should be OK with the same for kids with ADHD who sometimes can't see or hear or process what is going on around them, and sometimes can.

If you meet a person with ADHD who got good grades, you should be darn impressed with what they needed to do to achieve that. You cannot begin to understand how much harder their brains are working.[/quote]

I know multiple people with ADHD who not only got good grades but have impressive graduate degrees and made lots of money in impressive careers BEFORE getting their ADHD diagnosis.

Let's accept the premise that these people had to work harder to do so well with no accommodations. So? Don't most people who get very good grades, gain admission to selective schools, and pursue demanding careers work hard? Sure, there might be the occasional savant who does all that easily, but most normal, non-disabled people who have those outcomes worked plenty hard to get where they were. So someone with ADHD works hard in another way. Ok. Lots of people with ADHD will also tell you that it helped them at times because it enabled them to hyper focus on academic interests. So ADHD can be an academic advantage.

Of course, this is all also the result of expanding the definition of ADHD to include anyone who ever struggles with things like procrastination, being on time, or organizing their thoughts or their lives. We've expanded the definition to the point where like half the population has ADHD. At that point, what does it even mean?

I am so tired of ADHD being this catch all excuse/justification for any and everything. If ADHD is truly debilitating and requires real accommodations just for people who have it to access an education, then a huge number of the people currently claiming ADHD do not have it. On the other hand, if ADHD is actually as widespread as current diagnosis indicates, it's not actually "neurodivergence" at all, is it? And since so many people have been very successful with undiagnosed ADHD for so long, then we shouldn't need to accommodate it. Certainly not on the basis of the diagnosis alone. Perhaps some people with really severe ADHD need accommodations, but most of the people who claim to have it do not.

You can't have it both ways. Time to pick one.[/quote]

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