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][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]

ADHD is the new gluten allergy. When someone tells you they have it, it's probably safe to roll your eyes. [/quote]

THIS. ADHD exists, the way gluten allergies exist. However, the percentage of people who have either convinced themselves, or for various understandable reasons (in the case of ADHD, the undeniable competitive advantages that come with the various accommodations). is many, many, many multiples of the actual figure. It's not just the famous "Stanford is suddenly now 40% disabled" figure - it's the fact that at many schools...there's a great rundown in the NYT from I think this week...that figure has spiked by 600-700% OR MORE over the past 10 years or so. Literally since 2015. I get that smartphones melted all our brains, but if we're talking about a legitimate medical diagnosis for a malady that doesn't spread via viruses or bacteria like a contagious disease - that's literally not possible. Even if we were talking past underdiagnosis - sorry, I do not believe that psychiatrists were unfamiliar with attention deficit disorder. They've been giving Ritalin to kids for this since the 1960s. No.

We all know what happened is, the incentives for diagnosis became so great that there's been a rush not to be the only poor rube who doesn't get unlimited test time and oh so much more, the end. The small fraction - let's assume it's close to the figure before the incentives were institutionalized and diagnoses started spiking - are sadly under unfair suspicion, which makes them another victim of these "new" cases (are the overdiagnosed cases self-deluded or just bad people? Benefit of the doubt - for most, probably some mix of both.) But now there's a greater than 90% chance doubting the diagnosis entirely fair.

(Oh and also: we know that 99% of people who claim a gluten allergy can eat regular bread just fine but convincing themselves they can't automatically results in a diet that makes them skinnier without Ozempic and so that's what they've done, and the rest of us are rolling our eyes behind their backs.)[/quote]

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