Too much help can hurt special-ed students

Do "accommodations" help special-ed students? asks Daniel Buck. Extra time and extra help may lower expectations and set students up for future failure, he writes, citing scholar James Kauffman in Enabling or Disabling. “‘Saving’ a child from his or her own negative behavior reinforces that behavior and makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Kauffman argues.

Buck recalls a student "whose grades began to slip as classwork got harder in middle school." The student didn't pay attention in class, "didn’t complete his homework, didn’t study, made no use of his planner, and never took notes," writes Buck. His parents asked for "extra time on tests, teacher assistance filling out his planner, regular notebook checks, and other such assistance — while his teachers thought that he needed to feel the pressure of poor grades."

Extensions, extra time, and extra assistance meant he could continue with poor organizational habits, inattention, and reliance on adults to save the day. What incentive is there to try hard the first time — or at all for that matter — so long as he receives such supports?

Buck supports Miriam Freedman’s proposed special-education reforms. "Curtail the overdiagnosis of students with mild or moderate needs, focus on outputs instead of inputs, and remove the litigious nature of the law that sets parents against teachers."

"The share of students identified with disabilities nearly doubled from 8 percent in 1975 to 15 percent today," according to a report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education, writes Buck. "In 1975, most students qualifying for special education had disabilities such as severe intellectual impairments, speech impediments, or hearing loss," the report notes. Those numbers have stayed about the same, while the share of students with “modest behavioral differences” such as mild autism, dyslexia, and ADHD "has swelled from 25 percent to 66 percent of the students in special education."

Diagnostic changes "enabled many more children with modest behavioral differences (especially those from affluent families) to qualify for special education," the report's authors wrote.

Extra "test time has emerged as a fierce battleground among parents of high-schoolers," especially in wealthy areas, writes Tara Weiss in the Wall Street Journal. The "ranks of the extra timers have surged," as more students claim accommodations for recently diagnosed disabilities or medical issues.

"They’re training their anger on families who are going to extremes for an edge, from spending $10,000 for a diagnosis from a neuropsychologist to finding a gastroenterologist to support requests for unlimited bathroom breaks," she writes. "Some students with severe anxiety can take the ACT over four days."

Seven percent of students who took the ACT last year received accommodations, up for 4.1 percent in 2013, Weiss reports. A decade ago, 2 percent of SAT takers got extra time; it was 6.7 percent last year.

“The accommodations were meant to level the playing field,” says Laurie Kopp Weingarten, a college-admissions consultant in New Jersey. “But what’s happening is they’re tilting the playing field toward those with money and access.”

Scott Hamilton, an Atlanta-based clinical psychologist, told a family their 11th-grade son was just fine. “In what universe do we live in when I said their kid functions really well and they were mad at me?” said Hamilton. “Not finishing the SAT is not a disability.”