The Accommodation Gap
Extended time on tests is supposed to level the playing field. It's doing the opposite.
Recently, I have been speaking to many independent schools who grant academic accommodations to students almost exclusively based on recommendations in a neuropsychological report. If the report recommends accommodations, the kid gets them. And if the report doesn’t recommend them—or if there simply is no report—the kid doesn’t. The extent to which the kid is struggling in school (or not) is of secondary importance if it matters at all.
Why these sorts of policies exist at independent schools is really beyond me. Independent schools are allowed to do more or less whatever they want when it comes to supporting their students, so why are they requiring families to get private evaluations? Teachers are with these kids every day. They can see who’s struggling, and presumably they can fairly judge when and how to help.
Also, anecdotally, it seems that the overwhelming majority of neuropsych reports recommend extra time on tests, regardless of whether the kid in question demonstrates a functional impairment in school. So, by making the neuropsych recommendation the sole criteria, disability accommodations are being granted to many, many kids in independent schools who don’t have disabilities.
Ultimately, my impression is that outsourcing the decision making to a private evaluator, who the family selected and is paying, isn’t making the accommodations process more rigorous. It’s just making it more shady and expensive. And this matters, for reasons that go well beyond any individual student or school.
Public schools—which educate the vast majority of students in this country, including a disproportionate share of students with disabilities and limited financial resources—operate under an entirely different framework. Under Section 504 and IDEA, getting an accommodation like extended time requires meeting a legal definition of disability and demonstrating actual functional impairment in the school setting. You can’t get it just because a clinician your parents hired put it in a report.
And a downstream consequence of these misaligned systems is unequal access to accommodations on tests like the SAT and ACT. Many standardized testing companies grant accommodations at least in part based on whether a kid has gotten them at school. If a student has a documented history of receiving extended time, they have a track record to support the accommodation, and it’s basically rubber stamped. If they have no such history, they have a much harder time getting it.
So what we end up with is a world where students from independent schools—who, on average, arrive at college admissions with significant advantages in terms of resources, tutoring, and preparation—are also disproportionately taking standardized tests with extended time. Meanwhile, public school students, who had to clear a much higher bar to receive any accommodation at all, are not.
We are not measuring the same thing. We are not looking at a level playing field. We are looking at a system in which the conditions of a high-stakes test vary based on family wealth and school type, and we pretend like it’s fair.
Independent schools have fewer legal obligations to students with disabilities than public schools do. That’s true, and there are good reasons for it. But fewer legal obligations doesn’t mean no ethical ones. In this particular instance, independent schools should be playing by the same rules as everyone else, not because the law requires it, but because the alternative is using disability rights infrastructure to give already-advantaged kids another leg up.
Accommodations are not a commodity. They’re a civil rights protection. So when they’re available for purchase, something has gone seriously wrong.
Love!!!