When I wrote my essay for the Free Press about the proliferation of testing accommodations, I didn’t intend to spend so much time talking about extra time, let alone position myself as the accommodations police. At the same time, though, I’m pleased the piece sparked so many interesting conversations, and it’s left me with more to say.
One thing that keeps coming to mind is how we use anxiety to justify extra time on tests. My issue isn’t the core premise. Anxiety can truly impair performance on timed tasks. Instead, it’s that we’ve conflated accommodating anxiety with treating it, and in the process, we’ve inadvertently redefined anxiety as a permanently disabling condition.
To illustrate what I mean, let me tell you about Nina. Nina was diagnosed with anxiety in fifth grade. At the time, her anxiety was debilitating enough to interfere with her ability to take tests under standard conditions, and per the recommendation of a neuropsychologist, her school granted time and a half. The recommendation was reasonable and sound.
I met Nina five years later when she needed updated documentation for the ACT. In the intervening time, she had received psychotherapy and taken anxiety-reducing medication. She’d matured and developed coping skills. By the start of high school, she no longer needed meds, she saw a therapist only as needed, and her anxiety was manageable. Yet she still received—and claimed to need—extra time on tests. It was interesting: All signs suggested that her anxiety was well controlled, yet she was still being accommodated for an anxiety-related disability. Nobody bothered to revisit it because she’d always had it, and she assumed she’d always need it.
Again, my issue isn’t with Nina’s diagnosis or the clinician’s original recommendation. Severe anxiety disorders can interfere with attention, working memory, information retrieval, and processing speed, and they can cause genuine functional impairment. For some students, like Nina, extra time is necessary to make sure anxiety doesn’t prevent equal access to their education.
But, unlike some disabilities, anxiety is often highly responsive to treatment. Evidence-based psychotherapy and medication can reduce symptoms and improve functioning. Many anxiety disorders also change with development, so a child like Nina who is impaired at ten may very well not be at fifteen.
So when anxiety is substantially interfering with academic performance, absolutely provide extra time. It’s a reasonable accommodation. But it shouldn’t blindly follow a student for the rest of their academic career. When anxiety is disabling enough to warrant accommodations, those accommodations should be paired with treatment, serving as a bridge that mitigates the effects of the anxiety while treatment works to eliminate it. That means granting extra time for a limited period, maybe six months, and then reexamining it. After treatment, schools can look at symptoms, functional impairment, and treatment response to decide whether extra time is still necessary. If the impairment persists, keep the accommodation and continue to monitor it. If it improves, consider reducing or removing it. (Importantly, both treatment and assessment need to be accessible. Parents shouldn’t have to shell out thousands of dollars for private services.)
But we should not grant anxiety-related accommodations indefinitely. When we do, we communicate that anxiety is a fixed limitation that must always be worked around rather than a condition that can improve. And we risk undermining confidence in accommodations for students who truly need them. Accommodations are an important disability-rights protection, so we must ensure that they remain tied to documented functional needs.
It’s been a while since I posted a video, but I love this one!
My book goes on sale in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand this week!