Last week I wrote about why we issue accommodations to college students. We provide “access” through accommodations when a student with a disability does not have the same opportunity as non-disabled students. I listed a few examples of what providing access might look like.
Last week I also said that we don’t provide accommodations to college students in order to help them do well. Of course we want our students to do well, however accommodations stop at access. If an accommodation goes beyond access – beyond giving a student with a disability an opportunity that everyone else has – and enters the realm of permitting something because it will make the student successful, we’ve gone beyond the scope of the law. Some people might call this “over accommodation” and others argue that once you’re doing things to make students successful, you are by definition no longer accommodating, period. [See “More About Success” at bottom]
I just described the first reason issuing an accommodation is not appropriate: there is no access issue, but rather, we’re really talking about making a student more successful. If we did do that, we in essence would have created an equity issue, an unfair advantage for students with disabilities. That is not the intent of the disability laws – it’s supposed to be equal opportunity, not better opportunity.
There is a second reason issuing an accommodation is not appropriate – when, even if an access issue exists, the proposed accommodation is “unreasonable.” The law says we aren’t required to provide something “unreasonable” as an accommodation. There are several prongs to the “unreasonable” test. The one that is relevant from a faculty perspective is whether the proposed accommodation would fundamentally alter the nature of a program, compromise an essential element of a course or the curriculum, and/or weaken the academic standards or integrity of a course. If the answer to any of these is yes, then you’ve got an over-accommodation, non-accommodation, bad accommodation – whatever you call it, disability services shouldn’t issue it (there may still be a reasonable alternative that we can issue as an accommodation).
Next week I want to further explore the issue of fundamental alterations and compromising essential elements of a course/curriculum. And I will do that in the context of the controversial accommodations of flexibility in assignment deadlines and attendance.
More About Success:
Disability service providers can help students be successful. We can discuss learning strategies, study strategies, time management, note taking, course selection, resources on campus, etc. In fact, we try to make students with disabilities successful in the exact same ways we try to make all students successful, disability or not. We just can’t do it through issuing an accommodation.
There are two related topics to mention here. First, faculty can make adjustments to help students be successful all they want. Faculty can make an alteration to the norm (for example, allowing more time for a student struggling to meet a deadline on a paper or needing more time to finish a test), for a student that they would make for any student in the same predicament regardless of disability status. What faculty members should not do is alter the norm for a student because he or she is a student with a disability, if they would not do that for a non-disabled student in the same situation.
The other related topic is that college students (and their parents) are almost always unaware of the access vs. success distinction. In K-12 education, different disability laws apply (IDEA and a different sub-part of 504), and guess what those disability laws are all about? Making students successful. While students and parents have usually heard the vague message that “you might not get the same accommodations in college that you had in high school,” they don’t know what that really means or why things are different. It’s about access vs. success. This is all the more confusing because while the law puts a brick wall between access and success in higher education, the logical nexus still exists in students’ and parents’ minds – they’re thinking, “The whole reason I want my accommodations is so that I can do well in the class.”
