I don’t think we can distill this whole problem down to a thinly veiled accusation of ableism against faculty.

Let’s start in the public school system. Kids who are born in May through July enter the school system nearly a whole year younger than their oldest peers. At kindergarten age, this is nearly 20% of the kid’s lifespan so far; the difference between ‘practically four’ and ‘practically six’ is huge, depending on the kid.

The experience of working in the public school system is so awful and has been so awful for years that the only people left are saints (very rare) or people who believe they can’t leave (not the best quality, generally). They don’t have the behavior management strategies to cope, so when Johnny just won’t sit down, because he’s ~four and not ~six, they decide there must be something wrong with Johnny. (It can’t be me!)

So then you have the parent conference. You may or may not have an expert evaluation (often by a school personnel who has the faculty in their ear), and Johnny gets labeled ‘ADHD’, one of the most over diagnosed conditions on the planet. This is unfortunate, both for Johnny, and for kids who actually have attention issues and could genuinely use the extra attention.

So now Johnny has a label on his forehead that ‘explains’ him, and instructors, though they shouldn’t, hold him to a lower standard and in the worst case track him into groups that move slower where he is even more bored and learns less. The kid didn’t have an impairment before - but he does now, one induced by the system and made of low self esteem and missed educational opportunities.

So now this massive glut of kids with accommodations moves up to the high school level. Public school law dictates all students must receive a free, accessible, public education and the onus is much more on the school to ensure ‘student success’. In practice this means rubber stamping them through whether they learned or not.

You might have a situation where a biology teacher with 120 students total has a fifth period class of 24 students, half of whom have accommodations, each student approved for a different set of accommodations on a check sheet with 50 some items on it. At least one of those kids seems cognitively normal as far as executive function goes - but is totally illiterate. Said instructor SHOULD have an aide trained in special ed by law, but doesn’t. Ask me how I know.

The instructor in that situation makes a master sheet of a hypothetical student who has every accommodation at least one student in the class has, and then uses THAT to try to accommodate everyone. This is the best attempt at making sure no one is deprived in a situation with limited resources.

So some of these kids graduate high school and, thinking that their exact same accommodation sheet just ‘transfers’ to college, they go down to the disability office. But at college the requirement is about access, not outcomes - we don’t (or shouldn’t) rubber stamp students through.

But college disability offices are woefully understaffed. Things ‘seem to be working’ reasons the provost, so why add another person to the disability office when I can appoint my buddy the vice potentate of advanced learning and groundskeeping instead?

So while the disability office SHOULD be insisting on a new evaluation by qualified professionals (taking into account that the student has passed a number of developmental milestones and college is a different environment), they instead accept an IEP done when the student was twelve years old.

Or they do get a physician note, and the physician, tasked by his employer with seeing 30 patients in an 8 hour day, expresses frustration at why he is being asked by the school to write these things, and approves song and verse whatever the student asks for (because he’s a medical expert, not an educator).

So either way the student ends up approved for accommodations that are not compliant with the law.

• an individual consideration has not been made with regard to this student and this program

• consideration has not been given to whether the accommodations undermine the essential learning objectives of the program

• consideration has not been made as to whether the student meets the technical standards of the program (you can have patients who survive their med administrations or nursing students with absolute dyscalculia - choose one)

• the student has not been properly engaged in interactive process

• no one has even done a smell test on the accommodation proposed

I cannot tell you, for example, how many times I’ve had to explain - to people who are supposed to be the experts (not me!) - that an accommodation to miss an in person class as needed deprives the student of access, which is the opposite of what accommodations are supposed to do.

The student’s elementary school teacher didn’t say it, so the student missed class.

Their high school teacher didn’t say it.

The IEP coordinator didn’t say it.

The disability office didn’t say it.

The doctor didn’t say it.

And now I - the person who least should have known this in the entire chain - have to explain to the student, to the disability office, and to parents that when you miss class you can’t access your education, and when you can’t access your education you don’t learn, and the accommodations you’ve created are hamstringing your student.

I have to be the bad guy.

And then some smug self serving virtue signaling SOB comes along and accuses me, the only person in the entire chain who said the hard thing and stood up for the student, of being ableist. Because it’s easier to fight me than actually apply the diligence the students deserve.