Last month, the Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch wrote a viral and sorely needed exposé on what has become one of the biggest third rails in American education: disability creep.
According to Horowitch, over 20% of Harvard and Brown undergraduates and nearly 40% of Stanford graduates are registered as having “disabilities”—numbers which seem laughable on the surface. These are, after all, some of the most prestigious schools in the country, with acceptance rates in the single digits. Can it really be the case that one in five, or two in five, of their students are genuinely disabled?
Of course not!
Putting aside the students who are blind or deaf or quadriplegic or undergoing dialysis, the vast majority of American students—and certainly the vast majority of the strivers who have gotten through the grueling, highly selective process of getting into an Ivy League—have no need for extra time or support on exams and assignments. But they get academic accommodations anyway, usually for diagnoses of mild mental health conditions that are handed out like candy by therapists and disability offices.
At fault is the educational bureaucracy that always tends toward lowering standards for academics and behavior, as well as the culture of therapeutic coddling that has permeated our society and enabled mass incompetence in the name of mental health care.
While the Atlantic’s reporting focuses on higher education, the problem really begins at the K-12 level. As is often the case with dysfunctional situations, the status quo began with good intentions—in this case, to ensure the best educational interest for children with severe disabilities, who had largely been ignored, mistreated, and even abused until then.
In 1975, President Ford signed into law the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which established a right to a free appropriate public education for disabled children. It was reauthorized by Congress in 1990, and renamed the “Individuals with Disabilities Education Act” (IDEA), which remains in effect today and which mandates that every student with a disability who needs special education receive an individualized education plan (IEP). Students with disabilities who do not need special education are entitled to a 504 plan for accommodations under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
A student with an IEP or 504 plan can get accommodations such as extra time on exams immediately. That’s a good thing if the student is genuinely disabled, but a bad thing that will cause chaos in education if anyone is able to call him or herself disabled—and that’s what we’re seeing in classrooms today.
Part of this comes down to the fact that the definition of disability has been getting broader and broader. While IEPs are fairly restrictive and limited to 13 disability categories, 504 plans are not, only requiring that a student have “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.”
What this means in practice is that any student with so much as a mild anxiety diagnosis is effectively considered disabled for the purposes of the law. Perversely, this makes disability “desirable” in academic settings. If a student is, for instance, unable to get an A under normal time constraints, but can manage to get an A with double time for a disability, the student is incentivized to get a diagnosis—especially in affluent schools where parents can afford expensive mental health consultations, and in which a toxic therapy culture is the air breathed by children and adults alike.
Now, a double time accommodation might make sense for, say, a student who is receiving chemotherapy, whose physical impairment may be enough to require time to show his understanding of the material. But there is a fundamental difference when a student receives double time for something like anxiety or ADHD. In this case, an accommodation does not give a student necessary help to show his or her best capabilities as much as it artificially inflates the student’s actual capabilities, which obviously has implications for the student’s competence in the real world, and especially in the workforce.
In other words, there is a difference between the doctor who received double time on exams because she was undergoing chemotherapy in school and the doctor who received double time on exams because she is anxious and has an attention deficit. The first doctor has the general wherewithal to do her work, and is presumably dealing with a temporary blip; the second never had to try to overcome her anxiety or attention deficit enough to succeed in the classroom, casting doubt on her professional performance.
Medicine is one of the more extreme examples of how this disability creep plays out in the real world—we all want and need competent doctors, and lowering standards for them threatens us intimately—but this trend is affecting essentially every profession that requires education beyond high school. What this means in the long term is less innovation, less productivity, less professionalism, loss of knowledge, and more entitlement (which is part of the reason why our most prestigious institutions are falling off a cliff academically).
As far as schools and colleges are concerned, the smaller and smaller number of students not receiving double time naturally will find it unfair that they are subjected to time constraints their peers are not. Meanwhile, their peers are either not acting with integrity—getting vague diagnoses to game the system—or are internalizing a learned helplessness, thinking their mild mental health issues make them so disabled as to warrant diagnoses and academic workarounds. They never get the chance to learn how to work through difficulties and enjoy the fruits of their labor, and maybe even get over their mental health problems (or at least understand how to get over them enough to be functional professionals). It’s no wonder that mental health has tanked among the youngest Americans: the system incentivizes them to dwell in the worst recesses of their minds.
Any attempts to reform these systemic incentives are met with allegations of ableism—unfortunately natural in what Christopher Caldwell dubbed our “age of entitlement.” But policymakers cannot give into this emotional manipulation. They must touch the third rail of disability law in education if we are to be serious about fixing our schools and colleges—and if we are to be serious about ensuring the seriousness and continued professionalism of some of the most important functions in our country.
