I was working in disability law in 2008, and the pre-2008 law really was too narrow. IIRC, it essentially meant: if you could be accommodated, you weren’t disabled; if you couldn’t be accommodated, you could be discriminated against.
The problem isn’t that we expanded the definition of “disabled” - it’s that we got too loose on what counts as a “reasonable” accommodation.
Pre-2008, Little League could have legally banned eyeglasses because needing them wasn’t a disability. To most people, that’s absurd and defeats the purpose of the 1990 ADA. On the other hand, suing for an extra strike in baseball shouldn’t have been allowed under any version, because it fundamentally changes the game and isn’t reasonable. Similarly, extra time on tests isn’t truly reasonable as it materially alters what the test measures.
The issue arises from (a) courts being too willing to deem accommodations “reasonable” and (b) schools wanting to avoid the fights. As a result, people receive clearly unreasonable accommodations. This is especially problematic with testing time: it costs schools almost nothing, so they don’t resist, but it’s unfair to other students judged against those who get extra time.
Testing time doesn't cost the schools nothing. In terms of faculty and staff hours required to arrange the accommodations, it costs a lot of work that could go to more productive tasks.
Little League, a privately owned organisation, should be allowed to ban players from wearing glasses if it so chooses. I'm not sure what "most people" think about this, but "most people" are wrong about most topics so who cares.
I have to say I'm often confused by the way the law uses the word "reasonable". Disability activists inhabit a world where it's clearly reasonable for schools to give people with ADHD extra time on tests. I don't agree with them, but shouldn't the law establish a more rigorous standard than "it's just obvious common sense"?
I think you do have to bite the bullet on your little league hypothetical. Now, if we’re just talking about kids having a good time, it seems weird to ban eyeglasses. And frankly it’s hard to think of a reason why little league would ban eyeglasses, even if we didn’t have the ADAAA. But, in your hypothetical, where they did ban them, presumably they would have a reason to ban them. What could that reason be? Well, maybe there is some value in sorting kids by their unassisted eyesight, among other potential reasons. And, from your hypothetical, the ADAAA then swoops in, preventing the eyeglasses ban but also frustrating that sorting function.
Tests are similar. To you, it might be obvious that academic tests are really about sorting people by their ability to focus and solve defined problems. To most people, however, that function is ugly and disturbing, because it calls attention to the fundamental inequality of man, and we definitely do hold the these truths self evident that all men are created equal. So, normal people will justify academic tests as measuring proficiency, like did you learn the material, or even as a way to reinforce the material by inducing studying and requiring performance. Notably, extra time DOES NOT compromise the more socially appealing functions of tests. If someone gets extra time, the test can still validly measure their proficiency (which is a contest only between the student and the material, not other students) and the test is itself still a helpful pedagogical tool. So, if we lean on these reasons to test, extra time is a reasonable accommodation. If we are really butthurt about fairness, and c’mon no one likes a striver, ew, we could say that the reasonable accommodation is no time pressure for anyone. Like it’s challenging but not impossible. Elevators and ramps are also expensive. But they follow from the ADAAA’s logic.
Now, you could say that, a test like the SAT is purely about ranking and sorting. Indeed that’s why standardized tests are so unpopular! And you’d be right. But like, sometimes you have to trust private actors who have skin in the game to balance the considerations.
The difference is that eyeglasses only benefit people with impaired vision, but extra time benefits everyone. People don’t get upset about accommodations that help bring disabled people level with non-disabled people, but they do about accommodations that potentially give disabled people an advantage.
You’re missing my point. You’re still substituting your judgement about what is a legitimate accommodation, for the private actor’s judgement who has skin in the game, forgive the cliche. “Whether an accommodation could possibly benefit non-disabled” should be just another factor the private actor balances. Again, if glasses are really no big deal, the little league wouldn’t ban them in the first place. We wouldn’t need a ADAAA for that scenario.
Also, it’s literally false that extra time benefits everyone. A test can be designed to be hard in other ways. Some tests are designed to have time pressure and some are not. Like, you can have a 8-hour test in the library. Or you can write questions that someone who knows the material will get and someone who doesn’t won’t get, no matter the timing. Besides the question of test design, on a specific test, although some non-disabled people might benefit from extra time, others won’t. These others could just get the wrong answer. They could also not need the extra time.
It’s an interesting issue of whether an accommodation is unreasonable because some non-disabled people could theoretically benefit from that accommodation. But once you have the ADAAA as it is, the institution makes a call about which accommodation is easiest for it to do. Extended time is simply the easiest accommodation, and compared to other potential accommodations, which would involve redesigning the test or having extended time for everyone, the schools have revealed themselves to be willing to lose some fairness to the fraction of students who don’t have a “disabled” tag but would benefit from extra time.
This would be a significantly better point if time pressure were not a core mechanism of almost every standardized admissions test that is widely used in the US today.
Depends on the circumstances, but the answer may be "nothing."
The thing a lot of these discussions miss is that being "disabled" isn't an on/off switch for whether you get an accommodation. It's supposed to be the first step in the process. If you are disabled (defined broadly), the next question is whether there is an effective modification or adjustment that enables a qualified individual with a disability to perform the essential functions of the job or enjoy equal benefits, and does not impose significant difficulty or expense or fundamentally disrupt the employer’s legitimate business operations or the goals of the education process. Poor eyesight may get you the right to wear your glasses or to sit somewhere with better lighting, but it doesn't get you a wheelchair ramp. And sometimes, there is no reasonable accommodation. A quadriplegic may be able to get a wheelchair ramp installed to get into the building, but they aren't going to get to be a firefighter.
The problem with unlimited time on tests isn't that people with ADHD/anxiety/depression aren't disabled, it's that it isn't reasonable to give them extra time while denying it to others, particularly in a situation where class rank matters, either implicitly or explicitly.
Students with an OCD accommodation were the most frustrating for me, since they often finished their math tests much more quickly than students without accommodations. They then double-checked and triple-checked or even quadruple-checked their work, using their time-and-a-half accommodation. At the end of the term, they might have a 99% average, well ahead of the rest of the class. And the rest of the class noticed.
I was much more sympathetic to students who had suffered concussions while engaged in sports. They were so obviously in need of accommodations that could not be spelled out in detail by the legal system that, in consultation with the learning specialist, I just gave them as much time as needed, often over several days, by breaking the test into two or more sections. It’s crazy to think that we may have been technically breaking a law, or at least official school policy for accommodations, by using informed judgment and some human compassion.
If, for example, it takes one person two days to write a summary judgement brief, and another lawyer takes ten days, the one who does it in less time gets five times more work done in a year.
In my mind, these conditions are too broad to have any accommodation that applies to everyone who has it. There are some kids who can't stop a body part from moving, others who just let their mind wander a little more than normal. You can't base an accommodation for autism on the assumption that they are all Rainman. Some of them are just as capable as anyone else, they are just a little weird. Others have to wear diapers. Some people with "anxiety" worry a bit too much, others throw up every time they try to take a test. If you say everyone with this condition gets the maximum accommodation, you just get a lot of people getting accommodations they don't need, and incentivize people to get bullshit diagnoses.
That doesn't even go into the fact that diagnosing these conditions is incredibly arbitrary. All you need is to talk to a single doctor about your lived experience and you get a diagnosis. I know because I have (probably) ADHD. It was way too easy to just talk to a doctor (on a video call even), and get a diagnosis and medication. Did I do worse in school because of this? Yes, I think so. Should my school have had to accommodate me? No way.
The market wasn't correcting irrational discrimination though, for things like racial discrimination pre-civil rights era, or discrimination against women in muslim countries, or so on.
In both cases, that's because it wasn't/isn't allowed to. The phrase "Jim Crow" is often used in "Jim Crow laws", and that's because in the South, racial discrimination was required and enforced by law and/or mob violence. If you repeal those laws, and enforce the ones against mob violence, the market corrects the problem. This was literally never tried: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took the system straight from "mandated segregation" to "mandated equality" for private businesses. Likewise, Muslim countries have laws making women chattel.
There is a more subtle point here: if discrimination is widespread, it's possible to get stuck in a bad equilibrium where no one *doesn't* discriminate, and so no one can reap the gains from using undervalued potential workers and get an advantage. This equilibrium can be self-enforcing because if discrimination is common enough and widely regarded as proper, businesses which don't discriminate can be boycotted. But critically: once a society is out of that equilibrium, it stays out, because anyone who does discriminate is putting themselves at a disadvantage, and there are too many businesses that don't discriminate for bigots to boycott them all. This is also not an issue in the context being discussed here: very few people *hate* the disabled or believe it is improper for them to work, as was the case for racism and sexism.
> I was working in disability law in 2008, and the pre-2008 law really was too narrow. IIRC, it essentially meant: if you could be accommodated, you weren’t disabled; if you couldn’t be accommodated, you could be discriminated against.
What's too narrow about that? You have a terrible law, and an interpretation of the law that makes it impossible to apply. That sounds like the system working in a desirable way. Since making the law broader makes the situation worse, it cannot be the case that the law is "too narrow".
> Similarly, extra time on tests isn’t truly reasonable as it materially alters what the test measures.
This depends. Some tests, like the Wonderlic, rely on a time limit for their diagnostic power. Other tests don't.
One expected effect of time limits being made illegal is that test givers will shift to giving tests on which extra time provides little to no advantage. The SAT was always supposed to be an effectively untimed test, which made it cheap to offer the accommodation of extra time.
It’s understandable that LSAC doesn’t want to spend more than its annual budget defending itself in discrimination lawsuits.
Maybe we need to fund expedited arbitration for such disputes. With a class action-type vehicle for entities receiving more than 20 reasonable accommodation requests a year, or something like that.
The cost of litigation is a problem in a lot of aspects of American life. However, it's kind of how our system is set up, so it causes problem, removing it can cause more problems.
There actually is a process for expediting these disputes - they generally have to go through the EEOC (or the state equivalent) first, and at least when I was dealing with them 15 years ago, they can be pretty reasonable. It's just that, if you don't like their decision, either side can go to court.
I went to a private Jewish high school where basically everyone I knew had at least one doctor in their family, which meant getting "academic accomodations" for a "learning disability" was widespread. I would guess roughly 25-35% of my classmates got extra time on tests, some of whom were quite a bit smarter than I was and very clearly did not have any learning problems. One friend of mine would openly brag about gaming the system. Was extremely frustrating at the time and was obviously unfair to people who didn't get this fake disability status. Thank you for speaking up about this.
_"There’s a lesson here about moral panics. Recently, certain writers have asked why some people would “die on the hill” of saying Epstein is not a pedophile. But this is exactly how mass hysterias end up taking over society."_
I'd never really thought about it in this way before, as I mostly saw it as a personal and political interest, but one of the benefits of freedom of expression may be in stopping societal movements building up such momentum that society swings away too far from some reasonable baseline
This has been going on for decades. In 1997 a parent told me how much his son had improved his scores by getting the extra time. ADD. I had a son the same age who did pretty well on his SATs but didn’t get 1600 like this other kid did. Extra time would benefit almost everyone and if it is going to be granted widely theSAT shouldn’t even be a timed test. GRR.
I agree with this. The scores would go up on average but continue to rank students appropriately and I think the evidence tilts towards it being a slightly better predictor of intelligence when time constraints are removed, especially on the verbal.
If you're wondering why academics' websites (with course materials, preprints, etc.) have been migrating either to GitHub et al. or to closed-access systems like Moodle over the last decade: One of the reasons is a requirement of ADA-compliance on all pages hosted by a college. Several colleges have been successfully sued into removing their course recordings from public view:
It's continuing to get worse within academia. There's a huge initiative now to ensure that any material uploaded to any course website is "fully accessible" regardless of if there's anyone in a class that actually needs it in that format.
This is particularly challenging for anything visual like mathematical formulas or graphs, which require complicated and time-consuming work-arounds. Also, basically every PDF is non-compliant. Videos require not just auto-captions, but manually verified captions.
What this has amounted to in practice is more professors eliminating readings or making them shorter as well as cutting a considerable amount of material from their courses. This has also resulted in the expansion in power of various "accessibility" staff to effectively dictate course materials.
I am a person on the autism spectrum that struggles to finish tests on time because I have a spiky intelligence profile that makes me good at complicated logical analysis but bad at doing it quickly. This quality of mine also comes up in professional settings: the reality is that I struggle to think quickly, and this makes me struggle to always do things that others with similar levels of intelligence can. In a sense I could say I am 'disabled', but the reality is that this 'disability' has practical and real-world implications as to what I am capable of in real world contexts.
I am hopeful that there is a middle ground we can reach societally that both avoids stigmatizing and shaming unusual people while also maybe acknowledging that it is the responsibility of individual people to go into fields that are well-suited to their cognitive strengths.
My question is - why haven't the Republicans taken this up to fix it - not just this aspect of the ADA, but also how much it is over-interpreted for public accommodation, particularly business remodels, which has been a huge financial drag to small businesses and public entities with, often, an absurd rationale by the decision-makers. I could give a long list of these absurdities from my years in Facilities Management at the University of California at Santa Cruz and from my business-owning friends sad tales in the City of Santa Cruz.
Has anyone tried arguing that having a low IQ or being bad at maths amounts to a disability, and thus they should be accommodated by being given an exam with easier questions and lower pass marks?
You're not abbreviating a plural to a singular. You're abbreviating a noun that refers to a substance and therefore has no plural form. Note that, just as you'd expect from a substance, "mathematics" has singular verb agreement. You can say that mathematics is difficult, but you can't say that mathematics are difficult.
Our culture has been taken over by those of different value systems where getting ahead no matter what is the rule. Cheating is fine as long as it results in achieving the goal. Honor is not important. Fairness is not important. Being a victim and being disabled are no longer stigmatized but lauded and come with advantages, so practical people take them.
It sucks. But the fix would take drastic painful almost impossible steps to take. So, I'm for burning it all down and starting over.
Well yeah.. colleges are the havens of bleeding heart liberals, are they not? If they want to cut themselves off at the knees(by turning out substandard professionals) i say let them. This will only make those that dont take the easy routes more valuable. That piece of paper is only good for so much, but people that know how to do something well, or get shit done right, are usually recognized and utilized. My point is, these shitty systems need to be allowed to fail.
"Anything that substantially harms the ability to engage in “sleeping,” “learning,” “reading,” “thinking,” or “working” counts!"
So smartphones give people disablities?! Lets sue the fucking phone companies! Ive seen phones/social media do this and much worse to countless people. If thats the definition of disabled then we've got a case!
I don’t know, I think you’re overstating the impact of the ADA. It was designed by the Bush administration to be circumventable. First, it basically requires people with disabilities to sue in order for accommodations to first be established, which is a relatively substantial burden of time, effort, and money. Second, there are circumstances in which accommodations are denied: there’s a reason why, despite litigation, that NYC subways aren’t ADA compliant.
I think the examples you cite of ADA misuse reflect the issues with the litigation mechanism: PGA golfers and Ivy League parents are able to use the ADA to their advantage because they’re the ones who can afford it.
You say that the law might’ve been passed because of the halos lawmakers put on disability activists, but I think a lot of those activists would argue that the opposite was the case. Ultimately, the original ADA was a reluctant compromise for disability advocates, a way for the government to eschew responsibility for accommodations by making the implementation mechanism litigation against private businesses. Also, if I’m not mistaken, the ADA was paired with reductions in welfare spending, because the idea was that my making accommodations more prevalent, it would reduce the need for disabled people to depend on government subsidies and enable disabled individuals to obtain employment.
That's not how the law works. Institutions don't just sit around and wait for someone to sue them. They try to comply with the law as they understand it. If they're not complying, activists will sue to force change. The rules they create are broadly applicable, it's not the case that every single person has to sue for the law to be effective.
It's a controlled intersectional demolition of western civilization by the capture institutions. Satan is ultimately behind Marxism, feminism, and Postmodernity.
"Disabled" means different things in different contexts. Being "disabled" under the ADA very much does not get you SSDI benefits. If anything, the broad ADA standards make it harder to get SSDI, since to qualify for SSDI, your disability must result in an inability to engage in any substantial gainful activity and the ADA makes it easier to get a job, even if you are disabled.
Not only are many households on welfare ("benefits" as they call it, or the dole) but there are whole housing tracts of families (loosely defined) who have no living memory of anyone of three generations ever being in work. Work ethic is just a completely foreign concept to them, like dark matter. Their only knowledge of work comes from watching TV shows where actors are depicting characters who appear to be at work as part of the storyboard or there might be a news item about some trouble in the Tube where strange creatures called "commuters" are being interviewed about their delay. "Blimy. E'm fookin' glad I dinna hae to be oot in tha' shit."
Social media forces all of society to speak in hyperbole, to the point that all language loses meaning. It's not enough for something to be bad, it has to be the worst thing that has ever happened. Every war is a genocide. Every political act is a coup. Every liberal is a socialist, every conservative is a Nazi. The whole thing empowers the worst actors because if there is no difference between something that is bad and something that is horrific, it empowers whoever is willing to do the horrific.
I'm glad the extended-time scam is finally getting some attention, after years of silence. People working in college disability offices are typically small-scale bullies who don't accept any discussion. What's the most productive course of action for those who are forced to administer these unfair accommodations for their students?
I was working in disability law in 2008, and the pre-2008 law really was too narrow. IIRC, it essentially meant: if you could be accommodated, you weren’t disabled; if you couldn’t be accommodated, you could be discriminated against.
The problem isn’t that we expanded the definition of “disabled” - it’s that we got too loose on what counts as a “reasonable” accommodation.
Pre-2008, Little League could have legally banned eyeglasses because needing them wasn’t a disability. To most people, that’s absurd and defeats the purpose of the 1990 ADA. On the other hand, suing for an extra strike in baseball shouldn’t have been allowed under any version, because it fundamentally changes the game and isn’t reasonable. Similarly, extra time on tests isn’t truly reasonable as it materially alters what the test measures.
The issue arises from (a) courts being too willing to deem accommodations “reasonable” and (b) schools wanting to avoid the fights. As a result, people receive clearly unreasonable accommodations. This is especially problematic with testing time: it costs schools almost nothing, so they don’t resist, but it’s unfair to other students judged against those who get extra time.
Testing time doesn't cost the schools nothing. In terms of faculty and staff hours required to arrange the accommodations, it costs a lot of work that could go to more productive tasks.
Little League, a privately owned organisation, should be allowed to ban players from wearing glasses if it so chooses. I'm not sure what "most people" think about this, but "most people" are wrong about most topics so who cares.
I have to say I'm often confused by the way the law uses the word "reasonable". Disability activists inhabit a world where it's clearly reasonable for schools to give people with ADHD extra time on tests. I don't agree with them, but shouldn't the law establish a more rigorous standard than "it's just obvious common sense"?
I think you do have to bite the bullet on your little league hypothetical. Now, if we’re just talking about kids having a good time, it seems weird to ban eyeglasses. And frankly it’s hard to think of a reason why little league would ban eyeglasses, even if we didn’t have the ADAAA. But, in your hypothetical, where they did ban them, presumably they would have a reason to ban them. What could that reason be? Well, maybe there is some value in sorting kids by their unassisted eyesight, among other potential reasons. And, from your hypothetical, the ADAAA then swoops in, preventing the eyeglasses ban but also frustrating that sorting function.
Tests are similar. To you, it might be obvious that academic tests are really about sorting people by their ability to focus and solve defined problems. To most people, however, that function is ugly and disturbing, because it calls attention to the fundamental inequality of man, and we definitely do hold the these truths self evident that all men are created equal. So, normal people will justify academic tests as measuring proficiency, like did you learn the material, or even as a way to reinforce the material by inducing studying and requiring performance. Notably, extra time DOES NOT compromise the more socially appealing functions of tests. If someone gets extra time, the test can still validly measure their proficiency (which is a contest only between the student and the material, not other students) and the test is itself still a helpful pedagogical tool. So, if we lean on these reasons to test, extra time is a reasonable accommodation. If we are really butthurt about fairness, and c’mon no one likes a striver, ew, we could say that the reasonable accommodation is no time pressure for anyone. Like it’s challenging but not impossible. Elevators and ramps are also expensive. But they follow from the ADAAA’s logic.
Now, you could say that, a test like the SAT is purely about ranking and sorting. Indeed that’s why standardized tests are so unpopular! And you’d be right. But like, sometimes you have to trust private actors who have skin in the game to balance the considerations.
The difference is that eyeglasses only benefit people with impaired vision, but extra time benefits everyone. People don’t get upset about accommodations that help bring disabled people level with non-disabled people, but they do about accommodations that potentially give disabled people an advantage.
Or fake disabled people.
You’re missing my point. You’re still substituting your judgement about what is a legitimate accommodation, for the private actor’s judgement who has skin in the game, forgive the cliche. “Whether an accommodation could possibly benefit non-disabled” should be just another factor the private actor balances. Again, if glasses are really no big deal, the little league wouldn’t ban them in the first place. We wouldn’t need a ADAAA for that scenario.
Also, it’s literally false that extra time benefits everyone. A test can be designed to be hard in other ways. Some tests are designed to have time pressure and some are not. Like, you can have a 8-hour test in the library. Or you can write questions that someone who knows the material will get and someone who doesn’t won’t get, no matter the timing. Besides the question of test design, on a specific test, although some non-disabled people might benefit from extra time, others won’t. These others could just get the wrong answer. They could also not need the extra time.
It’s an interesting issue of whether an accommodation is unreasonable because some non-disabled people could theoretically benefit from that accommodation. But once you have the ADAAA as it is, the institution makes a call about which accommodation is easiest for it to do. Extended time is simply the easiest accommodation, and compared to other potential accommodations, which would involve redesigning the test or having extended time for everyone, the schools have revealed themselves to be willing to lose some fairness to the fraction of students who don’t have a “disabled” tag but would benefit from extra time.
This would be a significantly better point if time pressure were not a core mechanism of almost every standardized admissions test that is widely used in the US today.
What (if anything) would be a reasonable accommodation for a person with ADHD/anxiety/depression?
Depends on the circumstances, but the answer may be "nothing."
The thing a lot of these discussions miss is that being "disabled" isn't an on/off switch for whether you get an accommodation. It's supposed to be the first step in the process. If you are disabled (defined broadly), the next question is whether there is an effective modification or adjustment that enables a qualified individual with a disability to perform the essential functions of the job or enjoy equal benefits, and does not impose significant difficulty or expense or fundamentally disrupt the employer’s legitimate business operations or the goals of the education process. Poor eyesight may get you the right to wear your glasses or to sit somewhere with better lighting, but it doesn't get you a wheelchair ramp. And sometimes, there is no reasonable accommodation. A quadriplegic may be able to get a wheelchair ramp installed to get into the building, but they aren't going to get to be a firefighter.
The problem with unlimited time on tests isn't that people with ADHD/anxiety/depression aren't disabled, it's that it isn't reasonable to give them extra time while denying it to others, particularly in a situation where class rank matters, either implicitly or explicitly.
Students with an OCD accommodation were the most frustrating for me, since they often finished their math tests much more quickly than students without accommodations. They then double-checked and triple-checked or even quadruple-checked their work, using their time-and-a-half accommodation. At the end of the term, they might have a 99% average, well ahead of the rest of the class. And the rest of the class noticed.
I was much more sympathetic to students who had suffered concussions while engaged in sports. They were so obviously in need of accommodations that could not be spelled out in detail by the legal system that, in consultation with the learning specialist, I just gave them as much time as needed, often over several days, by breaking the test into two or more sections. It’s crazy to think that we may have been technically breaking a law, or at least official school policy for accommodations, by using informed judgment and some human compassion.
Life is a timed exam.
If, for example, it takes one person two days to write a summary judgement brief, and another lawyer takes ten days, the one who does it in less time gets five times more work done in a year.
In my mind, these conditions are too broad to have any accommodation that applies to everyone who has it. There are some kids who can't stop a body part from moving, others who just let their mind wander a little more than normal. You can't base an accommodation for autism on the assumption that they are all Rainman. Some of them are just as capable as anyone else, they are just a little weird. Others have to wear diapers. Some people with "anxiety" worry a bit too much, others throw up every time they try to take a test. If you say everyone with this condition gets the maximum accommodation, you just get a lot of people getting accommodations they don't need, and incentivize people to get bullshit diagnoses.
That doesn't even go into the fact that diagnosing these conditions is incredibly arbitrary. All you need is to talk to a single doctor about your lived experience and you get a diagnosis. I know because I have (probably) ADHD. It was way too easy to just talk to a doctor (on a video call even), and get a diagnosis and medication. Did I do worse in school because of this? Yes, I think so. Should my school have had to accommodate me? No way.
The pre-2008 law should not have existed. The market corrects irrational discrimination, and rational discrimination is, well, rational.
The market wasn't correcting irrational discrimination though, for things like racial discrimination pre-civil rights era, or discrimination against women in muslim countries, or so on.
In both cases, that's because it wasn't/isn't allowed to. The phrase "Jim Crow" is often used in "Jim Crow laws", and that's because in the South, racial discrimination was required and enforced by law and/or mob violence. If you repeal those laws, and enforce the ones against mob violence, the market corrects the problem. This was literally never tried: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took the system straight from "mandated segregation" to "mandated equality" for private businesses. Likewise, Muslim countries have laws making women chattel.
There is a more subtle point here: if discrimination is widespread, it's possible to get stuck in a bad equilibrium where no one *doesn't* discriminate, and so no one can reap the gains from using undervalued potential workers and get an advantage. This equilibrium can be self-enforcing because if discrimination is common enough and widely regarded as proper, businesses which don't discriminate can be boycotted. But critically: once a society is out of that equilibrium, it stays out, because anyone who does discriminate is putting themselves at a disadvantage, and there are too many businesses that don't discriminate for bigots to boycott them all. This is also not an issue in the context being discussed here: very few people *hate* the disabled or believe it is improper for them to work, as was the case for racism and sexism.
> I was working in disability law in 2008, and the pre-2008 law really was too narrow. IIRC, it essentially meant: if you could be accommodated, you weren’t disabled; if you couldn’t be accommodated, you could be discriminated against.
What's too narrow about that? You have a terrible law, and an interpretation of the law that makes it impossible to apply. That sounds like the system working in a desirable way. Since making the law broader makes the situation worse, it cannot be the case that the law is "too narrow".
> Similarly, extra time on tests isn’t truly reasonable as it materially alters what the test measures.
This depends. Some tests, like the Wonderlic, rely on a time limit for their diagnostic power. Other tests don't.
One expected effect of time limits being made illegal is that test givers will shift to giving tests on which extra time provides little to no advantage. The SAT was always supposed to be an effectively untimed test, which made it cheap to offer the accommodation of extra time.
Who says that seeing and hitting the ball without an artificial aid isn’t an intrinsic part of baseball?
Huh, I would think eyeglasses would be considered unsafe in any form of baseball. The example could likely use some adjustment...
that’s why they made rec specs lol
I see, I was unaware of those!
It’s understandable that LSAC doesn’t want to spend more than its annual budget defending itself in discrimination lawsuits.
Maybe we need to fund expedited arbitration for such disputes. With a class action-type vehicle for entities receiving more than 20 reasonable accommodation requests a year, or something like that.
The cost of litigation is a problem in a lot of aspects of American life. However, it's kind of how our system is set up, so it causes problem, removing it can cause more problems.
There actually is a process for expediting these disputes - they generally have to go through the EEOC (or the state equivalent) first, and at least when I was dealing with them 15 years ago, they can be pretty reasonable. It's just that, if you don't like their decision, either side can go to court.
I went to a private Jewish high school where basically everyone I knew had at least one doctor in their family, which meant getting "academic accomodations" for a "learning disability" was widespread. I would guess roughly 25-35% of my classmates got extra time on tests, some of whom were quite a bit smarter than I was and very clearly did not have any learning problems. One friend of mine would openly brag about gaming the system. Was extremely frustrating at the time and was obviously unfair to people who didn't get this fake disability status. Thank you for speaking up about this.
_"There’s a lesson here about moral panics. Recently, certain writers have asked why some people would “die on the hill” of saying Epstein is not a pedophile. But this is exactly how mass hysterias end up taking over society."_
I'd never really thought about it in this way before, as I mostly saw it as a personal and political interest, but one of the benefits of freedom of expression may be in stopping societal movements building up such momentum that society swings away too far from some reasonable baseline
This has been going on for decades. In 1997 a parent told me how much his son had improved his scores by getting the extra time. ADD. I had a son the same age who did pretty well on his SATs but didn’t get 1600 like this other kid did. Extra time would benefit almost everyone and if it is going to be granted widely theSAT shouldn’t even be a timed test. GRR.
Reasonable accommodations have sullied standardized testing. But eliminating timed administration would destroy it beyond recognition.
I agree with this. The scores would go up on average but continue to rank students appropriately and I think the evidence tilts towards it being a slightly better predictor of intelligence when time constraints are removed, especially on the verbal.
If you're wondering why academics' websites (with course materials, preprints, etc.) have been migrating either to GitHub et al. or to closed-access systems like Moodle over the last decade: One of the reasons is a requirement of ADA-compliance on all pages hosted by a college. Several colleges have been successfully sued into removing their course recordings from public view:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-berkeley-delete-publicly-available-educational-content
https://nationaldeafcenter.org/news-items/significance-harvards-settlement-video-accessibility/
and it appears that text offerings are likewise endangered (schools differ as to how much they care about it, though).
It's continuing to get worse within academia. There's a huge initiative now to ensure that any material uploaded to any course website is "fully accessible" regardless of if there's anyone in a class that actually needs it in that format.
This is particularly challenging for anything visual like mathematical formulas or graphs, which require complicated and time-consuming work-arounds. Also, basically every PDF is non-compliant. Videos require not just auto-captions, but manually verified captions.
What this has amounted to in practice is more professors eliminating readings or making them shorter as well as cutting a considerable amount of material from their courses. This has also resulted in the expansion in power of various "accessibility" staff to effectively dictate course materials.
Look up the rules for website accessibility. They are insane, and predatory plaintiffs can make a lot of money from them.
I am a person on the autism spectrum that struggles to finish tests on time because I have a spiky intelligence profile that makes me good at complicated logical analysis but bad at doing it quickly. This quality of mine also comes up in professional settings: the reality is that I struggle to think quickly, and this makes me struggle to always do things that others with similar levels of intelligence can. In a sense I could say I am 'disabled', but the reality is that this 'disability' has practical and real-world implications as to what I am capable of in real world contexts.
I am hopeful that there is a middle ground we can reach societally that both avoids stigmatizing and shaming unusual people while also maybe acknowledging that it is the responsibility of individual people to go into fields that are well-suited to their cognitive strengths.
My question is - why haven't the Republicans taken this up to fix it - not just this aspect of the ADA, but also how much it is over-interpreted for public accommodation, particularly business remodels, which has been a huge financial drag to small businesses and public entities with, often, an absurd rationale by the decision-makers. I could give a long list of these absurdities from my years in Facilities Management at the University of California at Santa Cruz and from my business-owning friends sad tales in the City of Santa Cruz.
They probably think it's a losing issue electorally. They have to explain it.
Just an excellent post. Learned a great deal from it. Thank you!
Has anyone tried arguing that having a low IQ or being bad at maths amounts to a disability, and thus they should be accommodated by being given an exam with easier questions and lower pass marks?
No, but I believe some have argued that anyone who calls it "maths" must be disabled. Do you people also call it Englishes or Medicines? :P
Ah, but do you call it “mathematic” or “mathematics”? If the latter, isn’t it weird to abbreviate a plural to a singular? 🥹
You're not abbreviating a plural to a singular. You're abbreviating a noun that refers to a substance and therefore has no plural form. Note that, just as you'd expect from a substance, "mathematics" has singular verb agreement. You can say that mathematics is difficult, but you can't say that mathematics are difficult.
Our culture has been taken over by those of different value systems where getting ahead no matter what is the rule. Cheating is fine as long as it results in achieving the goal. Honor is not important. Fairness is not important. Being a victim and being disabled are no longer stigmatized but lauded and come with advantages, so practical people take them.
It sucks. But the fix would take drastic painful almost impossible steps to take. So, I'm for burning it all down and starting over.
Yes, surely a system perfectly embracing your preferred ideology would rise from the ashes.
You can tell quite a bit from someone’s eagerness to see the world burn. That they don’t have much worth saving from the flames, for example. Sad!
It will burn itself down and fix itself. In fact id say we're witnessing that right now.
Learning things the hard way takes the most toll, but produces the best results(assuming those learning survive the hardships doing the teaching)
Well yeah.. colleges are the havens of bleeding heart liberals, are they not? If they want to cut themselves off at the knees(by turning out substandard professionals) i say let them. This will only make those that dont take the easy routes more valuable. That piece of paper is only good for so much, but people that know how to do something well, or get shit done right, are usually recognized and utilized. My point is, these shitty systems need to be allowed to fail.
"Anything that substantially harms the ability to engage in “sleeping,” “learning,” “reading,” “thinking,” or “working” counts!"
So smartphones give people disablities?! Lets sue the fucking phone companies! Ive seen phones/social media do this and much worse to countless people. If thats the definition of disabled then we've got a case!
Social media is cancer and in the future will absolutely be seen in the same way the lead in the pipes were.
I will join that lawsuit, brother!
I don’t know, I think you’re overstating the impact of the ADA. It was designed by the Bush administration to be circumventable. First, it basically requires people with disabilities to sue in order for accommodations to first be established, which is a relatively substantial burden of time, effort, and money. Second, there are circumstances in which accommodations are denied: there’s a reason why, despite litigation, that NYC subways aren’t ADA compliant.
I think the examples you cite of ADA misuse reflect the issues with the litigation mechanism: PGA golfers and Ivy League parents are able to use the ADA to their advantage because they’re the ones who can afford it.
You say that the law might’ve been passed because of the halos lawmakers put on disability activists, but I think a lot of those activists would argue that the opposite was the case. Ultimately, the original ADA was a reluctant compromise for disability advocates, a way for the government to eschew responsibility for accommodations by making the implementation mechanism litigation against private businesses. Also, if I’m not mistaken, the ADA was paired with reductions in welfare spending, because the idea was that my making accommodations more prevalent, it would reduce the need for disabled people to depend on government subsidies and enable disabled individuals to obtain employment.
That's not how the law works. Institutions don't just sit around and wait for someone to sue them. They try to comply with the law as they understand it. If they're not complying, activists will sue to force change. The rules they create are broadly applicable, it's not the case that every single person has to sue for the law to be effective.
24% of Britons are registered disabled.
53% of households in the UK are on welfare.
It's a controlled intersectional demolition of western civilization by the capture institutions. Satan is ultimately behind Marxism, feminism, and Postmodernity.
"Disabled" means different things in different contexts. Being "disabled" under the ADA very much does not get you SSDI benefits. If anything, the broad ADA standards make it harder to get SSDI, since to qualify for SSDI, your disability must result in an inability to engage in any substantial gainful activity and the ADA makes it easier to get a job, even if you are disabled.
Not only are many households on welfare ("benefits" as they call it, or the dole) but there are whole housing tracts of families (loosely defined) who have no living memory of anyone of three generations ever being in work. Work ethic is just a completely foreign concept to them, like dark matter. Their only knowledge of work comes from watching TV shows where actors are depicting characters who appear to be at work as part of the storyboard or there might be a news item about some trouble in the Tube where strange creatures called "commuters" are being interviewed about their delay. "Blimy. E'm fookin' glad I dinna hae to be oot in tha' shit."
They can't do delivery gigs cos foreigners are doing them. And perhaps they lack the cognitive capabilities to do office jobs. It's a growing issue.
Social media forces all of society to speak in hyperbole, to the point that all language loses meaning. It's not enough for something to be bad, it has to be the worst thing that has ever happened. Every war is a genocide. Every political act is a coup. Every liberal is a socialist, every conservative is a Nazi. The whole thing empowers the worst actors because if there is no difference between something that is bad and something that is horrific, it empowers whoever is willing to do the horrific.
I'm glad the extended-time scam is finally getting some attention, after years of silence. People working in college disability offices are typically small-scale bullies who don't accept any discussion. What's the most productive course of action for those who are forced to administer these unfair accommodations for their students?