Academic Accommodations and Sphere Sovereignty  – Religion & Liberty Daily

The percentage of students receiving accommodations in higher education has increased rapidly in recent years, and national media coverage, including a prominent Atlantic article, has kindled debates over the ways in which the current system is broken. Legitimate criticism has been leveled at the specific reporting practices used in recent popular reports, but overall these articles tell a clear story: The accommodations landscape is changing. While some see this as a positive trend away from ableist educational practices, many are uncomfortable with the seemingly inexplicable rise in accommodations because of the current and potential unintended consequences of such a rise. One popular concern, for example, is that disabled students are in fact at an advantage as compared with their able-bodied peers, owing to an abundance of accommodations, such as extra time on tests above and beyond what is appropriately compensating for slower speeds in some area of test taking.

At the heart of the controversy lies the question of testing, especially accommodations for extra time, given the central role that testing plays in determining college grades. National attention has also focused recently on how elite schools are attempting to combat grade inflation with strict grade caps and other comparative metrics, but there has been little attention paid to how these conversations overlap.

I am a blind student who uses academic accommodations, and I became interested in the accommodations debate because it seems clear to me that the abundance of accommodations is not serving my disabled classmates well. Despite the media coverage these issues are receiving, many faculty have been hesitant to speak publicly because of the high potential costs of sharing ideas that could be perceived as unfairly increasing barriers for disabled students. I have spent the last year talking to faculty and students privately (approaching the issue from a wide range of perspectives), and much of my thinking on the issue has been informed and clarified by these conversations.

The issue became more urgent for me when Harvard University, where I am a rising junior, approved a grade cap this past May. To counter grade inflation, the number of As given in every class will be capped at 20% of enrollment plus 4, which means that the grade of each student in the class will directly affect those of their classmates. In this context, it is especially clear to me that students and faculty must be in consensus about what accommodations are supposed to do, and for whom. The ethical framework that grants some students different treatment should be based not on an impossible standard of fair outcomes but rather on a limited allowance for academic adjustments for assessing proficiency, determined with the particulars of academic coursework in mind. The most promising way to ensure academic consistency while not penalizing embodied difference is to empower individual educators to listen to students’ circumstances as they particularly apply to a given class, employing a framework that parallels the logic of Abraham Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty.

The most straightforward defense of testing accommodations is that they make it possible for disabled students to be fairly evaluated and graded. For example, I receive double time on testing because Braille and screen readers take longer to use than print. If my peers are evaluated in a timed-testing scenario and my allotment of time is the same even though the medium I am using is different, I would in some sense be given less real time than my peers, so the school owes it to me to ensure equality in my real capacity to perform for grading purposes by granting me double time. This looks initially compelling, but it no longer makes sense in the context of grade caps.

Controversy surrounds the extent to which extra time on testing benefits student performance, for those with and without disabilities. This is especially unclear for those with cognitive and emotional disabilities, the population that accounts for the bulk of the recent rise in accommodations. When grades are determined precisely by the relative performance of others in the class, the only “fair” way to capture relative competency would be to precisely calibrate the time given to each student for testing to the individual differences in each student’s way of interacting with material. At best, accommodations are then a rough attempt at ensuring approximate fairness. But if the research that points to extra time enhancing the performance of those without disabilities is correct, then a student with a less severe form of a disability who gets the same accommodation as a student with a more severe form of disability would be unfairly advantaged. On a granular level, this is simply impossible to determine. This impossibility points to a thin notion of what accommodations should be doing.

Accommodations should not exist to ensure “fair” evaluation outcomes, and they cannot. Evaluation is only a small part of the educational experience anyway. Accommodations should rather be optimized to enable students to learn as much as possible and accurately represent their mastery of material. This should not be guided or justified by a commitment to comparative fairness of outcome, but rather on the grounds that this is what the educational infrastructure should be aiming for with all students, and bodily difference should not rule this out for some groups of people. Accommodations should therefore be tied to specific classes very closely, since faculty know best what all students should take away from their classes and what demonstrates rigorous engagement with class content.

At most schools, current accommodations procedures are run through student services offices, far from any classroom, that prioritize fairness, in part because they have no contact with the actual intellectual lives of students. This standard model of a disability office housed in a student services division is not the ideal way students should be accommodated. Faculty know best what their classes are trying to teach, how testing is trying to capture mastery, and what requirements should be more or less flexible. Students know how they learn best and should be prepared to defend this to faculty while understanding that college is a place to be pushed. The boundary between pushing reasonably and denying an environment in which learning and assessment can be actualized is a tricky one to negotiate, but ultimately Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty could be a promising way to understand a proposed methodology for negotiation.

Abraham Kuyper defined sphere sovereignty in this way: God’s sovereignty is best realized through the correct ordering of “circles” of life activity that should be governed distinctly. Respecting the boundaries of these “wheels” of human activity is important so that they do not “clog,” and the preservation of the individual nature of spheres leaves God’s supreme sovereignty unencumbered. Even secular institutions can take this model to heart.

One important sphere is education, to which academic accommodations surely belong. When they are taken over by college administrators, critical educational questions are relegated to a sphere that has no rightful authority to infringe on academic life, and the consequence is the sloppy treatment of these matters. Such offices are often built in reference to governmental initiatives and regulations, so the sphere of government is to some extent what is driving this. I do not want to claim here that there should be no such regulation, and in fact neutrality and insurance against poor treatment of disabled students is necessary. Moreover, there is a role for offices that gather expertise and know-how in the evaluation of disability and in providing certain niche services. The participation of government and student services offices does not imply that they always incompetently infringe on the educational sphere, but it is a danger that should be better guarded against than it is at present.

I propose that faculty and students drive the accommodations process for each class. Some oversight from college administrators would still be necessary, as faculty would likely not be immediately competent to take on this role. Additionally, given that colleges must provide accommodations by law, documentation and reporting may need to be relegated to some small bureaucracy (also justified by the need for specialized knowledge and neutral treatment of students). However, faculty and teaching staff do know best how to push students while prioritizing learning as the ultimate good. To respond to the present moment, I believe the perceived misuse of accommodations would decrease with more specialized accommodations, with the expectation of increased student buy-in to the process, and with faculty having more authority to determine which requests actually pertain to removing barriers to educational experience.

To illustrate how accommodations can work well when they are targeted by the student and faculty member to specific needs, an example from my past semester at Harvard is useful. I took a class that included a unit on introductory topology, the mathematical study of knots. The class approach was almost entirely visual, so the disability services made all visual materials in tactile form, since this is one standard option for blind students. For all students, part of the work of understanding knots is visualizing 3D objects through images, but I soon realized that tactile graphics were not fulfilling the same function for me because it is possible to see in much finer detail than it is to feel, so I was missing out on important information, and many graphics were too crowded. A course assistant first observed the problem, and was able to make 3D models that captured more information than could be captured in my drawings. I then brought these to my professor, and she offered to assess me on my understanding through these models.

I was at first uncomfortable because this felt easier than what my classmates were doing. Because my professor understood the broader picture, though, she was able to explain that either working with 3D models or projections was simply intuition-building. In higher level topology, drawings have a very limited use because they can only capture so much detail and contain so many lines. Essentially, tactile graphics and drawings have similar limitations, but tactile graphics have a much lower threshold for these limitations. Showing my understanding with 3D models, therefore, could show that I had built the same relevant skills as my classmates. This is not something that anyone in disability services could have thought of, because they are not trained to know the content or pedagogy of a college math class. Instead, because I am deeply invested in my learning, I initiated this process with my professors. Disabled students do tend to be highly engaged in this way, but reframing the conversation so that disabled students are optimizing for their access to learning rather than equality of outcome, and empowering faculty to lead and initiate these conversations, especially when accommodations are not working well in their classes, is an important shift.

Even if such a reframing did not lower the increased requests for accommodations, the obsession with whether the current level of accommodations is reasonable or fair would greatly decrease if we understood them as educational tools and not as some great equalizer and mechanism for fairness. On this improved model, attention should shift away from how many students are using the resource of increased access to learning despite embodied difference. Disabled students should be able to focus more on the access to learning and less on the outcomes of evaluations, and faculty should feel empowered to increase access to their courses while retaining the power to push and collaborate with their students.