Transcript: Candace Cortiella

Candace Cortiella offers some suggestions about providing accommodations and sounds a cautionary note about providing too many (time: 1:09).

It’s not unreasonable at all to go through some period of testing out accommodations to see if they do help the student with the access skills, and is the student going to embrace the accommodation. Are they actually going to use it or are they going to reject it in a classroom or test setting? The other thing to remember is that this is not an “if some is good, more is better” situation. I have seen through my work as a parent and as a parent advocate it’s schools and teachers having a standardized menu of accommodations that they want to give students, dictated by the student’s disability category. This is not a good way to go about making accommodations decisions. In fact, it’s not a good idea at all to over-accommodate students. There are a lot of dangers in that, and one of the biggest ones is that they really won’t be learning the content; they’ll just be using their accommodations. And as they grow up and go to college or whatever, they’re not necessarily going to have access to all those accommodations, so it’s not a more-is-better situation.