The College Board finally appears to be halting its years-long slide toward offering extra time and other accommodations to an ever-growing number of test-taking students claiming learning disability (see our earlier coverage going back to Feb. 1999). The last straw came when litigation pressure forced testers to abandon the practice of “flagging” scores on tests taken with accommodations (see Jul. 22-23, 2002 and links from there). Searching for a way to prevent a new flood tide of requests, the Board instituted “a new requirement that students seeking extra time must generally have a diagnosis and a plan for accommodations in school at least four months before taking the SAT.” In addition, it compiled a list of 142 schools which had accounted for a greatly disproportionate share of accommodations requests — a list including many highly affluent public and private schools — and asked those schools to supply greater documentation for the requests. “Faced with such scrutiny, many of the schools that had asked for the most accommodations have pulled back substantially on their requests.” The number of parental appeals has also tripled, suggesting that the Board may need to hire more lawyers than ever (and nervously hope for favorable treatment in the courts) if it wants to make the new harder line stick. (Tamar Lewin, “Change in SAT Procedure Echoes in Disability Realm”, New York Times, Nov. 8).

Filed under: disabled rights, schools