52 Accessing Specialized Education for Neurodiversity

Our K-12 system is still largely an industrial model.  While inclusion and in-school supports have vastly improved over the past few decades, the actual pedagogies, curriculum, and content remain fairly static and standardized in the vast majority of settings.  Although public schooling is an important historic innovation for expanding the labour market, promoting social mobility, and enabling universal access to basic education, public schooling (and the vast majority of charter and private school settings for that matter) are not well equipped to address neurodiversity or to help those with learning disabilities or intellectual disabilities thrive.

The prevalence of learning disabilities in Canada among school-aged youth is 8.4%,^[1] and in the US, one in five students within K-12 have been diagnosed with a learning disability.^[2]  Yet, most classrooms are set up to mainly accommodate just one type of learner. As ADHD advocate Justin Flink notes, “students are asked to sit still for most of their day, and frequently work alone; their papers are assessed on the basis of their spelling ability, rather than the ideas they contain; and their performance is measured according to their standardized testing ability: just three of the myriad sources of struggle for young people who learn differently.”^[3]

Many intellectually diverse students underperform in this standardized model, with too many dropping out or discounting their potential to thrive in post-secondary.  They are more likely to experience bullying and fewer than 10% of students with learning disabilities enroll in post-secondary education, and more face higher unemployment and incarceration.^[4]  A failure of this system is that students develop low self-esteem, low self-awareness, and a lack of agency.  Although individualized education plans – contracts between the school and the child’s family that outline particular accommodations – now exist in most jurisdictions, these are unevenly adhered to or maintained.

Moreover, as Flink points out, “such efforts have failed to tackle the root cause of the problem: a pervasive cultural stigma, and a tendency to conflate learning differences with a lack of intelligence.”^[5]   Both teachers and parents tend to lower their expectations for youth labeled with a learning disability, which contributes to “a debilitating cycle of failure, depression, isolation, and behavioral problems.”^[6]

Adults with disabilities may require specialized education and training services, including support for continuing education and job training programs. They may also need assistance with accessing educational resources and finding appropriate training programs.  As the pandemic helped able-bodied people appreciate the time, mobility, and productivity constraints of persons with disabilities, the relationship between time and learning is being recalibrated. As engineering professor and disability activist Ashley Shew writes in the journal Nature “my non-disabled colleagues are now struggling to adjust, but my team appreciates that ‘clocks should bend to our bodies’, not the other way around. Some disabled people call this concept Crip Time, reclaiming a derogatory term in pride.”^[7]

Additionally, there is a rapidly growing youth mental health epidemic affecting learners especially at secondary and post-secondary levels.^[8]  The National College Health Assessment reveals a nearly three-fold increase in reported anxiety among university-aged students over the past decade, along with a quadrupling in ADHD and a more than doubling of depression.^[9]  As educational thought-leader Alex Usher concludes from these numbers, “the student body we are teaching these days is fundamentally different – fundamentally less well – from any we have seen before.”^[10]