Most children with dysgraphia eventually need accommodations to be successful at school. The same is true for students with many other special needs, including those with auditory processing problems, vision problems, sensory integration issues, etc. While accommodations are among the easiest of interventions to implement, parents often are met with great resistance by schools who fear they give students an “unfair advantage.”

But school is not supposed to be a competitive game. The goal of school should be to educate children, not to separate the wheat from the chaff. Grades are supposed to be a measure of how much a child has learned and understood, not trophies.

In their recently published book, The Mislabeled Child [reviewed in this issue], Fernette and Brock Eide write:

We have found that many persons (educators especially, but also parents and children) misunderstand the purpose of accommodations, so we would like to say a little about them here. Some people worry that accommodations can create “special advantages” or “tilt the playing field” in favor of children with learning challenges. Others respond that accommodations are needed to “level a playing field” that is already tilted against the learning–challenged child. We find these metaphors subtly misleading. Education is neither a game nor a form of competition; it is the process of helping each child learn and achieve as well as she possibly can. People who are worried about giving special learning advantages to children need to rethink their whole perspective. We should be trying to provide as many learning advantages as we can to all children. This does not mean relieving any child of the responsibility of making the kind of diligent effort that is needed to learn, but it does mean lessening the burden imposed by learning challenges that make certain kinds of work essentially impossible and channeling a child’s energy into more beneficial forms of work. Accommodations, in other words, should not be thought of as ways of getting a child out of work but as ways of getting a child into the kinds of work that are best suited to promoting her education.

I think we need a new metaphor for education and accommodations. Maybe the classroom’s an orchestra and we want to help all the children play as well as possible. If one violinist needs a shoulder rest, do we say she can’t have it because the other violinists don’t use one, even if that means the string section will be out of tune? If one of the saxophonists needs a different kind of reed than the others, do we insist that he has to use the same reed as everyone else because he shouldn’t have any advantages, even if that means there’s a loud squawking noise every couple of minutes?  And if the flutes need more time to warm up than the timpanist, do we insist that the flutes can’t have the time they need? Virtuoso violinist Itzhak Perlman must sit when he performs, due to the effects of polio, while all other violin soloists stand. The music world would be a poorer place if he were banned from the concert stage because he wasn’t playing under the exact same circumstances as other soloists.

I suggest that we should give out shoulder rests and longer warm-ups and any other adaptations that our players need. School isn’t supposed to be about winning and losing. It’s supposed to be about giving kids the skills they need to make beautiful music in the symphony of life.