Necessary Accommodations or Leniencies for Solid Students?


- Article by Ruti Levi, The Marker

At the beginning of the year, 16-year-old Hila received a text message from her friend with the cell phone number and a strong recommendation for a private learning disabilities evaluator. "I wanted an evaluator with evidence that the leniencies he recommends have already been accepted by the Ministry of Education a number of times", the teenager explains.

Hila's friends, it turns out, know to point out the names of evaluators who have proven to be "generous". Loosely speaking, this means evaluators, who know that when parents pay, they're expecting results, e.g., leniencies that are negotiable: extra time, ignoring spelling mistakes, expanded formulas page in math - and if you're good, maybe you can reach the bagrut (matriculation) exam for English with an electronic dictionary.

The widely open market of evaluations has been familiar since the beginning of the decade, and the clearest expression of such has been rooted in the language; the word accommodations has been switched with the word leniencies. At the Ministry of Education it's noted that a third of the evaluations submitted for approval of accommodations are disqualified each year, and nowadays, regulations which define what is an acceptable evaluation and who is a recognized evaluator have been constructed, which is supposed to reduce the scope of the problem.



Anyhow, the Ministry notes, the accommodations are divided to three levels, where two of the first levels don't affect the essence of what is measured by the exam or don't affect its content, and the accepted belief is that they're not significant enough to help a child who isn't learning disabled. In other words, extra time that's given to a child who is not really learning disabled is not expected to improve the grade he'll achieve. These suppositions are supported by studies conducted within and outside of the Ministry of Education. In contrast, the significant accommodations are those which change the essence of the content being measured (for example changing a math exam to an exam in a different scientific subject), are given only with the approval of the District Committee for Severe Cases.



Last June, the Central Office for Statistics published a comparison of data of students receiving accommodations on the bagrut (matriculation) exams). The study found the number of students entitled to leniencies out of the general student body of 10th-12th grades almost doubled between the years 2000-2007. Another finding is that the "socio-economic level considerably contributes to the likeliness to receive an accommodation on the first and second levels" - according to the data, only 5.7% of the Arab student body received leniencies on the bagrut (matriculation) exams), in comparison to 23.9% of the Jewish student body.



Do children of the wealthy hurry to request leniencies and inflate the statistics, or maybe those established parents are more aware of the importance of evaluations for learning disabilities? Between all of the numbers and percentages, a more significant problem is raised: "Children with learning disabilities from needy families in the peripheral areas and impoverished neighborhoods are going to waste", says Ophra Elul, President of the Nitzan Association.