Aditi Juneja | Vox

The most reprehensible part of the admissions scandal: faking disability accommodations

2019-03-14T22:02:51-04:00

A standardized test. | Getty Images/EyeEm

In the first paragraph of the affidavit explaining the college fraud scandal that broke Tuesday, one sentence in particular stood out to me. Of the 33 parents, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, who were accused of engaging in elaborate bribery schemes to get their kids into elite schools, several of the parents allegedly “extended time for their children on college entrance exams … including by having the children purport to have learning disabilities in order to obtain the [necessary] medical documentation.”

As someone who is disabled, my blood boiled. I thought about all of the shame and embarrassment I had felt for needing, and sometimes using, accommodations for the ESPA, GEPA, ACT, LSAT, and bar exam. While I am no longer ashamed about needing accommodations, I do feel deep contempt for the people abusing these accommodations so they can succeed in a system that is built for them.

Right around my 11th birthday, I had my first “grand mal” seizure. These are the types of seizures that people imagine from the movies where you are on the floor, having full body spasms. These experiences were not scary for me, as I was unconscious, but they were disruptive of my life and my academic experience.

In addition to getting my first stick of deodorant that year, I also got a diagnosis of epilepsy. I spent the next couple of years trying almost every medicine on the chart of anti-epileptic drugs in my neurologist’s office. Between the doctor’s appointments and the seizures, I missed a fair amount of school.

I also developed a tremor, likely a side effect from one of the medications, that made it hard for me to take timed standardized tests that required handwriting. We spoke to my doctor, who recommended requesting accommodation for my next standardized test. When I took the ESPA, or Elementary School Proficiency Assessment, that year, I was separated from my classmates and brought to the room with the students in special education who had no time limit to take the exam.

I remember looking at my peers in the room and feeling embarrassed I had needed accommodations the same way students with serious developmental issues did. It made me wonder if people thought my abilities were impaired in some way.

I didn’t understand then that accommodation is not a judgment of your intelligence — it was a way of providing access so that I could accurately perform on the test the same way my peers without a disability could. I didn’t understand that activists have fought over the course of centuries for me to have that right. Instead, my embarrassment was so great that the next year I stopped using the accommodation, saying that I was fine and just did the best that I could on the standardized test with my tremor.

Almost a decade later, during my first-year constitutional law exam at law school, I had a grand mal seizure. After that, student services asked me if I wanted to use accommodations during exams. When I resisted, they noted that accommodations can be challenging to get for the bar exam without prior documentation. But I was so afraid of being separated out from my classmates again that I refused.

When it finally did come time to study for the bar, my biggest concern was having a seizure. I devoted myself to working out ways to regulate my breath during the test, developing a system where I would take a meditative break after half an hour of answering questions. This meant I had to plan to work faster than people who would have access to the full amount of time allocated. When I eventually passed the bar exam, I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders, most of it coming from never having to spend an enormous amount of energy regulating my disability during standardized tests ever again.

The Americans with Disabilities Act ensures that individuals with disabilities have the opportunity to fairly compete for and pursue opportunities including college, graduate school, and trade professions that require licensing exams. It does this by requiring testing entities that offer the exams to do so in a manner accessible to persons with disabilities. The goal, according to the federal Justice Department’s technical assistance requirements, is to ensure that people with disabilities “can demonstrate their true aptitude.”

There is still so much work to be done to ensure people with disabilities have access to both individualized education plans in grade school and educational opportunities after high school. This is due to the complicated web of laws that make knowing your rights challenging, accessing evaluations costly and time-consuming, and enforcing them an uphill battle.

On top of all of the practical challenges is the stigma that far too often accompanies being labeled disabled. Our society’s biases cause people to think that having a disability means that you are less capable, rather than understanding that people are often disabled not by virtue of their medical condition, but by a world not built for them. Now that this cheating scam has captured the public imagination, students with disabilities could face heightened barriers to accommodations and suspicion when requesting them. The suspicion and barriers will impact most acutely those who are also marginalized due to race, socioeconomic status, sexuality, or gender identity.

Through my academic career, I was in the privileged situation of being able to pay for test prep, having time to study for these tests, having access to medical care, being able to afford to take tests multiple times. I had teachers and professors who respected my self-advocacy and didn’t try to deny me access to my education. Yet still, the shame surrounding my condition prevented me from seeking accommodations later in my schooling.

My story is not the story of most people with disabilities. I know many people who have conditions that they can’t manage. And they shouldn’t have to. Accommodations are there to provide access and level the playing field. But people who abuse them create barriers for those of us who really need them.

Aditi Juneja is a lawyer, writer, and activist. She is the co-founder of Resistance Manual and host of the podcast Self Care Sundays. She currently works for Protect Democracy.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

I was on a Forbes 30 under 30 list. Here are the hidden privileges that made me a “success.”

2018-11-13T13:51:08-05:00

Forbes released its 2019 30 Under 30 list. | Forbes

Forbes released its 2019 30 under 30 list today. It’s a reminder not only of the hard work and intelligence of young people changing the world, but how uneven success can be as a result of generational wealth and various privileges.

I should know. I was on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2018 for Law and Policy.

This summer, I wrote about the controversial cover of Forbes’s Richest Self-Made Women issue which featured Kylie Jenner, the 21-year old member of the Kardashian family dynasty and cosmetics mogul. The description of Jenner as “self-made” quickly inspired a backlash, given the wealth and fame of the family she was born into. This, in turn led to a conversation on social media about what it means to be self-made.

The problem with this particular cover, and more generally with magazine lists like these, is they often gloss over the role intergenerational wealth and access plays in success. This is especially true when that success is achieved at a young age.

Lists like these — which fetishize achievement, particularly at a young age — erase the privilege and access that allow some of us to take career risks and be entrepreneurial in ways others can’t. They diminish the hard work done by people in more challenging circumstances and add to the myth that if you just work hard enough, you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. They ignore that some people have neither boots nor straps.

None of us are entirely “self-made”

I was featured for my work co-creating and leading the Resistance Manual, an organization that helps people get informed and get engaged in the political process. The “manual” itself is a wiki covering 15 policy areas, with pages for each state. I don’t know why they selected me for the list, but I do know that, even though the “30 Under 30” list doesn’t claim to be made up of “self-made” successes, they did send all finalists a questionnaire with questions about whether I was an immigrant, where I went to school, the amount of student debt I had at graduation, and how much debt I currently had. It also asked how much funding I’d raised for my company/enterprise and sources of funding. I don’t know how that information factored into their decisions.

The survey shows that the Forbes staff is obviously aware of the “hidden” advantages that often often contribute to success. In fact, for their list of the 400 wealthiest individuals, they even have a comically precise 10-point scale supposedly capturing how self-made people are. Forbes’s assistant managing editor told me that Kylie Jenner’s unpublished score would be a seven, reflecting that she got a head start from wealthy parents.

Of course, the truth is that none of us are entirely self-made. Most of us receive government support, for one thing. When asked, 71 percent of Americans say that they are part of a household that has used one of the six most commonly known government benefits — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, or unemployment benefits.

And many people who benefit from government largesse fail to realize it: Sixty percent of Americans who claim the mortgage-interest deduction, which applies to homeowners, say they have never used a government program. If you’ve driven on public roads, gone to public school, or used the postal service as part of your business — well, we all rely on collective infrastructure to get ahead.

Here are all of the hidden advantages and systems that helped me make the list

I certainly have. I went to public schools through eighth grade. My parents were able to save for some of my college costs through a plan that provides tax relief for those savings. I stayed on my parent’s health insurance until I was 26 under the Affordable Care Act. I have received the earned income tax credit, targeted at those with low or moderate income. I took out federal student loans to go to law school. I am enrolled in an income-based repayment plan currently as I pay them back and have also signed up for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. The way we discuss our successes as individual accomplishments and valorize some as “self-made” fails to acknowledge such systems of support.

What’s more, our current social structure makes being poor more expensive than being well-off. When I was taking LSAT prep classes, paying to take the LSAT, and paying application fees for law school, my parents covered those costs, meaning I didn’t have to take out a loan that would follow me for years.

My parents also helped me set up a bank account when I was 15, and helped me get a credit card when I was 18. If I had been unbanked and lacked a credit score, the interest rates on my student loans could have been higher. Such privileges, or lack thereof, are especially important for young entrepreneurs who need loans and investors to start their businesses.

We need to acknowledge that we don’t distribute opportunity equally

To be sure, I worked tremendously hard. I am sure that Kylie Jenner also works hard. But, I don’t think I’ve ever worked as hard as a mom who works multiple jobs for a minimum wage. Hard work is not enough. There are structures that impact success.

When it comes to wealth in this country, we no longer have a scarcity problem. We have a distribution problem. The world produces enough food to feed everyone, we have approximately five vacant homes for each homeless person in the US and the US spends twice as much on health care as other developed countries.

As Annie Lowrey points out in a Recode interview with Kara Swisher, there are reasons that a stronger safety net hasn’t caught on in the United States the way it has in other industrialized countries. One, is our strong individualistic culture and value of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. The second is racism. The wealthy pit poor white people against people of color by stoking politics of fear and resentment.

When holding people up as the hallmarks of success, we need to acknowledge that we don’t distribute opportunity equally — whether as the youngest billionaire or on a “30 Under 30” list.

Forbes failed that test spectacularly when it described Kylie Jenner as “self-made,” but many are guilty of the same flawed thinking, in a more limited way. We need to change our structures — both by strengthening our safety net for when people fall on hard times and by making sure people have equal opportunities to succeed in the first place — so access to opportunity is not just an accident of birth. And we can.

Aditi Juneja is a lawyer, writer, and activist. She is the co-founder of Resistance Manual and host of the podcast Self Care Sundays. She currently works for Protect Democracy.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.