They’re Not Asking for Special Treatment. They’re Asking for Equitable Treatment.

Why Neurodivergent Students Deserve Better from Our Schools

A teacher I know — someone I genuinely respect, someone who cares deeply about her students and is a truly phenomenal and passionate educator — said something to me recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

We were talking about a neurodivergent student who had been disrespectful to her in front of the class. The student, for their part, apparently felt genuinely wronged and frustrated (per the teacher’s report). The teacher felt she had no choice but to discipline the child — not out of cruelty, but because the code of conduct has to apply to everyone. Fair is fair, right? Doing otherwise would set a bad example and reflect poor classroom management.

The conversation wound through questions of equity, accommodation, and the practical realities of a mainstream classroom. And then she said it:

“Why does the majority need to accommodate their needs? It seems like everyone is being diagnosed as ‘neurodivergent’ these days, and we’re forced to be so sensitive to everyone’s feelings that it makes it hard to just teach.”

I understood what she meant. And it broke my heart a little — not because she’s a bad person (quite the opposite), but because what she expressed reflects a painful truth about the challenges of being an educator in the United States (and many other countries) these days. It also demonstrates a profoundly widespread misunderstanding of what accommodation and neurodiversity-affirming practice actually mean. And because that misunderstanding has real consequences for real children.

As a late-diagnosed autistic adult, a licensed clinical social worker, and a therapist who has spent years working with neurodivergent children, adolescents, adults, and families, I feel compelled to respond. Not to shame anyone, but to try to reframe the conversation in a way that I hope will be helpful.

First, Let’s Talk About What “Accommodation” Actually Means

Here’s the question that framing gets exactly backwards: Who, exactly, is being given “special treatment”?

Neurotypical people — people whose brains happen to fall within the statistical majority — move through a world that was designed by and for people like them. School schedules, classroom layouts, communication styles, grading systems, behavioral expectations, social norms — all of it was built around a neurotypical template. It fits their needs almost perfectly, because it was made (by them) to fit their needs.

Neurodivergent students — autistic kids, kids with ADHD or dyslexia or dyscalculia or dyspraxia, kids with sensory processing differences, and so on — walk into that same world and are immediately at a disadvantage. Not because something is wrong with them. Not because they’re broken. But because the environment was not designed with their nervous systems in mind.

When a neurodivergent student asks for accommodation, they are not asking for more than their fair share. They are asking for the equivalent of what neurotypical students already receive every single day, simply by virtue of being born with a brain that fits the mold the system was built around.

To use an analogy: if a school building has stairs but no ramps, and a student who uses a wheelchair asks for a ramp, that is not a special privilege. That is basic access. The other students aren’t being asked to give anything up. They still have their stairs. They’re just being asked to share a world where everyone can get through the door.

The same logic applies here. Neurotypical students lose nothing when a neurodivergent classmate gets extra time on a test, uses noise-canceling headphones, or is given a moment to regulate their nervous system before being expected to engage. They don’t lose a thing. And the neurodivergent student gains something they should have had all along: a fighting chance.

Admittedly, the teacher loses something: time. Which is precious. And the school system likely has to allocate some extra resources (additional staffing, effort to adjust codes of conduct and classroom management strategies) and dedicate some additional flexibility and compassion to consider the specific needs and issues of students who are in a minority (any minority, whether it’s neurotype, gender identity, language skills, or learning ability).

But in theory, that’s already written into legislation, not just IDEA (2004) but the ADA (1990) and even Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973). It isn’t just fair, equitable practice. It’s the law.

“But Everyone Is Being Diagnosed Nowadays.” Yes. Here’s Why.

I hear this a lot. The implication is usually that neurodivergence (as well as non-binary gender identities, another frequent complaint I hear from teachers and parents) is somehow trendy, overdiagnosed, or even fabricated — a kind of collective excuse for behavior that used to just be called “difficult.”

There’s a grain of truth buried in here, but it points in exactly the opposite direction from the one people usually intend.

We are diagnosing more people with autism, ADHD, and other forms of neurodivergence than we used to. But this is primarily because we’ve gotten better at recognizing these conditions — particularly in populations that were historically overlooked: girls, people of color, adults who masked successfully enough to slip under the radar for decades.

(That last category includes me. I was 56 years old when I received my autism diagnosis. Fifty-six years of wondering why the world felt so exhausting, so confusing, so overwhelming — and assuming it was my fault.)

Neurodivergent people have always been here. We’ve always been in those classrooms, sitting in those desks, trying to make sense of a world that wasn’t built for us. The difference is that now, in at least some corners of the world, we have names for what we experience — and, sometimes, a little more support. It’s about time, and it’s sad that it’s taken so long, and still meets so much resistance, when we try to be more visible.

More diagnoses don’t mean more neurodivergent people. They mean more people finally being identified and (sometimes, when we dare) seen.

The Student Who Was “Disrespectful”: What Was Really Going On (Maybe)?

Let me come back to that classroom for a moment.

A neurodivergent student was disrespectful to their teacher in front of the class. The teacher felt she had no choice but to discipline them. The student felt genuinely justified in their frustration: the class was, to this student, boring and confusing, and they weren’t getting the clear instructions they needed to do the assignment in a way they could understand.

Here’s what I’d ask us to sit with: Is it possible that the student didn’t fully understand why their behavior was inappropriate? Not as an excuse — but as a fact?

Many autistic students have genuine difficulty with something called “theory of mind” — understanding how their words and actions land on other people. They may have felt wronged. They may have been right, in their own internal logic, to feel wronged. And they may have had absolutely no framework for understanding that the way they expressed that frustration was causing a problem that extended beyond their own experience — that it was affecting the teacher’s authority, the classroom dynamic, other students’ sense of safety.

From the standpoint of an autistic person — remember, we tend to be fairly literal-minded, and a predilection for black-and-white thinking is one of the diagnostic criteria — some of our social rules are genuinely bizarre. Why is it okay and even funny to “flip the bird” at someone in one context, but a punishable offence in another? It’s the same gesture with the same meaning. Why is the reaction different? It takes a certain subtlety of understanding to recognize that context matters. And many autistic people find this context-dependent interpretation of language (including and especially non-verbal language) challenging. We can learn it, if we’re relatively lightly “spiced” with the neurodivergent spice mix, but it doesn’t make intuitive sense and requires extra effort and processing power.

Neurodivergent people also tend to be inherently, viscerally opposed to the whole idea of hierarchy. I don’t know exactly why, it’s just a thing. We tend to be justice warriors and find any kind of unfairness or hypocrisy unacceptable, at a cellular level. Which can lead us into mule-headed opposition to people who use the “because I said so” approach to enforcing rules. Not a recipe for success in the typical school, right?

This student’s behavior probably wasn’t defiance for the sake of defiance. (Maybe it was, but let’s give the kid the benefit of the doubt.) It wasn’t (necessarily) willful disrespect. For many neurodivergent students, these types of behaviors reflect a gap in social understanding that no amount of punishment will fill — because punishment teaches consequences, not comprehension. It might have been simple honesty (they were bored and weren’t getting what they needed to do what the teacher was asking), expressed in a contextually inappropriate manner. When is honesty a good thing, and when is it not? Another of those complex social rules that make no sense to a literally-minded person.

Now, let’s be honest: it’s entirely possible that this student was, actually, being intentionally defiant and disrespectful. Neurodivergent people are just as capable of being obnoxious, knowingly, as neurotypical people. (Myself included.) And telling the difference — is this particular kid behaving badly because they don’t understand, or because they’re being oppositional? — is genuinely hard in the moment, and at some point becomes irrelevant from the standpoint of classroom management. How many times can neurodivergence be used as an excuse for disruptive behavior? That’s a genuinely difficult and nuanced question. I get it.

The question I want educators to sit with is this: What does this student actually need to learn? And how do we actually help them learn it? Sending that student to the principal’s office with a referral taught them something, for sure. It just wasn’t, most likely, what the teacher and school hoped they would learn. And it wasn’t the academic lesson that was the focus of the assignment. That learning was lost, not just for the student but for the class as a whole because of the distraction of the incident. Whose fault was that, really? A complex question.

Discipline that looks the same for every student isn’t equitable — it’s uniform. And uniformity in the face of difference is not justice. It’s a different kind of injustice.

The Historical Parallel We Should Not Ignore

I want to be careful here, because I don’t want to minimize the very real and ongoing suffering of communities whose experiences of oppression are categorically different from and far more severe than what neurodivergent people face. The histories of BIPOC communities, LGBTQIA+ communities, and neurodivergent people are not equivalent.

But there are echoes worth naming.

When the dominant culture says “why should we change to accommodate you?” — when the majority insists that the minority conform to their norms rather than the other way around — that is the logic of oppression. It is the logic that sent Native American children to residential schools where their languages, their names, and their cultures were beaten out of them in the name of “civilizing” them. It is the logic that drove the “therapy” called Applied Behavior Analysis in its original, most harmful form — using punishment and aversion (including, most notoriously, cattle prods) to “train” autistic children to sit still, make eye contact, and suppress the very behaviors that helped them cope, all so they would look and act more “normal” to the people around them.

Autistic adults who went through that kind of treatment often describe it as traumatic. Research now confirms what they’ve been saying: masking — forcing yourself to “perform” neurotypicality at all times — is directly associated with higher rates of anxiety, depression, burnout, and suicide.

The instruction to “just fit in” and “learn to act normal” is not neutral. It is not kind. It is not helpful. It causes harm.

And when a well-meaning teacher asks “why do we have to accommodate them?” — even without intending it — they are participating in the same logic. The logic that says: the burden of adjustment belongs to the person who is different, not to the systems and institutions that were built without them in mind.

What Teachers and Schools Can Actually Do

I am not here to make teachers feel attacked. Teaching is extraordinarily hard work. Managing a classroom of 25 or 30 students with wildly different needs, backgrounds, and nervous systems — while also trying to actually teach something — is genuinely, legitimately difficult.

I worked for years as a school-based therapist in elementary schools that were over-populated and had overwhelming numbers of students with severe behavioral and learning challenges. I’ve sat with teachers who were in a state of despair, saying (fairly) that they did not go into the profession to be therapists — if they had wanted that they would have pursued a different graduate degree. That it’s hard enough when you have 2 or 3 challenging kids in a class of 25 or 30, but these days it’s more like 6, or 8, or 10. That they don’t have either the time or the aides to give individual attention to that many kids, day in and day out. That it’s unfair to the rest of the class. That it’s exhausting. And that they have 200 or so academic standards they have to meet, for every student, and that’s difficult enough even if they can just focus on teaching.

And let’s acknowledge the simple reality that teachers all too often take the blame for systems failures that are not at all their fault. Antiquated facilities, sometimes built for the grandparents of current students and for a student population half the size of what’s crammed in now. Inadequate, unreliable technology. Woefully inadequate school budgets. Chronic lack of teaching assistants and SpEd specialists. High turnover. Having to buy basic materials out of their own insultingly low salaries. Conflicting standards that change all too often, with little or no relevance to actual classroom conditions. School boards that, in many places, are hostile and punitive toward anything that smacks of “DEI” or “political correctness,” and that are all too ready to make examples of educators who try to show basic compassion and fairness toward students who don’t fit the majority mold. Wars over gendered bathrooms, who gets to play on which sports teams, and what books are allowed in libraries and on syllabi. Parents who are quick to raise a ruckus any time they perceive “unfair” treatment of their particular student or any hint of “indoctrination” into value systems that conflict with their own, whichever side of the culture wars they’re on.

There’s a reason why so many teachers are leaving the profession, and why so many of those who remain are exhausted, overwhelmed, and just trying to keep their heads down.

These are legitimate challenges. Teaching is a hard job, even an impossible one at times. I get it.

And also… neurodivergent students, and others who are outside the standard deviation from “normal,” also deserve to get an equitable education that meets their unique needs. It’s not just fair — it’s the law.

Separating neurodivergent students into their own classrooms or schools — as my teacher friend suggested might be necessary — is not a new idea. It’s an idea with a painful history. Decades of research and policy have moved away from segregation and toward inclusion precisely because inclusion, done well, benefits everyone. Neurodivergent students learn social skills from neurotypical peers. Neurotypical students learn empathy, flexibility, and the reality that people’s minds work differently — skills that will serve them for the rest of their lives.

The fact that this mindset is increasingly unpopular in a political and cultural climate that sees empathy and compassion not just as difficult, but as wrong and even treasonous, does not change basic justice. Just because it’s hard to advocate for equity these days doesn’t make it any less essential to do so. Quite the opposite.

So, how can educators and school systems actually do to support neurodivergent students and their families, in a practical sense?

What actually helps:

Universal Design for Learning — structuring classrooms and lesson plans from the ground up to accommodate different learning styles, rather than retrofitting for individual exceptions. When the environment is designed flexibly, everyone benefits.

Explicit teaching of social expectations — not assuming that neurodivergent students know what is expected of them and are simply choosing not to comply, but actually teaching the skills they need. This is different from punishment. This is education. It’s scaffolding applied to social and emotional learning, not just academics.

Collaborative relationships with families — neurodivergent students’ families often have crucial insights into what their child needs. Treating them as partners rather than adversaries makes everything easier.

More support for teachers — school psychologists, special education coordinators, aides, and counselors (including not just school counselors per se, but also school-based mental health professionals) who can help teachers understand what they’re seeing and how to respond. Teachers should not be left alone to figure this out.

Flexibility in how “respect” is expressed — a student who cannot make eye contact, who speaks bluntly, or who expresses frustration in ways that violate social norms may not be being disrespectful in the way that term is usually meant. Understanding the difference matters. Yes, it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference between a student who is behaving “inappropriately” because they don’t understand and one who is doing so intentionally — and neurodivergent kids can be intentionally obnoxious just as much as neurotypical ones. But it’s worth the time and effort to find out which is which, with any individual student. And both situations reflect a child calling for help, just for different needs.

To My Teacher Friend — and to Everyone Like Her

I said at the beginning that I respect this teacher. I mean that. She asked hard questions. She was honest about her frustrations. She’s doing a genuinely difficult job under genuinely difficult conditions.

But I also think she — and many, many educators and parents and people in positions of authority — have inherited a frame for understanding neurodivergence that is not serving anyone well. A frame that sees accommodation as a zero-sum game, where giving something to one group means taking it from another. A frame that sees neurodivergent behavior as a choice, or a failure of will, or a parenting problem, rather than as a neurological reality that calls for a different kind of response.

The majority does not lose anything when a minority is given genuine access to the world. What they gain — if they’re open to it — is a richer, more complex, more honest understanding of what it means to be human.

Every child who walks into a school is carrying something. Every child has a nervous system, a history, a set of strengths and struggles that are entirely their own. The job of a school — the whole point of public education in a democratic society — is to give every one of those children the tools they need to reach their potential.

That job has never been easy. But it has never been optional, either.

Neurodivergent students are not asking for a free pass. They are not asking for the rules not to apply to them. They are asking for what every child deserves: to be seen, to be understood, and to be given a real chance to learn and grow in a world that doesn’t pretend they don’t exist.

That’s not special treatment. It’s basic fairness.

That’s just what children are owed.

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About the Author

K. David Smith, LCSW, CASDCS, CCTP, CFTP is a neurodiversity-affirming therapist, late-diagnosed autistic adult, and the owner of Thriving Family Therapy, a multi-state telehealth practice serving clients in Oregon, California, Idaho, Florida, Michigan, and Vermont. He specializes in autism, ADHD, Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), and complex trauma. Learn more or schedule a free consultation at thrivingfamilytherapy.com.

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