Since 1975, the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, or IDEA, has ensured that all students with disabilities at federally funded schools may receive a fitting education for free. Before then, there was no guarantee that a given public school would accept such a student; the more likely path was either a pricey private tutor or an inhumane institution.

This law was a huge milestone in the struggle for disability rights. However, it raises one big question: how is disability being defined?

IDEA's answer seems straightforward; a student needs a formal medical diagnosis to be able to benefit from these protections for students with disabilities. But looking beyond face value, it's clear why special ed attorney Miriam Krugman Freedman wants to eliminate this requirement.

What is the Medical Model of Disability?

In short, this model defines disabilities as functional impairments as a result of biological anomalies. No longer is a mental disability defined abstractly and nebulously like any other mental attribute, like kindness or interestingness; rather, like physical ailments, these conditions can be expressed through a set of standardized criteria.

The medical model is certainly a step up from the past, when folks thought disabilities were signs of wicked spirits and tried to exorcise them away. In many cases, a disability is genuinely more unpleasant to live with than the typical neurotype; a medical approach to solving its problems could seriously improve this population's quality of life.

But when this fairly new model is so tightly woven to the need for childhood educational services, it has serious limitations of its own.

What's Wrong with the Medical Model in Education?

For one, apparently, people are willing to twist these standardized definitions out of convenience.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of autism. According to Allen Frances, one of the very authors of the DSM-5, kids who are struggling with some trait(s) of autism can often only get help for their challenges if they have a diagnosis of full-on autism, so a good chunk of the newly diagnosed "autistic" population wouldn't have qualified at all under the old diagnosis. And this certainly isn't a good thing:

"[T]he diagnosis has become so heterogeneous that it loses meaning and predictive value. This is why so many kids now outgrow their autism. They were never really autistic in the first place."

Now efforts to help the population with "autism" have become muddled. How can medical researchers find effective treatment if there's no single common underlying cause, not even close? More importantly, in the world of education itself, it's a good thing that these students can get the help they need, but will the quality of this help truly be up to par if all these wildly divergent neurotypes are lumped together?

And besides, the insistence on a "package deal" for impairments means that kids with just a single impairment can't get the help they may deserve. The way folks see it, if you're diagnosed with a full-on childhood disability that includes serious fidgeting, you're just a poor kid with a medical condition and you need help. But if you just tend to fidget, you're a disruption, and you ought to be scolded and punished, even if you can't really control it either way! Understandably, this can be pretty humiliating.

Even worse, this treat-versus-punish dichotomy isn't applied evenly. Studies show that white kids' misbehavior is more likely to be attributed to behavioral disorders than that of their black counterparts, regardless of whether they do or don't have such conditions. Surely this disparity would vanish if all kids who are struggling, disordered or not, could receive the patient help and understanding they deserve.

Solution?

A big recurring idea in disability design theory is the curb cut effect. Basically, the cost of an accommodation meant to help people with disabilities is justified because it may end up helping many other kinds of people. For example, curb cuts were meant to help people who use wheelchairs get up on sidewalks, but bicyclists and parents with strollers can also benefit.

It's clear how every kid could benefit from a system that embraces neurodiversity, that lends empathy to all kinds of minds. Only when the medical requirement is abolished from IDEA can this become a reality.