Why teachers cannot be trusted to explain accommodation denial

When my daughter reported that boys were harassing her through the bathroom door and the principal responded by telling her to return to class, the institutional response positioned her as the unreliable narrator—the one whose testimony required verification, whose distress could be minimised, whose understanding of harm could be dismissed as misperception or oversensitivity. Disabled children, particularly neurodivergent children, are systematically constructed as unreliable narrators of their own experiences: their reports of pain are questioned, their accounts of harassment are reframed as social misunderstandings, their expressions of need are coded as manipulation or exaggeration, and their testimony about what helps them regulate is overridden by adult observation of what appears compliant.

This construction of the disabled child as inherently unreliable serves a clear institutional function: it allows schools to dismiss the evidence that would otherwise compel them to act. If the child cannot be trusted to accurately report that the lunchroom noise is unbearable, that the fidget is essential, that the bathroom has become dangerous, then the school is free to prioritize its own observations, its own comfort, its own logistical preferences. The child’s unreliability becomes the alibi for institutional abandonment.

But there exists a parallel unreliability that the system refuses to name: teachers and administrators are profoundly unreliable narrators when it comes to explaining why accommodations are denied. They are unreliable not because they lie—though sometimes they do—but because they cannot see, or will not admit, the vast architecture of personal bias, psychological projection, and ideological commitment that shapes their interpretation of which children deserve support and which deserve discipline. The teacher who insists the fidget box must be locked away because “students can’t access them without permission” cannot reliably narrate that this decision is about control rather than chaos, about authority rather than safety, because acknowledging that truth would require confronting the fact that she values her own sense of command over the child’s capacity to regulate.

The architecture of personal bias in accommodation denial

There’s a lot of reasons a staff member of a school might deny an accommodation.

Examples of reasons for denial of accommodation that seem personal about the child or the teacher personal bias

• “Good student” bias or accomondations as “reward”: Accommodations given only to kids who are compliant and denied to kids who are oppositional or have emotional dysregulation.
• “Like me” bias: Favoring children who resemble the adult in personality, background, or behavior.
• “Not like me” bias: Disfavoring children whose traits remind the adult of what they dislike or fear in themselves.
• “rescue fantasy” or “fix-it bias.”: Adults often prefer situations they believe they can “solve quickly”. They like to feel competent and effective. Chronic or ongoing conditions, like long-term disabilities or neurodivergence, don’t offer that immediate sense of resolution. As a result, teachers or caregivers may prioritize short-term, acute issues and resist accommodations that require sustained attention, ongoing flexibility, or structural change.
• Ableist meritocracy mindset: Default belief that supports violate fairness or create “unearned advantage.”
• Accent or language bias: Interpreting ESL/ELL children’s struggles as “language issues” rather than disability.
• Adult ego threat: Requests for accommodations feel like a critique of the teacher’s competence → resistance emerges.
• Adultism: Baseline distrust of children’s self-reports of pain or overwhelm.
• Attractiveness / appearance bias: Judging children based on looks; “cute” children may get more empathy or leniency, others less.
• Attribution bias (laziness vs. effort): Assuming struggling children aren’t trying, rather than considering legitimate need.
• Attribution to parental failure: Blaming the child for traits seen as a product of “bad parenting” rather than disability.
• Behaviorist ideology: Assuming all behavior is voluntary.
• Confirmation bias: Once the adult forms an impression child is “lazy” all behavior is filtered through it.
• Cultural stereotyping: Assuming certain ethnic groups are “stoic ” or “demanding ” and interpreting accommodation requests through that lens.
• Disability invisibility bias: If a child “looks fine.
• Discomfort with disability: Adults avoid acknowledging disability because it triggers their own fear or denial.
• Discomfort with parental advocacy: Strong or assertive parents activate defensiveness; the accommodation becomes a power struggle.
• Fear of being manipulated: Misreading genuine needs as “playing the system.
• Fear or discomfort with difference: Adults avoid providing accommodations to children who seem “weird,” “foreign,” or otherwise unfamiliar.
• Gendered behavior expectations: Girls expected to be compliant and quiet → accommodations for ADHD/autism in girls dismissed. Boys assumed to be “naturally disruptive” → needs reframed as discipline issues.
• Hero-teacher fantasy: Adult wants to be the one who “fixes” the child through traditional teaching.
• High-socioeconomic status suspicion: Assuming affluent parents are “gaming the system” or “helicoptering.”
• Homophobia / transphobia: Dismissing needs of LGBTQ+ students as “identity issues” or “attention-seeking.”
• Identification with perceived “victims”: Over-empathizing with peers who are “inconvenienced” → deprioritizing the disabled child.
• Infantilization of disabled children: Assuming the child “doesn’t mind” or “won’t notice” the lack of support → their agency erased.
• Low-socioeconomic status prejudice: Assuming poor or unhoused families exaggerate needs to access “extra help.”
• Mimicry / echo bias: Favoring kids who mimic adult behavior or expectations; penalizing those who do not.
• Misogyny directed at mothers: Mothers’ reports of symptoms dismissed as anxiety or “mommy drama.”
• Mood / emotional expressiveness: Kids who express distress loudly may be labeled as dramatic; kids who are stoic may be ignored.
• Moral purity bias: Belief that “hard work and discipline” fix everything → accommodations seen as “cheating.”
• Need for control: Adults with rigid personalities view accommodations as “losing authority” or “special exceptions.”
• Neurotypical preference: Favoring children whose behavior and learning style matches the adult’s expectation of “normal.”
• Over-identification with own values: Adults favor children who fit the adult’s worldview or ideology.
• Overconfidence in professional expertise: Teacher or admin thinks they “know better” than parents.
• Perceived gratitude / entitlement bias: Kids who don’t “thank” adults or comply may have their needs dismissed.
• Perceived intelligence / aptitude: Children judged “capable enough” may be denied accommodations; perceived “low ability” may be patronized.
• Personality clash: Teacher simply doesn’t like the child’s temperament (intense temperment, shy, stubborn, or whatever).
• Popularity / social status bias: Children who are socially unpopular may have needs deprioritized; those popular may get extra attention.
• Projection from past negative experiences: A teacher had a difficult student with similar traits → assumes this child will be the same.
• Purity of the classroom ideal: Some adults idealize classrooms as calm.
• Racialized pain-denial bias: Stereotypes such as “Black/Brown kids feel less pain” or “are tougher” → minimizing distress and needs.
• Religious / moralistic projection: Judging children as “needing discipline” or “spiritually deficient” for challenges.
• Sensory dislike / aesthetic aversion: Adults averse to certain behaviors (rocking, fidgeting) may deny supports because it irritates them.
• Shyness / social awkwardness bias: Adults may underestimate need if a child is quiet; over-attribute struggle to personality if disruptive.
• Sibling comparison: Children compared unfavorably to siblings or peers (“Your brother managed fine; why can’t you?”).
• Stereotype threat internalization: Adults project stereotypes onto children based on identity (e.g., “boys are messy,” “girls are perfectionistic”).
• Stereotypes about immigrant parents: Dismissing concerns as “cultural misunderstanding” or “overprotective immigrant parenting.”
• Temperament bias: Quick judgments based on perceived irritability, stubbornness, or hyperactivity.
• Thatcherism mindset: Belief that since no one helped them up, they should not help others.
• Transference from personal childhood: Adult sees their own younger self in the child and responds with punitive “I survived without it” energy.
• Trauma insensitivity: Misreading trauma responses as “manipulation.
• Weight / body size bias: Over- or underweight children may be perceived as lazy, fragile, or overly sensitive.

The systemic mechanisms we have already analysed elsewhere—fairness weaponised, scarcity alibis, control anxiety, hierarchy of legitimacy—operate in concert with an equally powerful set of personal biases that teachers and administrators bring to every accommodation request. These biases are psychological, ideological, temperamental, and rooted in the teacher’s own unexamined relationship to authority, difference, difficulty, and need. They render the teacher an unreliable narrator because she cannot see past her own cognitive distortions, emotional triggers, and moral commitments to accurately assess what the child requires.

• “Good student” bias: Sometimes accommodations are granted to children who are already compliant, quiet, grateful, and non-threatening, and denied to children whose dysregulation or oppositionality marks them as undeserving. The teacher who insists “he doesn’t need a fidget, he just needs to try harder” is narrating from a belief system where effort is moral virtue and struggle is moral failure, and she cannot reliably report that her denial is rooted in the child’s failure to perform gratitude rather than an objective assessment of need.
• Ableist meritocracy mindset: The default belief that accommodations create “unearned advantage” rather than level access renders the teacher incapable of seeing accommodation as civil right. When she explains that allowing one child to eat at their desk would be “unfair to the others,” she is narrating from an ideological position that equates fairness with uniformity, and she cannot reliably assess whether the child’s medical need for food trumps her attachment to a rule designed for convenience.
• Behaviorist ideology: The assumption that all behavior is voluntary and controllable through consequences means the teacher cannot distinguish between defiance and disability. When she reports that “he chooses to climb the tree” or “she refuses to eat in the lunchroom,” she is narrating from a framework that erases neurological difference, and her account of why no accommodation is needed is fundamentally corrupted by her inability to see that the behavior is communication, not choice.
• Adult ego threat: Requests for accommodations feel like a critique of the teacher’s competence, and her defensiveness renders her incapable of accurately assessing the request on its merits. When she explains that “we don’t usually do that” or “I’ve never had a student who needed that before,” she is narrating from wounded professional pride, and her denial is about preserving her sense of expertise rather than objectively evaluating the child’s needs.
• Adultism: The baseline distrust of children’s self-reports means the teacher privileges her own observation over the child’s lived experience. When the child says “the noise hurts” and the teacher responds “it’s not that loud,” she is narrating from a position of epistemic arrogance that assumes adults know children’s internal states better than children do. Her explanation for why the child doesn’t need a quiet space is unreliable because it rests on the presumption that her perception is authoritative and the child’s is suspect.
• Fear of being manipulated: The teacher who worries that the child is “playing the system” or “faking” cannot reliably assess genuine need because every request is filtered through suspicion. When she explains that “I think he just wants attention” or “she’s trying to get out of work,” she is narrating from paranoia rather than evidence, and her denial is rooted in the fear of being duped rather than any objective determination that the accommodation is unnecessary.
• Discomfort with disability: Teachers who find disability triggering, frightening, or conceptually destabilizing cannot reliably narrate their own refusal to accommodate because they cannot admit that their discomfort is driving the decision. When the teacher insists “I just don’t think labeling helps” or “I prefer to see all children as capable,” she is narrating from her own need to avoid confronting difference, and her explanation for why no formal accommodation is required is an alibi for her psychological discomfort.
• Gendered behavior expectations: Girls are expected to be compliant, quiet, and socially adept, which means their ADHD, autism, and sensory needs are dismissed as “drama,” “pickiness,” or “social immaturity.” Boys are expected to be physically active and emotionally unexpressive, which means their need for movement is reframed as discipline problem and their need for emotional regulation support is read as weakness. The teacher who explains that “girls don’t usually have ADHD like that” or “boys just need to toughen up” is narrating from gendered ideology, and her assessment of what the child needs is corrupted by stereotypes about how children of different genders should behave.
• Racialized pain-denial bias: Teachers who carry stereotypes about which racial groups “feel less pain,” “are tougher,” or “exaggerate for attention” cannot reliably assess the accommodation needs of racialized children because their perception of distress is distorted by racist assumptions. When the teacher explains that “he’s fine, he’s just being dramatic” about a Black child’s sensory overwhelm, or dismisses an Indigenous child’s need for trauma-informed support as “cultural difference,” she is narrating from bias, and her account of why no accommodation is needed is fundamentally unreliable.
• Attribution to parental failure: Teachers who blame the child’s struggles on “bad parenting” cannot accurately assess whether the child has a disability requiring accommodation because they have already decided the problem is moral rather than medical. When the teacher explains that “if the parents just enforced routines at home, this wouldn’t be an issue,” she is narrating from judgment rather than diagnostic clarity, and her refusal to accommodate is rooted in her contempt for the family rather than an objective evaluation of the child’s needs.
• Low-socioeconomic status prejudice: Teachers who assume poor families exaggerate needs to access “extra help” cannot reliably assess accommodation requests from these families because suspicion contaminates every interaction. When the teacher explains that “I think they’re just trying to get free services,” she is narrating from class bias, and her denial of the accommodation is about protecting resources from the “undeserving poor” rather than evaluating whether the child’s need is legitimate.
• High-socioeconomic status suspicion: Teachers who assume affluent parents are “gaming the system” or “helicoptering” cannot reliably assess accommodation requests from these families either, because resentment corrupts the evaluation. When the teacher explains that “these parents just want their kid to have an advantage,” she is narrating from class resentment, and her denial is about resisting perceived entitlement rather than objectively determining need.
• Personality clash: Teachers who simply dislike a child’s temperament—finding them too intense, too withdrawn, too stubborn, too sensitive—cannot reliably assess that child’s accommodation needs because personal aversion shapes every perception. When the teacher explains that “I just don’t think he really needs it,” the “really” is doing the work of concealing the fact that what she means is “I don’t like him, and I don’t want to give him anything that might make my interactions with him more complicated.”
• Over-identification with own values: Teachers who favor children whose behavior mirrors the teacher’s own worldview, work ethic, or personality cannot reliably assess accommodation needs across difference because they unconsciously reward similarity and penalize deviation. When the teacher explains that “some kids just need to learn to push through,” she is narrating from her own experience of surviving difficulty without support, and her denial of accommodation is rooted in the belief that what worked for her should work for everyone—a profound failure of imagination and empathy.
• “Rescue fantasy” or “fix-it bias”: Teachers who derive their sense of professional competence from situations they believe they can “solve quickly” resist accommodations for chronic or ongoing conditions because these do not offer immediate resolution. When the teacher explains that “I’ve tried everything and nothing works,” she is narrating from frustration and ego depletion, and her abandonment of the accommodation process is about preserving her own sense of efficacy rather than acknowledging that some children require sustained, patient, long-term support that will never produce a triumphant before-and-after narrative.
• Projection from past negative experiences: Teachers who had a difficult interaction with a previous student carrying similar traits cannot reliably assess the current child because they are seeing the past rather than the present. When the teacher explains that “I had a student like this before and accommodations just made him entitled,” she is narrating from her own unprocessed resentment, and her preemptive denial is about avoiding a repetition of past difficulty rather than responding to the child in front of her.
• Transference from personal childhood: Teachers who see their own younger selves in a struggling child and respond with punitive “I survived without help” energy cannot reliably assess need because they are managing their own unresolved pain. When the teacher explains that “coddling doesn’t help in the long run,” she is narrating from the wound of having been left unsupported, and her refusal to accommodate is about retroactively justifying her own suffering rather than preventing the child’s.

The list continues—temperament bias, religious moralism, sensory aversion, stereotype threat internalization, trauma insensitivity, misogyny directed at mothers, homophobia, transphobia, weight bias, attractiveness bias, popularity bias, confirmation bias, attribution bias, neurotypical preference, need for control, overconfidence in professional expertise, discomfort with parental advocacy, hero-teacher fantasy, identification with perceived victims, purity-of-classroom idealism, sibling comparison, shyness bias, mimicry bias, mood and emotional expressiveness bias, accent and language bias, disability invisibility bias, Thatcherism mindset, infantilisation of disabled children—and each one represents a cognitive distortion, an emotional trigger, or an ideological commitment that renders the teacher incapable of reliably narrating why they denied an accommodation.

Why teacher unreliability remains invisible

The reason these biases do not disqualify teachers as narrators in the way that disability disqualifies children is straightforward: teachers occupy positions of institutional authority, professional credentialing, and adult status, all of which are presumed to confer objectivity, rationality, trustworthiness, and a higher expectation of care. When a teacher explains why an accommodation was denied, her explanation is accepted as neutral assessment rather than subjective interpretation, as professional judgment rather than personal bias, as institutional necessity rather than individual preference.

The system protects teacher narration by framing it as expertise. The teacher is presumed to know what children need better than children know themselves, better than parents know their own children, and better than medical professionals who have evaluated the child outside the school context. Her observations are called “data.” Her hunches are called “clinical judgment.” Her discomfort is called “concern.” Her bias is called “experience.”

When the parent challenges the teacher’s account—when the parent says “my child is not refusing to eat because she’s picky, she has a diagnosed eating disorder triggered by sensory assault, and she needs a quiet space”—the system treats this as parent versus professional rather than evidence versus bias. The parent’s lived experience, the child’s testimony, and the medical documentation are all positioned as less reliable than the teacher’s observation that “she seems fine when she’s playing with friends,” as if the capacity to mask distress in social situations disproves the existence of the underlying need.

The institutional investment in teacher reliability is profound because acknowledging teacher unreliability would require the system to admit that accommodation denial is not the result of objective resource constraints, pedagogical wisdom, or fair application of policy, but is instead the product of unexamined bias, psychological discomfort, ideological rigidity, and personal aversion. It would require schools to implement oversight mechanisms where teacher explanations for denial are scrutinised for bias in the same way that discipline decisions are supposed to be scrutinised for racial disproportionality. It would require professional development that names these biases explicitly and trains teachers to recognise when their discomfort, their ego, their fear, or their ideology is shaping their interpretation of need. It would require the system to acknowledge that teachers are human, flawed, and frequently wrong, and that their accounts of why they denied an accommodation cannot be taken at face value.

The system cannot afford this admission because it would destabilise the entire architecture of professional authority on which schools depend. If teachers are unreliable narrators, then parent and child testimony must be privileged, medical documentation must be determinative, and accommodation requests must be granted unless the school can prove—with objective evidence rather than subjective assessment—that the request is unnecessary or impossible. The current system inverts this: the accommodation is denied unless the parent can prove, against the teacher’s subjective resistance, that it is essential. The burden is on the disabled child to overcome the teacher’s bias rather than on the teacher to justify her refusal.

The epistemic injustice of privileging the unreliable narrator

What emerges from this analysis is a structure of epistemic injustice where the wrong narrator is trusted. The child who says “I can’t eat in the lunchroom because the noise is unbearable” is constructed as unreliable, but the teacher who says “I think she’s just picky” or “she needs to learn to eat at school” is treated as authoritative, even though the teacher’s assessment is contaminated by gendered expectations about girls and food, by discomfort with sensory disability, by irritation and stress at the inconvenience of accommodating difference, by the fear that allowing one child to eat elsewhere will create a cascade of requests they cannot manage, and by the unconscious belief that if the child were truly struggling she would look more distressed than she does (which erases the child’s capacity to mask).

The parent who provides a medical letter documenting Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) and requesting a quiet eating space is positioned as “pushy” or “helicoptering,” but the teacher who ignores the medical letter and insists the child should “just try harder” is not positioned as medically negligent or diagnostically incompetent—she is positioned as exercising professional judgment, even though her judgment is shaped by her belief that accommodations create weakness, by her frustration that this family keeps asking for things, by her resentment that the mother’s emails are long and use formal language, and by her suspicion that the child is manipulating the parent.

The child who reports harassment in the bathroom is told to return to class, but the principal’s decision to not address the boys’ behaviour is not framed as retaliation or abandonment—it is framed as a rules enforcement, even though the concern was manufactured by the administrator’s refusal to discipline the boys or offer a suitable self-regulation alternate environment.

This is epistemic injustice: the systematic devaluing of the disabled child’s knowledge about their own needs, the systematic elevation of the teacher’s biased interpretation as objective truth, and the systematic refusal to interrogate whether the teacher’s explanation for denial is contaminated by the dozens of cognitive distortions, emotional triggers, and ideological commitments that shape how she sees struggling children.

Correcting the record through material evidence and lived testimony

The only reliable correction to teacher narration is the triangulation of child testimony, parent observation, and material evidence. When the teacher says “he doesn’t really need fidgets,” and the parent provides the box of three hundred dollars worth of fidgets confiscated over the course of the year, the material evidence exposes the teacher’s account as false. When the teacher says “she could eat if she wanted to,” and the parent provides the paediatrician’s documentation of first-percentile weight and the medical diagnosis of ARFID, the medical evidence exposes the teacher’s account as negligent. When the teacher says “He seems to get along fine most of the time,” and the parent provides the testimony of the child who regularly climbed thirty feet into a tree to escape, the lived experience exposes the teacher’s account as wilfully blind.

The multi-lens analysis of accommodation denial reveals that teacher accounts cannot be trusted because they are narrated from within a dense thicket of bias, ideology, and institutional pressure that the teacher herself cannot see or will not name. Recognising teachers as unreliable narrators does not mean teachers are malicious—though some are—or that they are always incorrect—many are experts—it means that their explanations for why accommodations were denied must be interrogated with the same skepticism currently applied to disabled children’s reports of their own needs.

Until the system acknowledges that the teacher who says “I don’t think he needs that” is narrating from bias as much as the child who says “I need that to survive” is narrating from embodied knowledge, accommodation denial will continue to be framed as neutral professional judgment rather than what it actually is: the systematic refusal to meet disabled children’s needs, justified through a sprawling architecture of cognitive distortion, emotional discomfort, and ideological rigidity that the institution refuses to name because naming it would require accountability, oversight, and the dismantling of the professional authority on which the entire system of refusal depends.