Students With Disabilities Don’t Want Your Pity. They Want You to Take Them Seriously.

This story was published by a Voices of Change fellow. Learn more about the fellowship here.

I didn’t know I had ADHD until adulthood, but looking back, the signs were always there. I was the student who stayed up until 2 a.m. rewriting papers because I couldn’t organize my thoughts until the pressure turned into panic. In school, I became a master of masking, mirroring my peers and hyper-focusing on details to overcompensate. But no one ever asked why I always needed extensions or why my desk looked like a storm of papers with half-started ideas and stars all over them.

A teacher once pulled me aside after class and said, “You’re smart, but maybe this kind of work just isn’t for you. Don’t worry, though, I’ll still pass you because I see you trying.” The system wasn’t built with my brain in mind. It’s only now, as an educator myself, that I can see how many students are still being taught to hide, to shrink, to underperform instead of thrive.

When I first began teaching students with disabilities in New York City Public Schools, I walked in with a mission: to be the teacher I never had, the one who saw beyond labels and believed in possibility. I wanted to honor each student’s potential, not settle for their deficits. However, I quickly discovered there was a quiet force in our systems that betrayed my intentions: a conflation of empathy with low expectations, and a pattern “The Opportunity Myth” identifies as a damaging classroom practice.

The Opportunity Myth, a seminal study from The New Teacher Project, documented how students do not have access to quality opportunities like grade-level assignments, strong instruction, deep engagement and high expectations, which are the four key resources students need every day to succeed. In math classes, for example, students get exposure to grade-level material without rigorous tasks, or they don’t get the explanations that help them grasp it. In literacy, they read underwhelming texts or assignments that have little connection to the real work of formal writing or analytical thinking. Students of color and those with disabilities get the least access to opportunities.

The Opportunity Myth reported that 94 percent of students want to go to college, and 86 percent believe they can succeed if they work hard. Yet, only 17 percent of classrooms studied provided grade-level assignments, strong instruction, deep engagement and high expectations combined.

That’s not a myth. That’s a crisis. Low expectations don’t happen by accident; they grow within a system already shaped by ableism and ingrained inequality. In many schools, students with disabilities, especially Black and Latinx learners, are disproportionately tracked into lower-level classes or specialized programs that lack access to grade-level material.

These inequities are often reinforced by data-driven accountability pressures, staffing shortages, and the myth of “meeting students where they are.” But “meeting” requires knowing where to meet them.

These are the exact patterns I see in my school, and the same patterns you see in yours.

The Quiet Harm of Misguided Empathy

During my second master’s program, I conducted an action research project within my school community, a District 75, standardized assessment high school for students with special needs. The results were startling, but not surprising:

• Only 33 percent of teachers reported that their students with disabilities could perform on grade level, even when appropriate supports were provided.
• Students reported feeling limited by the types of assignments they were given which felt repetitive, overly scaffolded, and disconnected from real-world relevance.
• Teachers cited behavior, cognitive delays and language barriers as reasons to lower academic rigor, but few referenced instructional strategies to close those gaps.

In IEP meetings and staff rooms, I heard well-intentioned phrases such as, “I feel bad for what this kid is going through, so I’ll just give him a 65.” Another teacher frequently played board games with students, saying, “Games keep them engaged, unlike the science curriculum they don’t understand.” A math teacher once played movies daily, admitting he didn’t want to “deal with their behavior.” Their grading policies often looked at effort and compliance and not mastery of skills. I have walked into classes for intervisitation cycles to observe teachers telling students to simply “copy what is on the board” for a passing grade. Elementary and middle school classwork is given to high school students because “they can’t do high school-level work.”

At first, I thought compassion was at the core. But I realized over the years that we were pandering to perceived limitations that we have set for students, not the students’ actual potential.

I found through conversations with my students over the last 12 years that they often expressed how they have internalized their placement in self-contained settings or being a student with a disability as a reflection of their worth. One student said, “The teachers don’t think we can do the same work as other kids, so they don’t even try to teach us the same way.” Another student has said, “We are expected to act out and not learn, so I behave exactly that way.”

These statements show the truth behind the self-fulfilling prophecy. This mindset from our students breeds disengagement, contributes to higher dropout rates and creates a cycle of learned helplessness. It leads to IEP goals that are too broad, not ambitious enough or are so focused on behavior that they forget about intellect.

Support Without a Ceiling

Students are being denied meaningful academic access, not because they can’t learn, but because we assume they can’t. How can we replace pity with rigor and empathy with ambition? Over the last 12 years, using these five shifts in my classroom has helped me disrupt the opportunity myth:

1. Setting grade-level standards with mastery-based assessments and planning scaffolds for students. You can do this by approaching every lesson with grade-level outcomes, then work backward. Ask yourself, “How can we give this student access?” Use scaffolded tools like sentence frames, visual organizers and peer partners.
2. Design tiered tasks in the same learning arc where everyone tackles the same text or problem, but with differentiated entry points and pathways to access. All students work on essential content, just at different levels of independence or complexity and ways to show learning.
3. Use regular formative feedback, not gifted grades. Replace inflated marks with opportunities to improve. Show students their growth and give them the tools to continue it.
4. Be intentional with your equity work while facilitating instruction by ensuring all students, especially those with IEPs, language differences or behavior challenges are given equal voice, wait time and opportunity to engage in rigorous dialogue in various ways.
5. Include students in meaningful ownership of their goals. When learners help set their pace and impact, they internalize the expectation and see themselves as agents of progress.

To disrupt this educational pattern, we must reject the idea that equity means less. These shifts require a transformation in mindset and a commitment to dismantling the unconscious biases that show up in our planning, our grading and our language.

I share this from both sides of the work: as a teacher who is an IEP advocate and an Afro-Latina woman with ADHD. Students with disabilities don’t want kindness; they want a classroom that feels worth fighting for. They want to know the support is real and that the challenge isn’t a punishment. They want to leave school more flexible and ready for life’s thorns.

As a system, we cannot continue to excuse under-preparation with over-empathy because students with disabilities don’t need our pity; they need our belief. So let’s not let the system off the hook by calling inequity a “challenge” when it’s a choice. The time for performative inclusion is over, and what our students deserve now is unapologetic action, bold expectations and real accountability.