A Critical Policy Analysis of “Extra Time”: Disability, Time, and Power in U.S. Special Education Policy

• In Event: Reimagining Policy and Practice in Special Education: Practices, Systems, and Equity

Abstract

In this work of critical policy analysis, we establish what conditions made the assessment accommodation of extra time possible and how its existence has shaped today’s classrooms and discourses. Building on Popkewitz (2007), we demonstrate how “extra time” participates in a “double gesture”: the act of defining what is normal by simultaneously constructing and managing what is deviant. We analyze the entangled histories of the disciplinary definitions of extra time in special education, the implementation of extra time in schools and its impacts on the lives of D/disabled subjects, and we problematize the conflation of “slowness” and disability in order to build more accessible futures.

Authors

• Maya Berrol-Young, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Jasper W. Golden, Teachers College, Columbia University