> Which distinction can't be made?
You said, and I quoted:
> The politics were mostly fine, but the students... were the problem.
The distinction, thus, is between "the politics" and "the students".
In the rest of my comment, I clearly exhibited that the thing that made "the students" problematic for you were "the politics" that they were expressing.
> Which politics, concretely?
The politics that underlie the false disability claims.
And also the politics that your student expressed by making the statement:
> I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory
Which are the same politics described in the post above yours:
> it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying.
Which are also "the politics" that everyone means when it comes to conflicts between students and teachers in the modern era, and the ones that form the basis of the conflict that TFA is about. Which is to say, the politics whereby educators can do no right, and everything is discriminatory. You described yourself being put in a double bind: first you were politically pressured to make an accommodation for a "high disability rate" that you didn't even believe to be legitimate (and I think you were probably correct in this), and then you were told that this, too, would be considered discriminatory.
In short: the politics whereby the term "discriminatory" (and "bigoted", and the family of related -isms and -phobias) is simply a political bludgeon, which need not be connected to any ordinary understanding of what it means to treat people fairly or equally.
It is all shell games because the goal is not actually to improve outcomes (there is not even agreement about how to measure outcomes), but to keep the system feeling constant shame for supposed "discrimination" when outcomes are disparate.
> I'm not actually sure what you're saying at all. I don't think you've articuled a point here. I actually came away confused at multiple levels.
I explained a very clear notion: that when you described "the students" causing problems in response to someone describing "the politics" causing problems, you were talking about substantively the same phenomena. The students play a key role in perpetuating the political games, either because they stand to benefit personally or because they have been indoctrinated in some form or another.
> Did you read the linked article? Do you have a response to that?
You seem to be under the impression that I dispute your claims about false disability claims. I absolutely do not, and I was agreeing with you on this point.
What I am trying to explain to you is that these claims are part of a political expression: the fact that they might succeed is a show of political power, and the underlying theory of how to accommodate them is either not scientific or not actually aimed at optimizing per-student outcomes (or both). In particular, the metrics are not based in anything related to the described goals, but given purely in terms of identity-characteristic demographics of those who succeed.