Add to ElizabethN's (very excellent) point that much of the time, what
outliers need tends to be well outside of the range of what is reasonable or even prudent for children who fall closer to the mean.
That is, until one understands that the child in question
is an outlier, then naturally what that child needs is going to seem potentially outrageous.
The clearest way of envisioning that is to imagine that a child who is cognitively and/or developmentally at the other end of the spectrum were to be in a particular teacher's mainstream classroom...
honestly, any child who is more than two standard deviations from the mean
is effectively a special needs student, educationally.
Most educators wouldn't dream of taking two such students as fifth graders, neither with literacy skills, and immediately stating that they were "the same" because they couldn't read and the rest of the (NT) class can... but that
is the error that they tend to make at the other end of distribution. If two first graders can both read
beyond grade level then naturally, they are "the same."
There is both a floor and a ceiling in that band-pass filter. Advocacy has done much to remove the floor (thankfully)-- but not as much about the ceiling.
I find that it helps me to keep my patience for longer to bear all of those things in mind.
