It's interesting to think of Chris as a "guinea pig" for the mainstreaming + accommodations model of educating verbal autistic students in public schools.
Chris has riffed on Aspergers and many have claimed that Aspergers and "high functioning"/verbal/low-mid support needs autism are one and the same. But remember that Chris was diagnosed with autism during a time when you needed a speech delay to receive the diagnosis, and Chris did indeed have a speech delay. If he talked in sentences on schedule or earlier, he would not have received any support.
Sometimes, these "autistic early talkers" would have instead been diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia, childhood psychosis, a conduct disorder, bipolar (mania looks an awful lot like autistic meltdowns, pressured speech from infodumping, autistic introversion, difficulty with reading social cues, grandiose interest in specific topics, etc., etc., and burnout looks a lot like a bipolar depressive episode), etc., and given medication they don't need and not much in the way of coping strategies or accommodations for autism.
Other times, if the symptoms were sub-clinical (i.e., a solitary boy, just like his father, who likes electronics kits and doesn't get playful sarcasm unless it's really obvious, who manages to squeak by as a C student) was just "the weird kid in school" or "just shy." They received no coping strategies or accommodations at all.
And sadly, many autistic women are still either misdiagnosed with bipolar (made worse by the fact that they are essentially raised to mask, so unmasking can look like a shift away from their base state instead of towards it), with BPD, or just with being average, albeit maybe tomboyish or reserved, people. As a result, they never get accommodations, such as the ability to type notes in classes that would otherwise have laptop bans.
That's a big one – at my school, me and several other kids were issued bare-bones non-laptops called "AlphaSmarts". I'd take tests in a separate room or on the teacher's computer, often with spell check disabled. I also had accommodations allowing the use of quiet fidget toys in class, etc., and wasn't the only one.
It's perhaps a bit ironic that mainstreaming essentially inoculates the classroom with non-mainstream ideals. If your accommodations include the class powerpoints or a tape recorder, you could argue that that encourages kids not to listen... yet part of my disability makes active listening hard, to the point where I was given a thorough hearing test by the district because people wondered if I was deaf, since I found it hard to concentrate on teacher's voices and still find a lot of soft-spoken people especially are harder to pay attention to. And miming the neurotypical presentation of active listening, where you sit still with feet on the floor and make eye contact, actually distracts me even more! It's better to sit at the front, look at the board, and ask the teacher for clarification as needed, and also to have access to recordings of the lecture.
Yet you still ultimately have access to the same intellectual resources.
