TeachingLD: Responsiveness-to-Intervention Approach


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Expert Connection

What's up with Responsiveness to Intervention?

Chuck, I'm not surprised that you've heard a lot about responsiveness-to-intervention (RTI). It's been a popular topic in many circles the last few years. There has been a lot said and written about it, and much of what has been said and written is conflicting. Given the ambiguity, I can understand your question about what role you, and other special educators, will play in an RTI context. My Answer: Not much of one. Why? Because RTI has been conceptualized by policymakers in Washington, D.C. as a general education initiative to be implemented by general educators. Which isn't to say that you and other special educators nationwide won't be affected by it. I believe you will be. And for this reason alone, you and your colleagues across the country need to understand as much as you can about it. Before I explain why special educators will not likely play a major role in the RTI process, but will nevertheless be affected by it, I'll provide a brief description.

The RTI process begins with the identification of an at-risk group in each (regular) classroom. This may be accomplished by looking at scores on last year's high-stakes test, or by administering an achievement test or screening measure to everyone in the current school year. Next, each at-risk student's performance in the classroom (also known as "tier 1") is monitored frequently (e.g., weekly) for 8-10 weeks to determine the degree of his or her responsiveness to general education instruction. "Unresponsive" children (e.g., those whose rates of growth and levels of performance are below benchmarks appropriate for their grade and subject) are given "tier 2" instruction. Tier 2 is characterized as more intensive. That is, it may be delivered in small, homogeneous groups; conducted by someone with greater expertise than the teacher in a particular subject or skill (e.g., reading); or occur with greater frequency or duration. Tier 2 instruction may last 10 weeks during which students' performance is again frequently monitored to determine responsiveness. Those found unresponsive to tiers 1 and 2 either move to a third tier of more intensive instruction than in tier 2, or they are evaluated by a multi-disciplinary team for special education eligibility, depending on the RTI model. States like Iowa, whose RTI process involves three increasingly intensive tiers of instruction, are typically non-categorical; students unresponsive across the tiers go directly into special education without formal multi-disciplinary evaluations. In Iowa, such children are given the label "eligible for special education," rather than "LD," "MR," or BD."

I've provided this description to make a point. The primary purpose of RTI is to provide general education services to at-risk children who, heretofore, have often fallen between the proverbial cracks in service delivery. In the past, many instructionally-needy children, including many children of color in large, poor, urban districts haven't qualified for additional services, partly because there weren't any, save for special education; and because they didn't show a significant IQ-achievement discrepancy, thereby failing to qualify for special education.

RTI is also meant to be preventive. According to data collected by the Office of Special Education Programs in Washington, the modal age at which school-age children get an "LD" label is 11 years. RTI advocates say with reason that this is too long for at-risk children to wait to get instruction. So, RTI is meant both to offer instructional services to children who previously did not get them and to offer them much sooner than has often been the case. In short, RTI represents an effort to reorient general education towards early intervention; towards a more proactive, rather than reactive, system of service delivery.

To facilitate RTI implementation, policymakers in Washington have rewritten IDEA to permit up to 15% of IDEA monies to be used by general educators. A central assumption is that, by "front-loading" IDEA monies to support more effective and preventive general education instruction in tiers 1 and 2, there will be fewer students requiring special education. Although such thinking seems logical enough, it is not yet supported by data. What little data exist suggest the opposite may be the case. That is, the number of children placed in special education in Heartland, Iowa has increased not decreased since adoption of RTI. This issue needs further scrutiny because if special education budgets are reduced to help pay for general education preventive services-if the number of special educators is reduced-and if numbers of children eventually requiring special education does not diminish, then there would be less resources for the same number of special-needs children. If special education resources are reduced to facilitate tier 1 and tier 2 implementation and, as a consequence, the number of special education placements indeed goes down, will the severity of the typical special-needs child become greater? One might expect so if, to qualify, children must be unresponsive to two increasingly intensive instructional tiers. In such a case, will special education require greater resources to serve a smaller number of children? Either way, the "15% rule" has potential for depriving special education of much needed resources. And, at the same time, it has offers general educators an opportunity to provide quality preventive services.

As mentioned, Iowa and other states have adopted a non-categorical approach to special education service delivery. In such places, RTI represents a "severe low-achievement" definition of disability; students performing below a specific cut-point in a distribution of achievement scores are disabled; those scoring above are non-disabled. (For this reason, it is misleading to characterize such an RTI as a "new and more valid means of identifying children with LD," as some have said. There are no children with LD in Iowa.) One practical implication of this operationalization of RTI and of non-categorical service delivery is that resource rooms will be more heterogeneous. Children with mild mental retardation, behavior disorders, and learning disabilities will be grouped together, thereby making it more difficult for talented, hardworking special educators to provide effective instruction. Some special educators may say, "My classes are already heterogeneous!" To which I say, "Then they are likely to become even more so."

With this in mind, I'd hope that two tiers of RTI will be followed by a strong multi-disciplinary evaluation, which, among other things, attempts to distinguish children with LD from those with mild mental retardation and behavior disorders.

Finally, in the various descriptions I've read of different RTI models, school psychologists are often named as likely professionals to help with the increased emphasis on student progress monitoring during tiers 1 and 2; reading teachers are often mentioned as likely support staff to help implement tier 2 instruction. (In the RTI research to date, reading has been addressed almost exclusively; and early reading-reading at the word level in the primary grades-much more often than more advanced reading for comprehension. How RTI will play in the area of math and in the intermediate elementary grades, in middle school, and in high school, is unclear.) Who will do what is still in flux and, when the dust settles, different professionals will likely assume different roles from state to state and district to district.