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RTI and Special Education

I am a K-12 reading specialist and ESL teacher. Our school and district has an RTI plan in place. According to RTI, do we have to wait until a student who is achieving far below average is in the 3rd grade to evaluate him? I am being told that that this is because of IQ and getting an accurate IQ score. Considering that this student has received documented Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 interventions this year and is still far below where he needs to be, shouldn’t we not have to wait? We do not have an on-site diagnostician and rely on the local education service center to evaluate our students


Response from Edward Shapiro, Ph.D.:

RTI should NEVER be used as a reason to delay the evaluation process of any student in consideration for special education eligibility. Indeed, stern warnings have been issued by OSEP to LEAs to be careful that this does not happen. The objectives of RTI are to provide needed supports to students based on the data that drives the instructional process, and when the data suggests a student is not responding to the instructional processes provided within the general education framework, consideration for special education eligibility should proceed. A student's IQ score should have little or nothing to do with their response to intervention. In any successful RTI model, the consideration of a student's responsiveness to instruction across the tiers is the mechanism for examining whether eligibility should be considered.



Now let me move to what I think may be going on here, and I will admit that I am probably reading between the lines. If IQ is even being brought up in the conversation, then the situation is one where the determination for SLD is going to be based on an ability/achievement discrepancy model. In that model, the distance between a student's testing ability (i.e., IQ) and achievement (i.e., performance on academic skills) needs to be large enough for the student to be declared eligible. This means basically, the student needs to fail for a long enough time that the difference between their ability level (assumed to be average) and their tested achievement levels (assumed to b e far below average) reaches a discrepancy that is large enough to make the student eligible for services. In your case, the time in RTI has nothing to do with getting an accurate IQ.

In those schools implementing a successful RTI model but still using an ability/achievement discrepancy to make determinations for special education, the RTI data would add to facilitating the diagnostic decision. But in some cases, the inclusion of the IQ score into the mix would make t he student not eligible for special ed. This may be what is suspected by the local education service center evaluating your students.


Response from Evelyn Johnson:

Your question is a difficult one because policies for evaluating students to determine if they have a learning disability vary by state.

As a framework, the goal of the RTI process is to ensure that effective instruction is in place at all tiers, and to provide a mechanism for identifying those students who require more intense levels of support. When those students are identified, then the more intense instruction should be designed to help address their needs. If a student is not responsive to generally effective Tier 1 or Tier 2 instruction, and you have evidence to indicate that other students are making progress, then that provides an indication that there may be a 'within-child' issue that needs to be evaluated. Many states are moving away from an IQ-achievement discrepancy model of identification and towards an evaluation model that looks at a student's pattern of strengths and weaknesses in psychological processing areas related to their learning concerns.

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