RTI Blog

Soon after I accepted my new position at Lionville Middle School in Exton, Pennsylvania, I received word of yet another great opportunity from the RTI Action Network. Working in partnership with some other educational agencies they had set up a presentation in Washington, DC, for members of congress inside the United States Capitol to try and get language about RtI in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. More specifically, language to allowing the coordination of funds between Title I (federal funding to educate low-income students) Title II (funding for teacher and principal training) and literacy grant programs. I was being asked to come and share the perspective of a secondary principal who had implemented such programs. After getting over the shock of being asked, I agreed to come and do my part to help.

If one is careful not to take oneself too seriously, one can gain perspective in a 40-year career. Here is mine so far.

I am very tired of ideological arguments. I get that religion is ideological. I do not get that politics are.

It is impossible that every idea coming from a Democrat is wrong. It is impossible that every idea coming from a Republican is wrong.

I used to write a monthly column for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City. My first was a piece on the need for democracy to have the chaos of a good discussion. We have lost that ability.

After speaking to that colleague from another district at the local workshop, I began to hear more about secondary schools starting the process of implementing RtI. Principals from around the region were contacting me to ask about various components of our program. Most of them mentioned hearing about us from that recent workshop or from seeing the web chat that we did the year before. Apparently people were typing in “middle school” and “rti” for web searches and kept hitting on our presentation. I did not mind all of the questions because I was doing my own questioning to those who called. My feeling was that we needed to continue to look at how our framework could be fine-tuned and improved.

The work of Deshler, Fullan, Marzano, DuFour, Moats, Fletcher, Archer and Hughes, Batsche, Thurlow, Hehir, Sugai and Horner, Sprague, Sprick, Hattie, Woodward, Covey, Fixsen, Dweck, and many others have come to conclusions that coalesce into a clear, whole-system model that will improve outcomes for ALL students at the student, classroom, district, state, and national levels, but only if the findings of these authors are implemented with fidelity. It is really true!

In the previous four blogs, I described Pennsylvania's infrastructure for Response to Instruction and Intervention (RtII) and how the Pennsylvania Department of Education requires school districts to submit an application documenting that the RtII infrastructure is in place prior to being approved to use Response to Intervention (RTI) as part of the comprehensive evaluation of students thought to have specific learning disabilities (SLD). I also described the application process (post #3) and the rationale for why RtI is a better alternative than the traditional ability-achievement discrepancy approach to identifying students with SLD (post #4). In this entry, I will provide an overview of Pennsylvania's guidelines for identifying students with SLD using RTI.