RTI Blog

Over the years of being involved with change efforts around RtI, one of the interesting conversations has been talking about where students with IEP’s “fit” within the dialogue and decision making. Because RtI is a set of practices that shape curriculum, instruction, and assessment decisions within a school and district, teams at all levels should design the decision-making process to ensure it applies to each student served by that building or district. My experience has been that much of the initial energy around RtI focuses discussion and decision making as it applies to students who have not been identified as students with disabilities – resulting in an awkward pause when teams start talking about “what about students who have IEP’s?”

The changes to specific learning disability (SLD) determination contained within the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act expressed much of the ambiguity surrounding the field at that time. These changes came about because of the recognition that the discrepancy approach was inadequate as an identification method. At the time, the leading front-runner to discrepancy was Response to Intervention (RTI), which claimed the advantage of allowing for early intervention, for being more systematic in the attempt to ensure that learning difficulties were not a result of lack of appropriate instruction, and for relying on multiple measures that captured student growth rather than static points in time.

Pick up any journal, pamphlet, or presentation that introduces people to RtI and one of the cornerstones that will be mentioned is data. While perusing the internet, I came across a quote that read “Culture eats change for breakfast” (James Hunt). Our education system has not demonstrated the strongest practices related to data-based decision making. I often say that when data have been used, it has been used “against us,” which makes it difficult to create a culture that embraces data.

Last fall in this blog I discussed the impact of continuing budget cuts on the staffing of interventionists for RtI implementation in my school, Ocean View Elementary School in Norfolk, Va. In the past two years, many of the teacher positions which have provided tiered intervention support, especially at the Tier 3 level, have been cut due to ever increasing budget short falls. Over the summer, my leadership team met to review the strategies we began to put into place last year after the first round of cuts to evaluate how well they had worked and what else we could do, even as a second round of cuts was announced. We are looking at numerous strategies to close this ever widening gap between student academic needs and staffing resources.

It is no secret that it is extremely difficult to determine when a student can be classified as one with a specific learning disability (SLD). And when we discuss the reasons for why this is the case, we tend to draw on the usual suspects: The measurements we use to assess student performance and aptitude are flawed, disability exists on a continuum, environmental factors are difficult to separate from other causes, the role of the teacher plays too heavily in decision making, SLD “looks different” across students—some have disabilities in reading, some in math, some in writing, and some in combinations of these areas.