“Being against RTI [Response to Intervention] is like being against motherhood.”1
RTI is a rarity in K-12 school policy. There is no dispute over its worthiness. It is supported by voluminous literature setting forth its principles and potential effectiveness.2 And its principles are not new either. Long before the concept of RTI made its way into federal laws (including IDEA, the No Child Left Behind Act and the Every Student Succeeds Act), many state laws called for early identification and intervention processes identical or similar to RTI.
The principal features of RTI are:
Simply put: If done right, struggling learners who do not have severe disabilities can meet grade level standards.
RTI can also be understood as a call to action. As a group of researchers and practitioners put it, “RTI is designed to remove the oh-so-human temptation to speculate and slowly mull over learning problems, and instead spur teachers into action to improve learning, see if the actions worked, and make adjustments in a continuous loop.”3 It imposes the clear expectations and structure that are usually lacking in the management of classroom instruction. It prevents the “wait to fail” syndrome that typically delays timely extra help for struggling learners.
One preliminary issue is how much RTI should focus on behavior as well as academics. In principle, RTI should address the full range of students’ academic and behavior problems. Nonetheless, RTI in this book focuses almost entirely on instructional services, especially in reading. The predominant reason why learners struggle is because of their failure to learn to read: this is true of 80 to 90 percent of students found eligible for special education under the classification of a Specific Learning Disability (LD).4
At the same time, it is often hard to determine which is the chicken and which is the egg between the academic and behavioral causes of learning difficulties. Do students struggle and fall behind academically because of social and emotional problems? Or do students develop social and emotional conditions because of frustration and embarrassment when they can’t keep up academically with their peers?
In my own advocacy for students, I have seen many students for whom it’s the academic failure that comes first. Remember Devon from Chapter 2? (I hope you can’t forget Devon and how he suffered so much, so unnecessarily.) He is one of many students I’ve represented who fell behind early and was classified as LD. Then, as they got older and didn’t receive adequate instruction in special education, they fell farther and farther behind. They were seen by peers and they saw themselves as “dummies.” They acted out, becoming more unmanageable in the classroom and on the school grounds. Sometimes, their disability classification was changed, almost always wrongly, to Emotional Disability (ED). It’s not much of a stretch to say that frequently general education and special education are so bad that they drive struggling learners to seem crazy.
Still, bonafide behavior problems endanger academic success. They, like reading problems, should be nipped in the bud, and can be. There is extensive literature and research on the relative effectiveness of a variety of positive behavior support systems.5 Some practitioners, particularly those in the behavioral support field, prefer to align their work to a framework called Multi-tier System of Support (MTSS), rather than RTI. By and large, MTSS encompasses RTI with more emphases on behavioral issues and, ideally, on all learners, not just struggling ones.6 That’s a lot of acronyms but the plain point is that behavioral issues should not be neglected.
This Chapter’s focus on reading is also not intended to slight the applicability of RTI principles to math, and there are promising math RTI practices.7 Still, reading is the gateway for children and adults to the worlds of math, science, history, arts and other vistas of knowledge and culture. An article published by the Brookings Institute was titled “A counterintuitive approach to improving math education: Focus on English language arts.”8
There are two basic dimensions to RTI. One is the framework of the three Tiers. The other is the key operational elements in each of the Tiers.
RTI isn’t as simple as 1, 2, 3, but it isn’t all that complicated either. Tier 1 consists of instruction for the whole class in general education. The core curriculum for everyone should be research-based, and struggling learners should receive both “differentiated” (individualized) and some small group instruction.
Struggling learners and their skill gaps are identified through regular screening of all students, usually a minimum of three times per year. Parent alert: Contrary to some public accounts, these screenings are not cumbersome for the child, the teacher, or the class. That is, they are short, individual assessments, often built right into the whole class curricula. They are not a separate statewide test. They don’t require prep, stress or teaching-to-the-test.
Based on the screening data, students who are not meeting appropriate benchmarks should be placed in Tier 2. Tier 2 provides tutoring or small group instruction to supplement not supplant Tier 1. Though models differ, the extra dose of instruction is usually prescribed in the range of 20–30 minutes per day, four or five days per week. Some guidelines set the Tier 2 group size at 4–8 students who have relatively similar skill levels and needs.
Depending on the student’s individualized needs, the Tier 2 intervention instruction can be more intensive instruction in the core (Tier 1) program and/or an additional research-based intervention program targeted at particular skill deficits. Either way, the teacher should be well-qualified to provide the Tier 2 intervention.
The amount of time spent in Tier 2 varies, but is generally around eight weeks. The progress monitoring data determines (along with teacher judgment) whether a student is adequately responding and catching up. Non-responders, those who are still behind where they should be, can stay longer in Tier 2 or move on Tier 3.
Tier 3 instruction is even more intensive and specialized, and it too should supplement not supplant Tier 1. It does, however, replace Tier 2—the student would not receive Tier 2 and Tier 3 instruction. The range of time is about 20–30 minutes per day, four or five days per week, but with lower, including one-to-one, teacher-student ratios. The supplemental instruction is usually a research-based intervention program that should be taught by a teacher who is trained and experienced in that particular program.
A student who still does not respond sufficiently in Tier 3 should then be referred for evaluation to determine eligibility for special education. In effect, special education should be “Tier 4” with special education delivering even more intense and specialized instruction. Unfortunately, the system almost never functions that way. Almost invariably, students referred for special education did not receive appropriate Tier 2 and Tier 3 instruction in general education (as they should have). In theory, special education services would fill in for the missing Tier 2 and Tier 3 instruction. But that doesn’t happen either. Special education instruction also falls far short of providing appropriate Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions. As a result, as I’ve described already, special education services almost invariably turn out to be too little, too late to enable struggling learners to narrow their achievement deficits and avoid educational abuse.
What does it take for the three Tiers to operate the way they are supposed to? There are three cardinal elements: the quality of the data collection and analysis; reliance on interventions that are strongly research-based; and early (very early!) identification and intervention.
If what really matters in real estate is location, location, location, what really matters in RTI is data, data, data. Data must be gathered through an array of reliable instruments, from relatively short screening tools to curriculum-based assessments to standardized tests. The data must drive every chug of the RTI engine, from initial identification of learning problems, to data-driven instruction, to placement in tiers, to selection of interventions, and to progress monitoring.
By and large, state of the art screening and assessment instruments are up to the task, and the supply of data is up to the demand. With reasonably good diagnostic data in the hands of teachers, the obstacles to effective RTI lie elsewhere, including, as discussed in a later chapter, better training of teachers in how to understand and apply the data.
The terms research-based, evidence-based, and scientifically-based are used fairly interchangeably in K-12 education. By any name, the requirement that research-based best practices be used at every step of the way in RTI should be a no-brainer. The No Child Left Behind Act, by one count, employed the term “scientifically based research” about 110 times in an effort to force federal funds to be effectively spent.9 Its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), goes to great lengths to clarify and strengthen the research that qualifies as “evidence based.”10
There is a strong link between these requirements for all students in general education and for students in special education under IDEA. Under IDEA, as spelled out in Chapter 2, federal regulations state that before a child is found eligible as student with LD, the school should determine whether the child has made “sufficient progress to meet age or State-approved grade-level standards . . . when using a process based on the child’s response to scientific, research-based intervention. . . .”11
Needless to say, that’s easier said than done. One of the stumbling blocks is the complexity and confusion over what qualifies as research-based. There have been some hits and many misses as to what qualifies. Random trials peer-reviewed research is the “gold standard” but also the most difficult to meet. ESSA tries to address this. According to a Brookings Institute report: “ESSA is the first federal education law to define the term ‘evidence-based’ and to distinguish between activities with ‘strong,’ ‘moderate,’ and ‘promising’ support . . . the law also treats as evidence-based a fourth category comprising activities that have a research-based rationale but lack direct empirical support.”12
Yet for the present, the practical supply of such research—no matter how defined—is less than the demand. The supply is limited by the maze of school variables that complicate the research, by the dearth of educational research in general (and in education departments in universities in particular), and by school systems’ weak research and development (R&D) management practices detailed later.
Still, as we will see, there is a substantial body of research that supports the effectiveness of instructional best practices within an RTI framework, particularly tutoring in the early grades.
There is proof that timely research-based interventions can enable struggling learners to regain lost ground. But how much ground they can regain depends on how much ground there is to make up.
The downward spiral in learning to read starts very early. As discussed in Chapter 2, students who fall behind rarely catch up. Without early identification and intervention, the “Matthew effect”—“rich” readers get richer, “poor” readers get poorer—dooms struggling learners. Still, as preeminent reading researcher Joseph K. Torgesen has concluded:
The good news is we now have tools to reliably identify the children who are likely destined for this early reading failure. . . . Most importantly, given the results of a number of intervention studies, we can say with confidence that if we intervene early, intensively, and appropriately, we can provide these children with the early reading skills that can prevent almost all of them from the nasty downward spiral. . . .13
Torgesen added that “while the exact effects of the interventions [in the studies described in the article] varied, they were all successful in bringing most students (56 to 92 percent) to well within the average range of reading ability.”14 What’s more, “strategic early interventions” can decrease the number of students found eligible for special education by between 50 and 75 percent.15
Still, in the maddening education wars, one important element of early identification and intervention is not without controversy. That’s the battle over what is developmentally appropriate literacy instruction in prekindergarten and kindergarten.
Over the past decade or so, instruction in foundational skills like reading has increased in prekindergarten and kindergarten programs. This movement is in step with growing research showing that reading difficulties, including dyslexia, can be identified at those early ages, and treated with developmentally appropriate interventions. Prekindergarten programs for three-year olds as well as four-year olds are gaining traction too.16
However, there has been resistance by some early childhood educators and parents. They team up with education progressives out of fear that children are being over-tested and prematurely drilled-and-killed, while missing out on social and emotional development. The Head Start program for a long time has been caught in the crossfire.
Some of the controversy can be traced to economic class differences. Children from non-poor families do not need the same kind of very early interventions as children from low-income families. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds enter school, even at age 4, with profound deficits in language and other readiness skills. As revealed in a famous early childhood study, children from non-poor families enter school having been exposed to 30 million more spoken words than children from families on welfare.17
Thus, low-income children, unlike peers from non-disadvantaged homes, require academic preparation (it might even be called academic remediation) from the earliest possible moment. Not to the exclusion of growth in social and emotional attributes, but in a healthy balance across all domains. That is happening in many places, and early identification of learning difficulties is becoming more the norm.
While the importance of early identification and intervention cannot be overstated, a few words need to be said about RTI for older students. Even if RTI doesn’t kick in early enough and with sufficient intensity, it is not completely three strikes and you’re out. All need not be lost. Even far-behind older students can be assisted through tutoring, as seen later in this chapter, particularly if the interventions occur in general education rather than in special education.18
RTI’s reliance on data, research and very early intervention does not mean that we can be certain that it will work as advertised. In fact, there is no evidence that it has been effectively implemented on a large scale in any large school system. The reasons are plainly revealed in this Chapter and elsewhere in the book: mainly lack of money for interventions, poor teacher training, and failure to use evidence-based programs and practices.
Still, there is a whole lot of evidence that we know how to do it, if it’s done right.19 RTI, bear in mind, is less a discrete program and more a process with innumerable moving components. This section scrutinizes the most crucial components, in particular evidence-based tutoring, and shows how they can provide ample fuel for the engine of RTI to carry struggling learners to academic success.
The inventory of best practices in the classroom that enable struggling readers to meet state standards begins with RTI Tier 1: that is, “core” instruction in general education for all students beginning in prekindergarten and up the school ladder. Sometimes called “the first teach,” it’s an indispensable foundation for academic success. Done well, it can prevent or mitigate the necessity of interventions in Tiers 2 and 3.
That said, this book does not attempt to catalogue, much less examine closely, best practices in it. The subject is simply too open-ended. Because Tier 1 is universal for all students whether they are struggling learners or not, it involves virtually every aspect of schooling. It is near impossible to name an education reform that does not impact mightily on Tier 1 instruction. To name a few major reforms du jour—teacher quality, class size, school choice including privatization, and technology in the classroom.
Teacher quality is the most vivid example. Suppose the U.S. adopted reforms that would elevate teaching to the ranks of high-performing nations around the world. The reforms could strengthen the applicant pool by raising admission standards for teacher education programs in colleges and universities and improving the relevance and depth of the coursework; provide incentives for teaching in low-performing schools; increase professional development including classroom coaching and mentoring; and raise salaries.
The potential power of such a radical overhaul of teacher quality has been authoritatively documented in the National Center on Education and the Economy’s comparison of the U.S. with “high performing” school systems around the world.20 It is difficult to imagine any movement that would be more transformational. Yet, that is unlikely to happen in the near term; the political obstacles are simply too overwhelming. Moreover, a certain percentage of students, no matter how skilled the teachers, will require extra help. Nor is any other mega-reform—including the privatization crusade of the Trump education department headed by secretary Betty DeVos—likely to happen in the foreseeable future in a way that would substantially alter Tier 1 (or Tiers 2 and 3).
On the other hand, though not conventionally recognized as a mega-reform like “teacher quality,” stronger curricula have under-appreciated potential to strengthen Tier 1. The curriculum refers to both standards for what students should know and be able to do (think of the famous or infamous Common Core standards) and the textbooks and learning materials that are aligned to the standards, which teachers should be expected to use. Yet, the selection of textbooks and materials, including lesson plans, has been habitually neglected.
My 2010 book, It’s the Classroom, Stupid, lamented the absence of educational reform strategies that focused directly on how to improve teaching and learning in the classroom. Classroom teachers are denied well-designed, teacher-friendly curricula that would greatly boost teacher effectiveness, especially in Tier 1.
A 2017 report of the Johns Hopkins School of Education brought welcome attention to this. A summary by David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, highlights both the underestimated importance of curricular choices and how state and local districts fall down on the job of assuring high quality textbooks and materials. In this too, the U.S. lags behind high-performing school systems in other countries.21
Chester E. Finn, Jr., for decades one of the nation’s leading K-12 policy intellectuals, has sought to explain why curriculum reform, regrettably, has been missing from policy reform debates.
Many shun curriculum because content choices are often culture-war battles . . . Talk of a “national curriculum” is taboo and when states venture into these waters, it’s almost as controversial. . . . Curriculum, therefore, is generally left to districts, which frequently leave it to individual schools and often to individual teachers or departments within them.22
This neglected subject is further discussed in a later chapter on how school systems mismanage what I call the instructional infrastructure, including curricula.
Educators, in part, underestimate the consequences of poor curricula by overestimating the power of “differentiated” instruction. It has long been an act of faith in the education establishment that many problems of struggling learners can be overcome if teachers would only give more individual attention to the multiple learning styles and difficulties of individual students. The mantra of “one size doesn’t fit all” is invoked. Who can be against such “differentiation”?
Well, I’m happy to say that some experts, in my view for good reason, are deeply skeptical if not altogether dismissive. No one can be against it in theory, but in practice, theory collides with the reality of the classroom life of teachers.
To see why, let’s start with a fairly typical description of differentiated instruction. It recognizes that learners differ in factors such as culture, learning style, and gender. In order to address those differences, teachers need to approach each student by their unique readiness, interests and learning profile. Sounds good. Yet, the other side of it is portrayed by a seasoned educator in an article titled “Differentiation Doesn’t Work:” “Although fine in theory, differentiation in practice is harder to implement in a heterogeneous classroom than it is to juggle with one arm tied behind your back . . . the only educators who assert differentiation is doable are those who have never tried to implement it themselves: university professors, curriculum coordinators, and school principals.”23
Of course teachers must individualize instruction as much as they can. But there are simply too many kids with too many differences to expect overloaded teachers to pull it off well. An ex-teacher recalls being “Differentiated to death.”24 No doubt many teachers in the trenches feel the same way, though they keep their opinions to themselves to keep from getting in trouble with administrators.
Two newer versions of differentiated instruction making the rounds these days are Universal Design for Learning, and “personalized learning.” As set forth by a national program that ardently advocates for UDL: “UDL provides students of all abilities equal chances to learn. With UDL, educators design flexible and motivating lessons that draw on students’ strengths to learn and show what they have learned. Students are offered many ways to access the same information.”25 Yet, UDL’s lofty principles encounter facts on the ground that make it extremely hard, if not impossible, for everyday teachers to implement the principles.
Still, UDL has many theorists who have gained it favorable footing in both federal and state laws.26 And no wonder. Like differentiated instruction, UDL appeals to the best instincts of idealistic educators and cost-conscious policymakers and politicians. Both differentiated instruction and UDL are low-cost, compared to tutoring and other reforms.
The drumbeat for differentiation is being amplified by growing attention to “personalized learning.” It too “tailors educational approaches to an individual student’s needs, strength, interests, and aspirations.”27 But it bumps into the same challenges, mainly the overburden on teachers and the large and varying skill deficits of students.
As a result, evidence of effective implementation of differentiation and its alter egos is scant if not absent altogether. And worse, by setting unrealistic expectations for the degree of individualization that overloaded and under-supported teachers are supposed to deliver, teachers are scapegoated and demoralized (and the need for RTI interventions is downplayed).
My experience in Baltimore over the past decade leads me to one final note of caution about best practices in Tier 1. As a member of the Baltimore school board and an advocate for system-wide reform, I have struggled for many years to get top school officials to develop a stronger RTI framework for Tiers 2 and 3. For the most part they have put me off, but not because they don’t understand the necessity of RTI and how it should be done.
Rather, their mantra is, we have got to get the Tier 1 “first teach” down pat first. In principle, they have a point. The better Tier 1 is, the lesser the number of struggling learners. But they take the point too far by their almost exclusive focus on it to the neglect of Tiers 2 and 3. In Baltimore, for example, Tier 1 teaching has been a recognized, relative strength of the system. It is also easier to get stuck on Tier 1 because instruction in Tiers 2 and 3 costs more money up front (though it will save money down the line).
Other school systems may have fallen into the same trap. The best Tier 1 in the world will not eliminate the need for additional Tier 2 and Tier 3 assistance for a significant number of struggling learners, predominately poor and minority students.
With Tier 1 a vast work in progress, Tiers 2 and 3 will be required in large doses for a long time. But what exactly does that mean? What are the Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions, and what are their prospects for success? How will I back up my claim that there is a convincing body of research on Tier 2 and Tier 3 instructional best practices?
The definitive piece in this puzzle is tutoring. Its proven benefits surpass other intervention best practices. However, before showcasing tutoring as the star of the RTI show, we should take notice of some vital supporting players.
There is a vast range of them. One helpful approach is found in the 2016 study by consultants to the Maryland Commission on Innovation and Excellence on Education (of which I am a member). The Commission’s principal charge is to make recommendations to the Maryland governor and state legislature on the cost of an adequate education in the public schools (and how the big bill should be divvied up by state and local governments). Adequate is defined as the resources necessary so that all students can meet state standards. But putting a price tag on it has been elusive.
All states—often prodded by lawsuits and judicial decisions—have grappled with the issue, and the study for the Maryland Commission is a state-of-the art approach. Its recommendations are based on evidence-based research and educators’ professional judgment.28 They confront head-on the central challenge of this book and RTI: What resources are necessary to enable struggling learners to receive adequate instruction in general education so they avoid being mislabeled as disabled, and educationally abused?
The Commission study does this by first identifying the resources that should be part of the “base” per pupil costs. These are the “Core Programs”—in essence, Tier 1—that should be available for all students in general education. They run the gamut from teacher-student ratios in general education classrooms to central and school-based administrators to supportive services like technology, guidance counselors, nurses and librarians.
Second, the study identifies the additional resources that are necessary to enable students “at-risk of academic failure” to meet state standards. These are essentially the costs of Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions. Included are tutors within an RTI framework, additional pupil support positions like counselors, extended day and summer school programs, and additional teachers and related services for Limited English Proficiency (LEP) and special education students. The per pupil costs for these resources are added to the base.
“At-risk” students in the Commission study are not exactly the same as this book’s struggling learners, but they’re close. At-risk in the study is defined only in terms of poverty (using eligibility for Free and Reduced Price Meals as a proxy) and LEP students. By contrast, struggling learners in this book—though disproportionately poor and minority—include all students who fall behind in general education. To illustrate, in Maryland about 50 percent of students are poor and minority, but about 60 percent of all students are below proficiency in reading and math.
There is another significant difference between the study and the conventional RTI framework. While the study calls for an RTI approach, it only calls for Tier 2 prior to referral to special education; in the study, Tier 3 is special education. This is a clear departure from the national consensus that three tiers of instruction should precede referral to special education.
The study appeared to justify the omission of Tier 3 based on its belief that a financially ample base and Tier 2 interventions would eliminate the need for further interventions in general education. This is a worthy premise, but there are substantial risks and doubts. If there is only one tier between the Tier 1 core and special education, and if the Tier 1 and Tier 2 costs are not adequately estimated, or are not fully funded, or don’t work as well as hoped, it becomes much more likely that many struggling learners will be referred to special education before they have received enough progressively intense interventions in general education. Many more struggling learners will be mislabeled as disabled and exposed to future educational abuse.
Despite this mis-step, the study still has the right idea about the need to specify, largely through the RTI process, the programs that will bring struggling learners up to meeting grade level standards. And it shines the spotlight, first and foremost, on the most powerful intervention—tutoring.
The evidence of the effectiveness of tutoring towers above the evidence of any other intervention strategy.29 For example, a review of research on interventions for struggling readers was in effect a catalogue of proven and promising tutoring interventions.30
An insightful perspective comes from R. Barker Bausell, a retired medical bio-statistician and professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Though not a K-12 educator, he has long pursued a passion for research on how to teach children to read and write. He distilled his findings in a 2011 book Too Simple to Fail. The “simple” way to reform public education, he wrote, involves replacing a lot of ineffective whole class instruction with “the most effective instructional paradigm ever developed”—tutoring. Tutoring delivers the “massive doses”31 of intensive instructional time that struggling learners require. He outlines scenarios with various tutor-to-student ratios and time allocations.
On a less professorial note, a Bloomberg View journalist’s column was titled “Want to fix education? Give a kid a tutor.”32 That seems an apt summary of the research, but what are the devilish details?
Tutoring, of course, can mean many different things. The consultants to the Maryland Commission thought that the “most powerful and effective approach . . . is individual one-to-one or small group (one-to-three or one-to-five) tutoring provided by licensed teachers.”33 But there are countless models with a variety of features.
These models cover a huge amount of ground. But the very good news is that a thousand flowers are blooming, and many varieties, including those for struggling learners, have the sweet smell of success.35
In the framework of RTI, Tier 2 and Tier 3 tutoring generally fall within well-recognized design boundaries. For example, here are guidelines drawn from the Maryland RTI Guidance Manual:36
RTI models across the country are rarely if ever identical, but the Maryland manual is mainstream. Among the many variables, the tutor-pupil ratio has drawn the most research attention because of its cost impacts.37 Tutor-pupil ratios should undoubtedly vary depending on circumstances. But a red flag needs to be raised about the frequent prescription of “small group” tutoring. No term has been more misused in RTI and in Individual Education Programs (IEPs) for special education students. I have witnessed many instances in which a group of 10–15 students has been defended as being “small.” To say that a group that size qualifies as tutoring is nothing less than a scam on parents and students. The research telling us that 1:5 should be the maximum tutor to student ratio reflects common sense. Not only are larger groups unwieldy for one teacher in a 30 to 45 minutes tutoring session, but a larger group of students will almost certainly vary widely in their skill levels and needs, making individualized assistance even more problematical.
Another common issue is whether the tutoring instruction should be more or less prescribed for the tutor. How much latitude should the tutor have? The issue is frequently overlooked but has been framed as whether a “problem-solving” approach or a “standard treatment protocol” should be the best way to deliver the Tier 2 and Tier 3 tutoring.38 Problem-solving involves giving IEP teams and tutors a lot of flexibility to prescribe what they think best for each student. A standard treatment protocol is more evidence-based and off the shelf, and more closely ties the teacher’s hands.
The easy answer to the question of which approach is preferable is: it depends. From there it gets more complicated. What are the student’s individualized needs? How strong is the evidence behind the particular standard treatment protocol? Are we talking about tutoring in Tier 2 and/or Tier 3? What are the teacher’s qualifications?
Still, there are some basic pros and cons to each approach. Problem-solving is ideal in principle, but in practice it may add to the overload on already overburdened teachers. Does the average teacher tutor, much less volunteer tutor, have the knowledge and time to cook up individualized and research-based instructional recipes?
Some experts in tutoring would raise the ante even higher for the requisite tutoring skills. The developers of a promising tutoring model (in math) concluded “that tutoring is a task that is fundamentally different from regular classroom teaching.”39 In a fascinating article that examines the tradeoffs of problem-solving and standard treatment protocols, three scholars go even farther, calling for “expert instructors” able to fashion individualized “experimental teaching” for students who struggle the most.40 But such “expert instructors” and “experimental teaching” seem to be beyond practical reach. We can accomplish the aims of RTI with tutoring that is a pragmatic combination of standard treatment protocols and problem-solving approaches.
With all its permutations and combinations, tutoring still has as good a Good Schoolkeeping Seal of Approval as any reform strategy in K-12 research and practice. Moreover, it is largely immune from the great plague of almost all instructional reforms: the difficulty in replicating proven or promising programs on a large scale. Tutoring, even allowing for all its variables, is relatively easy to put into practice. The pool of tutors—professional teachers, para-professionals and volunteers who are part-time and full-time, inside and outside of public schools, including retired teachers—seems bottomless. There is already a flourishing industry in tutors for private school students.
So, parents must be wondering, if RTI with tutoring is so great, why isn’t there more of it?
Why hasn’t RTI been effectively implemented on a large scale anywhere? Chapter 6 on money (not enough of it to pay for the Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions) and Chapter 7 on management (how educators don’t spend cost-effectively the money they have) are primers on the two most fundamental reasons. The management shortcomings include poor teacher training and failure to employ best reading programs and practices.41
But there are others that are not so clear-cut. First, states, with one notable exception, are in denial about the absence of RTI. Second, there is the tendency of educators to bungle and shoot themselves in the foot in their approach to RTI.
States falsely claim to be doing RTI. Ask any state or local administrator and they say “we’re doing that.” To try to prove the point, they usually allude to some document or manual that spells out RTI guidance and maybe best practices. But they don’t say how much of it they are doing, or how well. They don’t document at what scale they are doing it, what models they are using, and any data on its effectiveness. They’re bluffing.
Tennessee is an exception. It has put in more effort than any state. And best of all, it is remarkably candid about its shortcomings.
A 2018 report, “Assessing Progress, Four Years of Learnings from RTI2 Implementation in Tennessee”42 and the manual that laid the foundation43 should be required reading. The Tennessee Department of Education launched a statewide initiative in 2014, and made sure it was more than fanfare. It followed implementation closely, and the 2018 progress report bared the good and not-so good news.
The RTI initiative demonstrated promising results. It widely influenced practice and particularly reduced the number of students who were inappropriately referred to special education and mislabeled as disabled. Most administrators and teachers were supportive.
Yet, it fell short in many central ways. There were shortages of staff and school time to carry out the intervention process and instruction. To some teachers, the procedures in the state manual were too prescriptive and burdensome. And implementation in high schools, because of huge learning deficits and scheduling challenges, was especially questionable.
In other words, exemplary effort in Tennessee to implement RTI has so far turned out just as you might expect from the nation’s first’s large scale initiative. Full of holes in funding and implementation, but full of promise. It’s not proof of what RTI could accomplish if done right. But the premise and promise are unmistakable. If it is begun earlier rather than later; if it is supported by more resources and better managed; and if it is part of a sustained process of ongoing improvement—it’s on the right track. And other states should follow suit.
Maryland is typical of states that try to fake it. I testified and lobbied for legislation in the Maryland state legislature in 2017 that sought to require local school systems to report on students who received early intervention services. In their comments on the legislation, local departments of education hemmed, hawed and hid. They alleged that they were providing a lot of such services, but statutory reporting would be too burdensome. In truth, their opposition wasn’t as much that they would be overburdened if they had to report the data; it was that, having very little to no meaningful RTI, they had very little to no data to report.
The bill, as enacted, required the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) to issue guidelines for the local reports.44 But the state department was no more enthusiastic than the local departments, fearing that its own negligent lack of action to support (or mandate) RTI would be exposed. MSDE’s lengthy 2008 manual, “A Tiered Instructional Approach to Support Achievement for All Students: Maryland’s Response to Intervention Framework,” says all the right things about how RTI should be done.45 But it is simply exhortatory. There have been no meaningful follow-up steps like directives, professional development, dissemination of best practices and monitoring to spur implementation. The state has virtually nothing to show for it, and as of this writing, is still trying to evade its responsibilities under the legislation.
No state, except Tennessee, or local school system is doing much more than Maryland. According to a survey by the Education Commission of the States in 2014, over 30 states “require or recommend that that school districts offer some type of intervention or remediation for struggling readers for a P-3 grade. Some states require specific interventions while others let districts choose from a list of suggested interventions.”46 But the absence of data or other reports on implementation indicate that these efforts are mainly window dressing.
So don’t believe the local and state school systems across the country that boast, when asked about RTI, “we’re doing that.” They’re not. If they were, we would have heard about it. Parents would not have so many children—estimated in Chapter 3 at more than half of all students—struggling and not meeting basic standards.
Perhaps a section on “bungling” is redundant and overkill. It may also be too much inside baseball for parents. But educators should understand and heed its lessons.
We have already established that school systems across the country are in denial about their failure to get aboard the engine of RTI. But we should also recognize that the failure sometimes goes beyond just inaction, and educators create additional obstacles for themselves. Several examples follow.
Among the bunglers are educational researchers. In early 2017, four of them co-authored a paper titled “The Concept of RTI: Billion-Dollar Boondoggle.”47 It ignited a firestorm. A counterattack by a group of 24 at least equally expert researchers, calling themselves the Consortium for Evidence-based Early Intervention, condemned the Boondoggle paper as “pages of disconnected, incoherent topics that are characterized by distortions, half-truths, and just plain falsehoods.”48
This scholarly rumble—which smacks of a schoolyard fight among adolescents—highlights how something as seemingly straightforward as RTI can become ensnarled in education politics and false dichotomies. I come down strongly on the side of the counterattackers but that isn’t the main point, as we’ll see.
The Boondoggle uproar began with a November 2015 report, “Evaluation of Response to Intervention Practices for Elementary School Reading.”49 Its co-authors represented several well-known organizations, backed by a large Technical Working Group, under contract to the federal Institute of Education Sciences National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. This academic pedigree would hardly signal a report likely to cause a big fight among researchers.
Nor did the overall findings of the study (308 pages long and methodologically dense) augur fierce controversy. The study reported that for some students, the reading interventions did not improve reading outcomes; rather they produced “negative impacts.”50 Yet, even with the reference to “negative impacts,” the study overall had more caveats than clear conclusions. And it criticized its own limitations—the report “does not assess whether the [RTI] framework as a whole is effective in improving student outcomes.”51 (Italics in the original.)
Nonetheless, the Boondoggle authors attacked all RTI as a rip-off. They were especially outraged that RTI was “not better than other methods of identifying LD.”52 The “boondoggle” was the waste of money on RTI, including “commercially produced” intervention programs.53
The Consortium counterattack unleashed its own heavy rhetorical artillery. It expressed surprise at the “sensationalized title . . . and unclear, rambling, disjointed, factually incorrect, and misguided piece.”54 The Boondoggle-ists were especially off the mark, said the Consortium, in their “implicit endorsement of the use of ability achievement discrepancy models” for identification of LD, rather than RTI.55 (I strongly agree with them. Reminder: the discrepancy model is a cardinal sin according to the teachings in Chapter 2 of this book.)
The lesson to be learned from the Boondoggle brouhaha is captured by leading RTI researcher Douglas Fuchs (who was not one of the Boondoggle authors or a member of the Consortium). He offered a wise and calming perspective as reported in Education Week: “Researchers need to know more about the differences in the quality of instruction, the types of interventions, and the progress-monitoring used in each of the schools studied. . . . More detail about RTI practices are needed . . . for school leaders to draw lessons from the study.”56
He’s right and the Boondoggle-ists are not just wrong: They squandered precious time and attention from constructive approaches to scaling up effective RTI, like those offered by Fuchs. They even bungled legitimate concerns about how school systems may misuse RTI to delay eligibility for special education.
Recall that the 2004 amendments to IDEA tried to substitute RTI for the discrepancy gap as the appropriate gateway to eligibility under the classification of Specific Learning Disability (LD).57 Though RTI is acknowledged to be far superior to the discrepancy gap, some parents fear that school systems will use RTI more to delay referrals for special education than to prevent them, thereby saving money. These savvy parents are on to a real danger.
An article by famed researcher on dyslexia Sally E. Shaywitz and a co-author is titled “Response to Intervention: Ready or Not? Or, From Wait-to-Fail to Watch-Them-Fail.”58 The Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates expressed similar concerns.59 In response to protests, the federal Office of Special Education Programs admitted that it has come to our attention “that, in some instances, local educational agencies (LEAs) may be using Response to Intervention (RTI) strategies to delay or deny a timely initial evaluation for children suspected of having a disability.”60 The federal Office stated that this should not be allowed to happen.
But can state and local school systems be trusted to make sure it doesn’t happen? Two professors of special education published a thorough and insightful study of RTI as a pre-condition for LD eligibility. The picture they portray is not pretty. At its best “each state has developed its own set of RTI regulations . . . resulting in considerable variability in policy and practices.”61 In a separate article, the same experts elaborated on the failure of states to provide guidance, collect data and monitor fidelity and effectiveness.62
And so, in the hands of many school system mis-managers, the dangers of misuse of the process of RTI are real. Parents must be on guard and prepared to take action to prevent abuses. Chapter 10 spells out steps that can empower parents in such situations. The first one is for parents to get true knowledge of school system abuses. Hopefully this chapter has given parents knowledge of the dangers that school systems will in fact bungle the letter and spirit of RTI. They may not only not provide RTI but delay proper referrals to special education.
The scale of the number of struggling learners who need RTI interventions is an obstacle all its own. The scale is so immense that educators (and policymakers) are in danger of being paralyzed.
The children waiting in line for RTI include struggling learners in general education who have not been referred to special education, and students who have been referred and typically mislabeled as disabled. But the exact number in each category is hard to pinpoint.
For starters, it is difficult to estimate precisely the number of struggling learners who wind up in special education. Still, as mentioned in Chapter 1, it could be as many as about 85 percent of the 6.5 million students who receive special education services, about 5.5 million children in all.63
If that isn’t astonishing and depressing enough, there are far more in general education. Let’s call them stranded struggling learners: those who are not referred to special education but remain in general education, waiting for adequate RTI to fire on all cylinders.
Exact estimates of these stranded struggling learners don’t exist. But a back-of-the-envelope calculation starts with a count of all students who do not meet rigorous academic standards. Using the “gold standard” National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for fourth and eighth grade reading and math, about two-thirds of all students in grades K to 12 are below proficiency, totaling roughly 28 million students.64 Then subtract the approximately 6.5 million students in special education (those with and without severe disabilities). This leaves about 22 million stranded struggling learners who are being academically shortchanged, if not educationally abused, in general education. And no surprise, poor and minority students are disproportionately found in the back of the line.65
Still, despite the staggering numbers, the humongous queue of struggling learners is no excuse for reformers to throw up their hands in surrender. The problem is manageable—not only educationally but fiscally and politically, as we will see in later parts of the book.
But before that, the next chapter explores RTI-like “specially designed instruction” for students in special education. Yes, most of these students, almost all of them mislabeled as disabled, wouldn’t need special education if they received RTI-like interventions in general education. Still, these students who are now stuck in special education and the relatively small number of students in special education who legally belong there are entitled to and can benefit greatly from RTI-like instructional and related services in special education.