RTI signals dramatic even radical change if done right. The key to RTI is that the general education classroom instruction must be research based. In reading instruction that means systematic and explicit reading instruction. Only time that gen ed instruction should be any different is when 80% or more students in school are meeting state standards. Then the evidence based instruction should just be directed to the other 20%. Schools across the country using sight word based programs like Fountas and Pinnell are not employing research based practices as indicated by thousands of high quality research studies.

A student whose first grade screening test indicates that he is at "high risk" for reading failure who gets Reading Recovery is not getting a systematic and explicit phonics program and if by chance he has dyslexia, he is being taught dyslexic reading strategies that contribute to the difficulty a dyslexic reader already has(guessing at words, using context clues to decode words). Thus that student is not part of an RTI program.

High poverty districts where 60% of the third graders' screening results indicate that they are at "high risk" for reading failure, ALL need to get an intensive reading program. A few schools have managed to do this, but most are only taking the lowest 10 - 15%, meaning that even in the face of data, they are opting to let those students move through the grades, never developing adequate reading skills. Already there is talk of class action law suits by some urban education advocates.

It's trickier in math and writing to determine what is research based, because there isn't the same body of high quality research. But the message in reading provides a clear blueprint.

Hi Mary,

Thanks for the numbers. We're very interested in reasearch based findings . . .they add a ton to the conversation.

Hi Bernice,
I have to say a resounding, yes, to your question as to whether RTI isn't just good teaching. When I taught in the US (I am now teaching in Canada) I remember meeting with key players in the child's educational life (special ed teacher, principal, parent, student -if appropriate, etc) to discuss children who I perceived as having difficulties in the classroom. At those meetings we would determine appropriate interventions for me to try out before referring the child for special ed testing. When did that ever change? We do not have RTI in the school board where I teach however we do have meetings to discuss students with suggestions given for interventions to try out. It seems to me that RTI is another fancy name for something we should have been doing all along. I know many effective and knowledgeable teachers that use their expertise and knowledge to do just this.

Hi Mary,
Please check out the What Works Clearinghouse from the US Department of Education. You will find that the WWC gives Reading Recovery a very good grade. Unfortunately, a lot of money has been spent propagandizing "research-based" programs that have not helped students become more strategic readers or improved reading achievement overall. Instead we have created a generation of word callers who think reading is about reading fast.

Here's part of what you can read at the WWC webpage with regards to Reading Recovery:
Research
Four studies of Reading Recovery® meet What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards, and one study meets WWC evidence standards with reservations. The five studies included approximately 700 first-grade students in more than 46 schools across the United States.3

Based on these five studies, the WWC considers the extent of evidence for Reading Recovery® to be medium to large for alphabetics, small for fluency and comprehension, and medium to large for general reading achievement.

Effectiveness
Reading Recovery® was found to have positive effects on alphabetics and general reading achievement and potentially positive effects on fluency and comprehension.

That positive review of Reading Recovery in WWWC discredited that organization. As educators, we have to realize that because we are in an immature profession where every product claims to be research based, it's our responsibility to ask questions and determine if the claims meet the minimum standards of quality research. Let's face it - too many educators were never taught to critically analyze basic research studies and they don't have the math skills to interpret them. It's much easier to discount the whole lot. These days I'm hearing so many people cynically respond to the perennial hype by saying that "in education you can't rely on research." But ignoring the quality of information isn't the answer.

Basic question to ask include: Did the stakeholder do the study? Was there a control group? Was the determination of effectiveness made after a short time of intervention? Students who have had RR don't show any gains and possibly are lower level readers than if they'd never had it by fourth grade. When you test children at the end of first grade when the tests still have a high proportion of high frequency "sight words," and a whole language based program can come out looking good. After third grade when there are too many multisyllabic words to memorize, those whole language programs, now called balanced literacy programs, don't show improved reading achievement when compared to a "decent" well taught systematic and explicit phonics program. Unfortunately, in our profession, the burden is on us to either dig through the claims of effectiveness or find educators with serious research backgrounds who have established credibility to serve as guides for us. There aren't many of them. The book “Making Sense of Research: What's Good, What's Not, and how to Tell the Difference” by Elaine and Patrick McEwan is a relatively easy read and looks at some educational myths not supported by credible research.
Back to Reading Recovery. I helped a parent get one hour of daily tutoring for her child when during her child’s due process, the school district which claimed to have RTI with Reading Recovery gave in when it came down to an examination of the research during my day on the stand. If systematic and explicit phonics programs are the most effective (only) reading instruction for students who are at risk or have learning disabilities, then to unmask RR, one only has to go down the list of "what is a systematic and explicit reading program? Does RR have or do this?" RR simply does not qualify.
Read about why WWC should never have heralded RR at
d-edreckoning.blogspot.com/.../...c-treatment.html Another resource explaining why RR is so ineffective is at: www.wrightslaw.com/info/read.rr.ltr.experts.htm Another helpful resource is in the book "Reading Instruction for Students Who Are At Risk Or Have Disabilities" by Bursuck and Damer. They have tables at the end of each chapter that list characteristics of research based reading programs for the specific critical reading area. Five programs are compared -- one of them being RR.and it’s the only one with all of those “no” checks.

If the school is using RR as the intervention, they simply do not have the basic foundation for RTI – research based intervention. Having WWC say that RR is research-based, makes fighting that claim more difficult. But do you want your physician to cave in and give you a new ineffective drug for an illness when a drug company says that research supports that the new drug is more effective than the old one ----- and there is shoddy little research and it’s all done by the drug company.

Any special education teachers who have worked with students who had RR, know that it’s worse than being just an ineffective program. By using the 1-1 instruction teaching guessing strategies that children with reading learning disabilities tend to use anyway rather than left-to-right decoding strategies, the program is actually teaching dyslexic reading behavior to struggling readers. The best article discussing the damage done by teaching the 3 cueing strategy at the heart of RR is at http://www.balancedreading.com/3cue-adams.html

The Reading Recovery Program is based on some good fundamental teaching practices when it comes to reading instruction that I'm certainly not going to argue with whether they meet the standards of research based or not and I can't imagine they don't. Some of the basic designs of the Reading Recovery Program are that the students receive an additional 30 minutes of daily one-on-one Reading Recovery instruction for up to 20 weeks. The program is geared towards helping the students realize their strengths to become independent readers. They learn to read by composing and writing their own messages. The teachers analyze the student behavior and knowledge to determine instruction. The students are taught to predict, confirm and understand what they read. The selection of reading material comes from over 2,000 small books of increasing difficulties.

Combining reading and writing, teaching predicting and confirming and using a student's strengths rather than their weaknesses to aid in their instruction are all excellent ways to teach reading and insure success. Working with a library of 2,000 non-threatening small books that gradually increase in level of difficulty is certainly a strategy that any good teacher should commend. As far as I can see the Reading Recovery Program is a good one that has had remarkable success with those students who have used it. And, it's based on good reading instruction.

You have to ignore the highest quality research in the area of reading to make the last statement. I know that in education schools, that research is ignored, but it's your responsibility as an educator to start reading it.

I would never disagree about using a student's strengths and any good phonics program does, but the reality is that for most struggling readers and all dyslexics only explicit systematic phonics is the method that will increase achievement so that they are grade level readers by the end of third grade. Why in the face of thousands of studies showing that would you still advocate for a sight word based method of teaching reading? It would be malpractice in the medical if a doctor said to his diabetic patients, "No one likes insulin shots and so I treat all my patients with malteds which they all feel better about."
Please for the children's sake read the following and then after you have read it write that last sentence one more time and say that you still agree with it in the face of overwhelming research to the contrary.
1. Did you go to the link I provided where the top reading researchers in the country wrote a letter about their concerns with Reading Recovery? Read it. www.wrightslaw.com/info/read.rr.ltr.experts.htm
2. Read the National Reading Panel Report in its entirety - it's free on line.
3. Read Sally Shaywitz's book. She's a researcher at Yale Haskins lab where they now can identify the abnormal brain patterns when reading of dyslexic students before and after explicit systematic phonics (after the intensive phonics they look much more like normal brain patterns of skilled readers)Why would anyone opt to use an approach that doesn't bring about those normalizing kinds of visible brain changes on an MRI? If you were born with a physical problem in one leg and intensive physical therapy would correct it, how would you feel if you went to a doctor who opted to have you swim instead because you enjoyed it more -- and you still had no correction of the problem. link to Yale labhttp://dyslexia.yale.edu/ You'll have to get the Shaywitz book at Amazon.

4. Read about how the 3 cueing strategy got started (at a workshop - no research) and why having children guess from first letter, guess from pictures or context is so damaging to their growth as a reader. I know it's tough to experience the kind of dissonance you have if your ed professors told you that 3 cueing was "best practices" -- kind of like having been brought up as a fundamentalist and trying to leave and find out that things out there are nothing like what you were taught for years. http://www.balancedreading.com/3cue-adams.html Marilyn Adams

5. Read about Raynor's eye resarch www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/rayner.htm -- The scientific community is horrified that schools still teach sight word reading to young learners or use the 3 cueing stratgey because those practices go against everything we have learned about how a skilled reader's eyes move from left-to-right processing text. Anything that disrupts that process is simply teaching bad habits.

6. Read Whole Language Hi Jinks by Louisa Moats www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=367 and after that read her classic book "Speech to Print."

7. Read the interviews by the top reading researchers, including cognitive psychologists, in the United States at www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/index.htm (the videos provide interesting snippets also)

8. Order Rollanda E. O'Connor's Book Teaching Word Recognition: Effective Strategies for Students with Learning Disabilities.

9. Finally, I'd recommend Natalie Rathvon's "Advances in Early Reading Assessment" because she adeptly synopsizes reading instruction and assessment as it relates to highly valid resarch studies.

If your education profs didn't include any of this reading in your coursework and you don't pursue finding out on your own, you've made a decision to stay in that fundamentalist community, basing decisions on dogma rather than research.

I don't disagree with anything you say -- even agree that RR can be good for comprehension, but only if the teacher doesn't teach those dyslexic reading strategies that RR encourages (guessing at words from context or pictures.)

"One size does not fit all" which is what makes well designed RTI effective.

IN a typical kindergarten or first grade, 5% of students come to school having taught themselves to read -- they need to be challenged and in our schools we always had them work with older students which is what the association for the gifted recommends because we are failing our gifted students quite dreadfully in this country. Their scores have decreased the most (although recent data shows that it’s a myth that they’ve gone down during NCLB. The big decrease was in the preceding 20 years.)

20 - 30% of students will learn to read no matter how you teach them to read -- they profit from silent reading and need to be challenged more than we typically do. Although they read well, many of these students will struggle without explicit spelling instruction that starts out emphasizing phonetic spelling, moves to rule-based spelling, and finally covers morphographic spelling by the start of third or fourth grade. We have a generation of kids who were taught by visual spelling methods (most common words - memorize list) and now in college they simply can't spell and it impairs their writing.

20 - 30% of students will only learn to read with some kind of support because it's challenging for them...that could simply be 1-1 because of attention problems; it could be having a good phonics program in the classroom; it could be mom tutors him every night

30% of students will ONLY learn to read with systematic and explicit phonics starting in kindergarten with a teacher who is skilled at teaching it. These students need programs like the DI reading instruction, Wilson, etc. In the US we don't teach these kids to read at grade level.

Only 5% of students should have such serious pervasive reading disabilities that they need special education for many years. In high poverty districts, we found that can go up to 10 – 15%.

A large number of research studies show that the worry about children who can read the words but not comprehend ("word callers” is the derisive term) is relatively small at about 10%. I suspect from my experience that in high poverty districts with many ELL students this goes up to around 20%. But you get much better results working with a child who can read the text but needs comprehension instruction compared to working with a child who can't read the words to start off with. BTW, if a child has 4th grade reading skills, a great comprehension program if taught explicitly with lots of think alouds is Bob Dixon's "Reading Success." His “Spelling through Morphographs" program for older struggling spellers is amazing. His background as a linguist makes for superior instructional design and thus effectiveness.

Phonics instruction is never complete without great comprehension instruction including
1, the teaching of comprehension strategies (I see way too much comprehension that focuses on picture walks/prediction before the story and questions at the end of the story. This is not the kind of comprehension instruction I’m referring to. Picture walks/prediction are fine, but the goal of comprehension instruction is to get the learner to do it independently. By third grade, kids are completely bored doing this every day and meanwhile no one is explicitly teaching them to identify the main idea or how to summarize without including details.)
2. ongoing vocabulary instruction throughout the day
3. solid core knowledge to gain long term memory information for later doing critical thinking in science and social studies (names of continents, countries, what is magnetism, names of shapes, etc.) Montessori programs do this amazingly well. You don’t leave kindergarten without knowing your continents; in first grade you learn to identify different kinds of rocks and what’s distinctive about each one, etc.
4. fluency (about 30 – 40% of students need systematic practice with text they can read with 97% accuracy)
5. a matching spelling program emphasizing first phonetic spelling, then rule based spelling and finally morphographic spelling.
6. Explicit writing instruction should provide a chance for the child to integrate these skills into her writing

As students move into the Consolidated Reading Phase, they also need advanced word reading instruction. Even those students mentioned above who learn to read effortlessly, profit from advanced phonics practice reading new multisyllabic words if they are also learning the meaning of the prefixes, suffixes and root words.

The problem in many school districts is teachers don’t have enough time to do language arts right. If a child needs intensive reading intervention for the 60 – 90 minutes small group that is required to make progress, he misses out of the great vocabulary and comprehension strategies being taught in class (if the teacher is directly teaching them.) Districts that have 120 minute reading/spelling blocks can do all of this and I can’t imagine trying to do it with high risk kids in poverty areas without that amount of time.

I might sound strident, but I've been in way too many reading classrooms, where whisper and silent reading is the only type of reading taking place, phonics is limited to 5 or 10 minutes in K - 2nd grade when it should be emphasized, DRAs are used to assess student progress leading to inflated reading grade level scores, and children with learning disabilities in reading don't have access to the very structured scientific reading that is the only method of teaching that will get them caught up to grade level. Because I live in a part of the country where Reading Recovery was introduced as a new whole language teaching method from New Zealand, many districts have no teacher who know how to teach phonics, no decodable books in the entire building, and no phonics curriculum owned by the district for special ed teachers to use if they knew how to use it. After awhile, you realize that effectively teaching reading to students from poverty and those wiht learning disabilities is one of the biggest social justice issues of our age. One of the best predictors of jail cells needed in a state is the number of middle school students not reading to proficieny.

Ladies (and Gentlemen),

Now that it seems your conversation has been resolved, I would just like to mention that there is a really interesting program that you might want to look into. It is based in Reading Recovery, but adds in the phonics component it lacks.

Darrell Morris, a professor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina is one of the founders of this program, and has recently published a book outlining his program. It is titled Diagnosis and Correction of Reading Problems. The Howard Street Tutoring Manual is another book of his that outlines his program nicely. The phonics program is very sequential, starting with beginning sounds and moving through multisyllabic words. Comprehension is also addressed, and sight word knowledge is encouraged because there are some words that simply do not decode. I really like the program, and it has been very successful. He acknowledges that for dyslexic students this program would not be enough, that they may need something even more structured like the Wilson method, but it does address many of the readers who could succeed with just a little extra help.

I wish I could respond to all of the comments that Mary and Bernice make but I think that would take an article or at least a chapter in a book. I don't have that much time right now.

What I do want to comment on is that Mary's posts reveal many assumptions she has about how children learn to read that then determine her selection of research studies, web sites, reading programs in the classroom, etc. So do I. I think that is the basis of our disagreement and unfortunately, Mary, your posts are somewhat condescending. I don't need a treatise about teaching children to read. I would prefer more concise posts that don't assume I am an uninformed teacher that doesn't read research or theory.

I agree with Bernice that the most important thing teachers can do is to look at each child's strengths in order to determine what she or he needs to learn next. Only then can we make appropriate choices with regards to the most effective strategy, technique, etc for teaching that child so that she or he can make progress as a reader and writer.

Hi Bernice,
Unfortunately, there are teachers out there (just as there are in other professions) who would rather others take care of the kids who are difficult to teach or challenge our beliefs and practices.

One question I have about RTI is whether it's considered "good practice" or is it another mandate handed down from on high? If it's the latter then that may explain some of the reluctance on the part of teachers. Often, when we don't have a say in what we are being asked to do and did not participate in its creation, it becomes another hurdle to jump in the course of carrying out one's duties in schools. I am a firm believer that teachers need to be involved in the development of all initiatives at every step of the way. I see the new push for National Standards has no teachers in the primary reviewing group. How would doctors feel about not being included in the development/review/critique of new initiatives? No need to answer. That was a rhetorical question.

I know what you mean about having no say. I'm afraid RTI came from above just like No Child Left Behind, NCLB. However, I do think the Response to Intervention actually does have a good basis. It is good teaching and it's something that was supposed to have been done all along. With the coming year being one of no pay raises including no cost of living increases it's hard to convince anyone they need to do more. However, RTI is good responding to a child's needs. A teacher should intervene as soon as a child is not responding to good teaching. With RTI there is more of a standardized protocol of what to do once that intervention is begone.