What seems to have gotten lost in the development of RTI initiatives is that federal law indicates that RTI is to be a general education initiative. No roles for special education teachers or school psychologists are indicated in the law except at the very end when the RTI tiered approach to addressing the lagging achievement has failed to accelerate reading development of a very few kids.Thus, after a year or two of providing increasingly more expert and more intensive reading instruction, the general education community may refer the struggling readers for special education services. But largely, one would expect that schools would follow the process set forth in the law to create problem-solving teams of classroom teachers, reading specialists, and school administrators who would develop and deliver the RTI instructional services, basically separate from special education personnel.

It seems that the provision in the law that allows the general education RTI teams to take 15 percent of a district’s special education budget to support RTI efforts has created an incentive for special education personnel to be involved in an attempt to protect their budget by assuming roles in RTI (rather than losing their jobs to support the employment of more general educators or reading specialists to deliver RTI instruction as intended by the law). This is understandable but simply unintended by the federal law. At the root of the law was the evidence that Congress heard on the failure of the special education services to accelerate reading development, in contrast to the NICHD sponsored research showing 98 percent of all students can be reading on level if schools only provided more and better classroom reading instruction plus a daily expert tutorial that typically began in kindergarten (e.g., Mathes, et al, 2006;Vellutino, et al, 1996; 2006).

Thus, Congress rewrote education laws such that pupils with disabilities are now an Adequate Yearly Progress group under NCLB and developed RTI to support accelerating the reading development of struggling readers leading to more schools meeting AYP goals in reading for pupils with disabilities. The RTI initiative is also designed to prevent children from being classified as learning disabled simply because no one offered more and better reading instruction to them.

If Congress has its way, fewer than 2 percent of all students will fail to achieve on-level reading proficiency thus dramatically reducing the numbers of children labeled LD while also reducing federal expenditures for special education services. And Congress is quite clear that research is on their side, while current school practices with struggling readers is largely uninformed by the research available and, thus, continue creating more LD children.

So, in the end schools will be judged by how successful they are in reducing special education enrollments while also improving the numbers of children reading on level. The law makes no mention of tiers or of the use of packaged programs. It does require schools engage in monitoring the progress of students receiving RTI services but that means monitoring reading development, not monitoring sub-skill development. The law also requires that schools use research-based evidence supporting the reading instruction that is intensified (Allington, 2009). But the research on commercial programs indicates on one program had strong evidence it improved reading achievement (that was Reading Recovery),while almost none of the 150 commercial reading programs reviewed had any unbiased research supporting their use. But that doesn’t mean that the research provides no guidelines for effective RTI instruction, just that no commercial developer has yet managed to produce a product that reliably improves reading achievement.

In the end RTI may be the last, best hope of schools to adopt the research-based practices that have so clearly demonstrated that reading failures are about the quality and quantity of reading instruction children receive rather than something inherent in the children themselves. The question Congress is asking is: Can schools use the research to respond in ways that largely and finally eliminates reading failure in schools?

References

Allington, R. L. (2009). What really matters in response to intervention: Research-     based designs.Boston: Allyn & Bacon, Inc.

Mathes, P. G., Denton, C. A., Fletcher, J. M.,Anthony, J. L., Francis, D. J., & Schatschneider,C. (2005). The effects of theoretically different instruction and student characteristicson the skills of struggling readers. Reading Research Quarterly,40(2), 148–182.

Vellutino, F. R., Scanlon, D., Sipay, E. R.,Small, S. G., Pratt, A., Chen, R., &      Denckla,M. B. (1996). Cognitive profiles of difficult-to-remediate and readily remediated poorreaders: Early intervention as a vehicle for distinguishing between cognitive andexperiential deficits as basic causes of specific reading      disability. Journal of Educational Psychology,88(4), 601–638.

Vellutino, F. R., Scanlon, D. M., Small, S.,& Fanuele, D. P. (2006). Response to  intervention as a vehicle for distinguishing between children with and without  reading disabilities:Evidence for the role of kindergarten and first-grade interventions. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 39(2), 157–169.