students with special needs actually learn but to simply allow them to attend school. Based on these results, viewing RTI as merely a new way to qualify a student for traditional special education services is nothing more than creating a new pathway to educational purgatory.
Viewing RTI as a Regular Education Process
Instead of viewing RTI as a process to qualify students for special education, some go to the opposite extreme and see a multitiered system of supports as a way to stop the over-identification of students for special education. While this goal is noble, the unintended consequence is usually detrimental to both regular and special education students. For example, policymakers in one southwestern state dictate that Tier 3 can only serve special education students. This means that regular education staff alone must serve students who need intensive remediation in foundational skills but do not have an identified learning disability.
Often categorical dollars fund the best-trained faculty in areas like reading remediation, language acquisition, and behavior support, which would then deny regular education students access to their expertise. It is unrealistic to expect content-credentialed teachers to have the training equivalent of a reading specialist or school psychologist. This is why federal law acknowledges this need and allows early intervening services, in which a percentage of a district’s special education resources can be used in preventive ways for students who demonstrate the need for these services but don’t have a disability (Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act [IDEIA], 2004).
Creating this artificial divide between regular and special education staff also hurts special education students. Special education teachers cannot be content experts in every subject at every grade level. Yet many individualized education programs (IEPs) assign special education staff to provide supplemental interventions in multiple content areas. To implement RTI effectively, we cannot view it as regular education or special education. Instead, educators should base interventions on each student’s individual needs, and assign staff based on who is best trained to meet each need. We are not suggesting that schools should discontinue special education services altogether, or that educators can disregard student IEPs. What we are suggesting is that special education law now advocates for providing schools much more flexibility to meet all students’ needs. But taking advantage of this requires schools to rethink the way regular and special education have worked for years.
Building Interventions on an Ineffective Core Instructional Program
A school with weak and ineffective teaching will not solve its problems by creating a system of timely interventions for students. Eventually, the number of students it is attempting to support will crush that system. Interventions cannot make up for a core instructional program functioning in teacher isolation, a culture of “my students and your students,” tracking students by perceived ability and demographic expectations, assessing students with archaic grading practices, and expecting parents and special education to be the primary solution for struggling students. This is why our approach to RTI works best in schools that function as a PLC. The PLC at Work process focuses and unites all the school’s practices toward one mission: to ensure high levels of learning for every student. As long as we view RTI as an appendage to a school’s traditional instructional program, instead of an integral part of a school’s collaborative efforts to ensure all students succeed, a school’s intervention efforts will most likely be ineffective (DuFour, 2015).
Failing to Create a Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum
To learn at high levels, students must have access to essential grade-level curriculum each year. Every student might not leave each school year having mastered every grade-level standard, but every student must master the learning outcomes the school or district has deemed indispensable for future success. Anything less, and the student is on a trajectory to drop out of school.
Working collaboratively as a PLC, educators must create a guaranteed and viable curriculum grade by grade, course by course, and unit by unit that represents the skills, content knowledge, and behaviors every student must master to achieve this goal. Equally important, they must ensure students have access to this essential, grade-level curriculum as part of their Tier 1 core instructional program. With the rare exception of those few students who have profound disabilities, there should be no track of core instruction that focuses exclusively on below-grade-level skills.
Tragically, many schools assume their most at-risk students are incapable of learning at grade level and, instead, replace these students’ core instruction with Tier 3 remedial coursework. If a student receives below-grade-level instruction all day, where will he or she end up at the end of the year? Below grade level, of course. Educators must provide Tier 3 interventions in addition to Tier 1 essential grade-level curriculum, not in place of it.
Tragically, many schools assume their most at-risk students are incapable of learning at grade level.
Using Mismatched and Misused Assessments
Interventions are most effective when they target a student’s specific learning needs. This requires assessment data that can identify the specific standard, learning target, skill, or behavior that a student lacks. Unfortunately, many schools use broad indicators to drive their interventions, including report card grades, state or provincial assessments, district benchmark results, or universal screening scores. The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance’s study validates this common implementation mistake. It finds that most schools’ RTI implementation is fairly rigid, using a single test to identify students for Tier 2 and a standard set of interventions once they get there (as cited in Sparks, 2015). These assessments usually measure multiple standards and then report a student’s results in a single composite score. While this information can be helpful in identifying the students who need additional help, it is insufficient for assigning students with specific interventions.
Educators must provide interventions in addition to Tier 1 essential grade-level curriculum, not in place of it.
Relying Too Heavily on Purchased Intervention Programs
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and IDEIA advocate using interventions based on “research that involves the application of rigorous, systematic, and objective procedures to obtain reliable and valid knowledge relevant to educational activities and programs” (IDEIA, 2004). As a result, some districts have created lists of approved interventions that constitute the only programs their schools can use which, in turn, restricts a school’s ability to creatively meet each student’s individual needs. Furthermore, outside of primary reading, a limited number of scientifically research-based interventions is available for each subject and grade level.
Some schools and districts have fallen into the trap of searching for the perfect product to buy that will help all their struggling readers, writers, or mathematics students. For example, a school might purchase a Tier 3 reading intervention program and then place all its struggling readers into it. The problem is that at-risk readers don’t all struggle for the same reason, so there is no one program that addresses every student’s unique needs. Some very good, scientific research-based products are available that can become powerful, targeted tools in a school’s intervention toolbox—but there is no silver bullet solution for all struggling students. Improving student achievement requires job-embedded, ongoing processes, not disjointed programs.
Perpetuating Ineffective Interventions
A system of interventions can only be as effective as the individual interventions it comprises. When we work with schools, we often have them list their current site interventions. At practically every school, the list includes remedial support classes of varying types, study hall opportunities, summer school, retention, and special education—interventions that research concludes are generally ineffective (Buffum et al., 2012; Hattie, 2009). For example, the research on retention shows that it does not promote higher levels
