In March, 2013, Phi Delta Kappan ran a tombstone, R.I.P. RTI,
and an future Obituary announcing the death of Response to
Intervention (1982-2018) with an article:
"Seven ways to kill RTI."
The newspaper of the National Association of School Psychologists
had an article:
"RTI WILL Fail, Unless..."
On November 11, 2015, Education Week published an article:
"Study: RTI Practice Falls Short of Promise -
First Graders Who Were Identified for More Help Fell Further Behind"
(the largest National study ever done on RTI - 20,000 students in
13 States - documented the failure of RTI), and I believe published
its obituary.
It turns out the reason RTI has failed is simple: instead of teaching
students, teachers and everyone else (in some schools every person
physically in the building is expected to contribute to RTI) are using a
huge variety of interventions on a student, changing them after failure,
again and again after more failure, testing and testing and testing,
and charting and charting and charting often using AIMSWEB, etc.
In other words everyone in RTI is very busy doing almost everything
EXCEPT spending almost every minute directly teaching.
These same results (academic achievement actually declining) were
detailed in a 2010 report, paid for by the Illinois State Board of Education
(using funds from a Federal grant), studying RTI in the 57 school buildings in
Illinois that had received the most assistance in implementing RTI.
A couple of the "Seven ways to kill RTI": #4 Searching for quick fixes;
#5 Believing that commercially produced intervention programs, rather
than highly trained, knowledgeable educators, can improve reading.
Quotes from "RTI WILL Fail, Unless...":
"RTI represents the best venue for school psychologists to implement
desired roles since the calls for role change and expansion started
over 50 years ago."
"It now almost seems unfortunate that RTI was institutionalized in
special education regulations."
"Are we attempting to identify children who are truly learning disabled?
[that is the ONLY use of RTI included in IDEA 2004]
If so then RTI is ALMOST INDEFENSIBLE because labeling a child
with a disability due to a lack of adequate response to effective
interventions is basing a diagnosis on prognosis." (emphasis added)
"A child who fails to respond to intervention is identified as LD
because the non-responsiveness predicts a continued lack of
adequate response and, therefore, must be manifesting a
disability."
"This represents the same high inference logic as current diagnostic
approaches such as the discrepancy model or identifying processing
deficits."
"If one accept this, then using RTI data to diagnose a disability is
using data that leads to treatments with assumed outcomes, and it
is the failure to achieve those outcomes that results in the diagnoses."
"Gerber (2005) stated that the RTI approach
does nothing to inform us about learning disabilities."
So RTI (also known as MTSS - Multi-Tiered System of Support)
may have died, but we should all be aware that nothing
ever really dies in education or special education, not even
Facilitated Communication.
Bev Johns
