RTI greatly differs from the resource room placement trend of the 1970’s and the pre-referral interventions of the 1980’s. RTI is suppose to provide early intervention for struggling readers which directly contrasts the old wait as see method taken on by special education. It was always assumed that you needed to wait until 2nd or 3rd grade to identify students with learning disabilities so you do not miss-diagnose a student.

Today there are many early screening tools and reading readiness tests that are widely available and have much better predictive validity rates than what was around in the early 80’s and 70’s. The IQ test use to be seen as the best predictor of student success. The discrepancy model compared student IQ’s with their actual reading scores, seems very unreliable now with all of the new research using phonological awareness, and letter identification assessments. More valid screening tools and methods are being created every day. These tools include oral reading fluency, word identification, nonsense word fluency assessments, and also phoneme segmentation skill assessments.Pre-referral interventions or suggestions of practical things to try before putting students through what was often thought of as unnecessary standardized tests made by a team of educators, including the classroom teacher, are applaudable in their effort but fall short of what is needed.

The ideas of things to try were often based on teacher anecdotal descriptions of the student academic and behavioral observations however. These are often biased descriptions given by teachers fed up with the student’s behavior, not data driven which RTI is. Suggestions that come out of these team meetings are not very scientific and often are designed to help the social structure of your whole classroom, the student’s social standing or identify and correct the students learning struggles.

They are often not based on research that will give the teachers strategies to improve his or her overall ability to teach reading and meet the diverse needs of students in his classroom. So in reality the intervention were not focus on the student’s inability to read but focused on ways for the teacher to help control the child’s behavior. They often do not help to child learn to read in my opinion. So there was a need for RTI and it can work when it is done right.
I want to hear how you do RTI at your school. I know of some schools who have an RTI time built into the school day where all kids who receive interventions do so at the same time and the rest of the kids in the school complete enrichment activities. This can work but research shows that you get the best results from student when they receive interventions from trained professionals, not support staff which often happens when you have a time set up like this. There are compelling reasons to do this type of RTI time also if you have a lot of students who read interventions. If you are at a school that has only 10% of your students who need interventions then it may not be the best use of time or personnel. I ask if you have more than 10-15% of your students receiving then is the teaching in the classrooms not as effective as it need to be? Each school has their own unique situations and it is important to remember that RTI is not a program that has to be followed like so many urban schools hold on to these days. Please send me your comments.