It's Coming: Response to Intervention

The newly released federal regulations for IDEA 2004 say that states MUST allow schools to use Response to Intervention and CAN'T make them use the discrepancy model...

And on top of that, the regs say that an eligibility committee can decide that a child has a specific learning disability if "the child does not make sufficient progress ...when using a process based on the child's response to scientific, research-based intervention..." which makes it sound like that without the Response to Intervention (RtI) model, it may be impossible under the new regs to identify learning disabilities.

We're going to take a closer look at the RtI model. We already have one article online about Response to Intervention that simply described the model.

Coming up in a couple of days we'll look at some of the problems the model will pose for identifying learning disabilities in particular. Quantifying the decision to place a child in special education looks set to become much more difficulty, which means that when parents disagree with the decision they will have a much harder time winning in the due process.

In just over a week we'll look at the benefits the RtI model brings to the school setting. RtI has the potential to help children that in the past simply went without help. The model could also bring the expertise of reading specialists and learning disabilities specialists together and make them find a joint approach to the problems that students have in the classroom.

And then later this month we're going to take a look at the evaluation process itself - particularly at the role of IQ testing in the future. The day may soon come when a school principal doesn't have to wait for a very busy certified school psychologist to find the time to spend half a day evaluating Johnny's "cognitive function." The decision that Johnny has a learning disorder may not require an IQ test anymore. But that's a point of contention we'll look at in some detail (and the truth is that only time and court cases are likely to provide the answer with any certainty).

While discussion of those topics is more or less set in stone this month, we may also eventually look at the tone of RtI. I've heard it said that the reponse to intervention model had to be implemented because so many learning disabilities were being caused by bad teaching. We may talk about that.

The RtI model also has the potential to change the way school districts think about inclusion. My guess is that there will be pressure on schools to move students who are self-contained back into the general education classroom to see if they respond to interventions there. Doing that could also free up instructional time for special education teachers to do some of the Tier II intervention work.

We look forward to having you here with us as we examine the impact of RtI over the next few weeks...