9486 in the collection  

Measure for measure, teaching approach gaining popularity

Ohanian Comment: I
worry that the teacher so focused on the data
can't see the child. I worry that RTI is one
more example of how "Data driven" has come to
mean child abuse. RTI appears to be one more
way to standardize education so that anybody
can do it, denying the need for specialists.

This is one more example of press release
masquerading as news item. It offers no
critical view. January23, 2008, Education
Week published an article, which includes
some criticism of RTI. Reader comments are
interesting.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/01/23/20
rtireact.h27.html


By Sarah Lemagie

One by one, elementary students sat down at
long tables in the cafeteria at Loring School
in north Minneapolis. They read aloud while an
instructor kept time to see how many words they
could get correctly in ... one minute.

As instructor Sarah Scheller's timer buzzed at
the far end of the room, fourth-grader Kieran
Stomberg looked up from the story he was
reading. "How do you feel about that one?" she
asked. "It's fun!" Kieran said, flashing a
smile full of braces and high-fiving Scheller
when she told him his score.

Rattling through 170 words is a snap for some
students, but for others, getting through 30 or
40 can be an arduous task, full of hesitation
and mistakes.

The test -- taken by every student at Loring
three times a year -- is part of an
increasingly popular teaching philosophy that
aims to improve achievement among all students
while getting fast, effective help to the kids
who need it most.

It's a framework that, for some schools, has
reduced the number who end up needing special
education.

A few Minnesota schools that have used the
model for years say they have seen a dramatic
improvement in elementary students' reading
skills, as well as a drop in those identified
as learning-disabled. Now state educators are
taking an in-depth look at the framework
through a three-year federal grant, and the
Legislature has pumped $1 million into a two-
year effort -- now at its midway point -- to
train and support schools that want to adopt
the approach.

Nearly 40 schools and districts are receiving
coaching this year with the legislative
funding, from Vista View Elementary in
Burnsville to Congdon Park Elementary in
Duluth. And a growing number of schools are
sending staff to conferences about it,
including one in Rochester this month. Its
spread, supporters say, signals a major change
in the way schools find and help struggling
students.

"It keeps kids from being referred for special
education, it meets needs earlier and it just
helps kids learn better," said Mia Urick, lead
staff member at the Minnesota Administrators
for Special Education.

Data looked at often
Response
to Intervention (RTI) is a data-driven
approach to reading, math and sometimes even
classroom behavior that screens all students
and groups them based on achievement. At Loring
School, young readers who are having the most
trouble work in smaller groups, and their
progress is assessed every one or two weeks,
instead of three times a year. Reading
instructors meet once a month to go over their
students' data, which includes scores from
district and state tests. If one research-based
teaching strategy isn't working for a
particular student, they try another.
"We look at the data, and that's how we plan
for our instruction," said Loring Principal
Jane Thompson.

RTI has been around for years, and many school
districts have long used some of its
principles. But its popularity has grown
nationally since 2004, when the reauthorization
of a key federal special education law
implicitly endorsed RTI by, among other
changes, allowing its use to help identify
students with learning disabilities. It also
comes at a time when schools are facing tougher
standards under No Child Left Behind, as well
as high costs for providing special education.
RTI can save money by reducing the number of
students who need special education, said Matt
Burns, an associate professor of educational
psychology at the University of Minnesota who
has long studied the approach. In one case, he
said, a Michigan school district reported
saving roughly $2 million to $3 million a year
with RTI. But other districts say it's a wash,
partly because the approach often has special
education teachers spending more time in
general ed classrooms.

Research on RTI's effectiveness is fairly thin
for students beyond elementary school and in
subjects other than reading.

Still, a few Minnesota schools are collecting
striking data: The St. Croix River Education
District (SCRED), which runs special education
and other services for five east-central
Minnesota districts, has been using RTI
principles for a dozen years. In 1996, a
struggling St. Croix River first-grader scoring
in the 10th percentile on the one-minute
reading test -- which correlates well with
overall reading ability -- could get through 15
words. In 2007, a student in the same
percentile could read 39 words in a minute.
And in the last decade, the percentage of
students identified as learning disabled has
dropped by about 50 percent.

"We're preventing kids from ever needing
special education because we're able to catch
their problems early and fix them before they
become too severe," said Kim Gibbons, executive
director of SCRED.

No longer waiting to fail?
Nationwide, nearly 14 percent of public school
students -- about 6.8 million children -- are
in special education for conditions ranging
from autism to hearing impaired. Roughly 2.7
million of those kids get the service because
of a learning disability such as dyslexia,
according to the National Center for Learning
Disabilities.

The reason that fewer students may end up with
the "learning disabled" label in classrooms
that use RTI has a lot to do with how schools
have traditionally identified those students,
educators say.

"The old special education model is a 'wait to
fail' model," said Ann Casey, director of the
Minnesota Response to Intervention Center,
which received the legislative funding to help
more schools roll out RTI.

The standard, "wait to fail" model defines a
learning disability as a discrepancy between a
child's IQ and his or her classroom
achievement. But establishing that discrepancy
can take years, and learning-disabled students
who need special education often don't qualify
for the service until fourth or fifth grade,
Gibbons said.

"You very rarely identify little kids," she
said. "They never qualify because they haven't
failed long enough."

In many cases, the problem isn't with the child
as much as with the teaching, Gibbons said. "A
lot of kids end up in that category because
they haven't gotten good, scientific-based
reading instruction," she said.
Fears and challenges

Proponents say RTI holds promise to help
educators do a better job of identifying
learning-disabled kids, but some parents are
worried.

"Parents have expressed concern about not
wanting their child to get stuck in RTI too
long," when what they really need is special
education, said Virginia Richardson, manager of
parent training at PACER Center, a Minnesota-
based advocacy group for families of children
with disabilities. The calls from parents
peaked, she said, after the 2004
reauthorization of the federal Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act.

RTI isn't meant to replace special education
evaluations, which, by law, parents can ask for
at any time.

"The point is to get the correct services to
the kid as early as possible," Urick said. "If
the correct service means referral for special
education, then that's what we do."
RTI faces other hurdles, including the
difficulty of getting schools the resources and
training they need to roll it out effectively
in the classroom.

"In my opinion, the chances of successful RTI
implementation at the national level are quite
slim, but individual schools can be
successful," Burns wrote in an e-mail. "In
education we have a long history of trying the
new thing to come along, but then not
implementing it correctly and ... giving up on
it because it didn't work."




— Sarah Lemagie
Star Tribune
2008-09-07


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