Response to Instruction and Intervention:a substantial rise in special education equity

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, AS TENNESSEE ROLLED out new academic standards, the state confronted a two-part problem.

First, there was ample evidence that lower-per-forming students were not making the progress they needed to access grade-level material, an issue that was only likely to worsen given the more rigorous demands of the new standards.

Second, data suggested that a large contingent of struggling students were being identified with a specific learning disability (SLD) for reasons that were as likely to be related to unmet instructional needs as they were to any definite disability. The result was that poor, minority, and male students were highly overrepresented in the special education population, and they were disproportionately likely to receive a disability label that would then stick with them through-out their school career.

These two concerns led the Tennessee State Board of Education to adopt Response to Instruction and Intervention (RTI²) in July 2014.

RTI² is a framework for teaching and learning that in-cludes regular screenings to identify student areas of need and a tiered model of intervention for those that need additional help. In Tennessee, it is also used to determine the eligibility of students to receive special education services for specific learning disabilities (SLD).

Thisreport describes the Tennessee Department of Education’s reflections and conclusions from the last several years of RTI² in Tennessee.

Since RTI² was first implemented in Tennessee, there have been significant drops in the number of students identified with an SLD and a substantial rise in the equity of identification across different student subgroups. However, there has been considerable variation in the quality of implementation across the state.