B2E News Alert – Education Business Intelligence

News Alert Homepage › White Papers

Response to Intervention – A Path to Educational Reform?

Anne Wujcik

Response to Intervention - A Path to Educational Reform?


Language in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 and the more recent Individuals with Disabilities Act of 2004 (IDEA 04) have given rise to widespread interest in Response to Intervention (RtI) in states and school districts across the country. In essence, RtI is a teaching process designed to bring better instruction to all students, using research-based curricula proven to result in successful outcomes. Also integral to RtI is:

• School wide screening to identify students in need of targeted interventions;
• Collaborative problem solving to identify interventions proven to meet student needs;
• Frequent progress monitoring of student response to interventions; and
• Data-driven decision making to track progress and inform instruction.

This fall the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDE) and the Council of Administrators of Special Education (CASE) will release a series of “Blueprints” – documents intended to guide state, school district and building-level implementation of RtI. The body of work accomplished by NASDE and others reflects the high level of interest and activity around RtI – not only within the world of special education but in the general education world as well.

In an online interview with QED, Nancy Reder, NASDE Executive Deputy Director wrote: NASDE’s position is that RtI is the future of general education and that it is a strategy that can be used to improve teaching and learning for all students.”

NASDE and other like-minded groups want to see NCLB and IDEA 04 more closely aligned and are pushing for inclusion of key components of IDEA 04 in the reauthorization of NCLB, including:

• Early intervention services for students before they are referred to special education;
• Measures to address over-identification of minority students for special education;
• Differentiated instruction in the general education setting; and
• RtI as a process to meet the needs of all students.

The Push from Washington
For years there has been growing support for RtI among researchers, educators and within the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). Most recently, discussion drafts to reauthorize NCLB released In September 2007 by the House Committee on Education and Labor have incorporated central tenets of
RtI. Already IDEA 04 provides funds to support Early Intervening Services (EIS). The Act allows school districts to allocate 15% of their IDEA Part B funds for EIS in general education classrooms and requires them to do so if a disproportionate number of ethnic and minority students in the district are identified with specific learning disabilities (SLD).

A real spike in RtI initiatives around the country came with language in IDEA 04. The Act and its
2006 regulations specify that states must adopt criteria for determining whether a child has a specific learning disability.

Demise of the Discrepancy Model – The “Wait to Fail” Approach
The discrepancy model – measuring the gap between students’ IQ test scores and their achievement levels relative to age and grade level to determine if they have a learning disability – has long been acknowledged to have two inherent weaknesses. First, students are tested in response to their failure and don’t get the help they need early on when it’s most useful. Second, although the model can legitimately identify students with SLD, it can also inaccurately identify students whose lack of achievement is due to other factors such as inadequate instruction, poverty, and limited English proficiency.

In contrast, the RtI model, with its goal of helping students earlier and more accurately identifying students with learning disabilities, has ignited not only interest but some real passion among educators long dissatisfied with the discrepancy model. In late summer of 2007, QED talked with a group of Colorado educators about the strengths and challenges of RtI as a solution to help students learn. Here are some of their thoughts about RtI – from the philosophical to the practical.

The RtI Solution – Colorado Educators Speak Out

Not unlike their colleagues across the country, Colorado educators speak of RtI in broad terms, not only as a method of teaching and learning but as a new way of looking at how schools are structured and instruction delivered. Some refer to it as school improvement, others as a paradigm shift, systems change or whole school reform.

Response to Intervention, November 2007

Daphne Pereles, who oversees implementation of RtI initiatives for the Colorado Department of Education (CDE), takes it a step further, "It’s not even whole school reform," she said. "it’s educational reform. From the highest levels all the way down. It really is a different way of approaching education as we know it." Pereles is passionate about RtI as a process that holds real promise to help all students learn. "It’s kind of like NCLB crashing into the IDEA Act of 2004. Which is really a good thing because it levels the playing field and allows us to look at laws about instruction for all kids," Pereles said. While almost all states and school districts across the country now are in various stages of implementation of RtI, a few states such as Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania are widely reported to have robust RtI initiatives "It’s incredibly exciting, and there’s a lot of energy around it (RtI) right now," Pereles said. Two years ago the CDE convened a task force of special and general educators to examine RtI and develop a working model to help school districts implement the RtI process. The classic three-tier pyramid model

details the varied levels of instruction and intervention integral to RtI. At the broad bottom base of the pyramid – Tier I or the Universal Level – all students receive high-quality research-based instruction that includes screening and frequent progress monitoring and assessments. In Tier II, students identified as at-risk through Tier I assessments (an estimated five to 15 percent of the student population) receive targeted interventions, either in small groups or through individual instruction. In Tier III, students receive more intense interventions. This group is estimated to comprise one to five percent of all students. Students can move back and forth among the tiers, depending on their

response to interventions. Last year CDE convened a state wide RtI Implementation Team of parents, superintendents, curriculum directors, special education directors, and Title I program directors. "Everyone was at the table," Pereles said. "We began looking at the pieces and the components of RtI. Standard protocols, problem-solving models typically used with individual students. How you use multiple sources of data. We looked at curriculum across tiers. What do we do for all, for some, for a few? Where are our gaps? Where are we missing pieces in instruction and intervention for students falling behind?"

CDE will release an RtI guidebook for school districts this fall. "We’re having districts calling right and left to get some guidance about how to begin, how to begin thinking differently and to begin doing some of this work," Pereles said. "It’s about stepping outside of your school and looking at it differently. Looking at data differently and using it differently. Looking at the structures of your school, putting together a system that allows for collaborative work, that forces collaboration, so that all kids are everybody’s kids," she said.

Role Changes and Restructuring Require "a ton of PD"

For districts wanting to implement RtI, professional development is critical, as Pereles points out. "It’s enormous, it’s huge. Its (RtI) implementation requires a ton of PD and a ton of support. We’ve done a lot of work around role changes with school psychologists, LD (learning disabilities) teachers, with speech language therapists – all across the board. "With RtI you rethink your resources. It’s no longer a teacher sitting alone in her classroom. From what I’ve heard and seen, teachers feel much more supported in an RtI system. Because they don’t have to be the answer for all 30 of those kids looking at them. They are able to ask for support for kids."

Early Identification

A key feature of RtI, especially for special educators, is that through screening and frequent progress monitoring students get help earlier. "It’s incredibly exciting for special educators," Pereles says, "because a lot of times kids weren’t put in special education or given the instruction that special education teachers have until they were so far behind – three to four years in reading. Research clearly shows that we’ll never catch them up. We can close the gap, but catching kids up is impossible when the gap is three to four years. Special education teachers were given those kids all the time and expected to take out their magic wand. "With RtI, special education teachers are able to get in there and help kids before they are ever staffed (for special education)," notes Pereles. NASDE’s Reder agrees. "What RtI does is change the approach towards teaching ALL students, identifying students early that need additional instructional support and trying different approaches of instructional support to see if the student can make progress. "NCLB, as well as changes to IDEA, are having the result of moving more students with disabilities back into the general education classroom as opposed to isolating them. In many cases, school districts are using co-teaching (a general education and a special education teacher in the same classroom) to help students with disabilities."

Archuleta School District 50 – RtI Comes to a Rural Colorado School District

Bill Esterbrook, Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction at the Archuleta School District 50 in Pagosa Springs, CO helps drive the district’s RtI efforts. "We’re beginning our fourth year with RtI," Esterbrook said. "Full implementation begins this year in the district’s four schools, which comprise 1,700 students. Over the last four years Esterbrook said he’s learned a lot. "When we first started with RtI, we failed miserably. We saw it as a program, and we didn’t really realize the importance of having small, instructionally focused groups of teachers." Now Esterbrook says he recognizes the two absolute essentials of RtI: good data and a collaborative school environment. "The thing we’ve found is that where there is an excellent relationship to RtI and Professional Learning Communities (PLC), that’s where the growth happens. What we believe is that if you’re doing RtI correctly, then you must be doing PLC."

The Three-Team Approach

The district’s RtI implementation plan revolves around a three-team process that provides instructional support to teachers as well as oversight and monitoring of instructional practices. The Grade/Content Level Team of teachers within specific grades or content areas identifies, designs and implements interventions for whole classrooms, groups of students, and individual students. The team also monitors and shares data about the success of various interventions. If a student fails to respond positively to interventions, the team refers the student to the Building Problem Analysis Team. Members of that team are selected by the school principal and consist of one or more staff members who have completed training in problem analysis. The chief goal of the team is to identify the root causes for a student’s lack of progress. After reviewing the data they might enlist the expertise of a speech therapist, a school psychologist, a reading or math specialist, or an occupational therapist to prescribe more specific and intensive interventions. Should the Building Problem Analysis Team be unable to help the student, the Student Success Team, which consists of the school principal, the counselor, two or more regular education teachers and the school psychologist, reviews the data and decides on a next course of action. The team might ask for more information from the Grade/Content Level team, devise a new plan, or request permission of the parents for a comprehensive evaluation of the student, which could result in referral to special education.

"The Student Success Team is a very powerful team," Esterbrook said. "When you talk about a team that impacts achievement and how teachers address student needs, their recommendations and their report are binding, and

there’s no coming back from it. "Our goal (with the three-team process) is to put special education out of business, so to speak. And absolutely decrease over-identification for special education," Esterbrook said. But he also is quick to modify that stance, saying – "One of the things you have to be careful about is not keeping a kid in an RtI process for eight weeks if it is very apparent that he has some really significant learning disabilities." Leadership is essential to making the three-team process work and in Pagosa Springs the principals are the designated RtI experts in their schools. "Principals have to become the academic leaders of their buildings. They need the ability to collect accurate data and meet with teachers in meaningful ways to guide instruction. If they have the data, they can influence instruction. Overtime, discipline (problems) will go down, attendance will improve," Esterbrook said.

Data: The Driver

Esterbrook, like other RtI proponents, passionately believes that data should be the driver. His district now has data days where, together, teachers pour over data from reports with color-coded bar graphs that display not only individual student growth but progress within groups of students by ethnicity, Title I and other factors. One of the strengths of RtI is that student progress is assessed by looking at multiple data sources, not just the state CSAP test scores. Esterbrook also predicts that assessment tools will change. "I think a lot of assessments we’re currently using will probably go by the wayside. There needs to be a lot of work done on progress monitoring tools that you can use to administer some really quick probes to see how kids are doing. I haven’t found anything in the upper classes, particularly in math but also in reading and writing, that provides you with probes that are grade appropriate." Still, Esterbrook says he’s beginning to see results, particularly in schools that have set aside time during the day for teachers to share data and plan collaboratively. "In those buildings there’s more trust among teachers and we’ve started seeing some really decent growth in student achievement."

Esterbrook also reports progress in math. "Our teachers are learning how to teach math through the RtI process," Esterbrook said. "Each grade level has a math specialist that teaches all of the math classes for that grade. Overall, third and fourth grade CSAP scores in math were higher than ever before. And when you do actual cohort studies (just the kids that were here in third grade and how they did in fourth grade), there was a 16 percent increase in kids at advanced and proficient levels," he said. Despite the successes, Esterbrook is quick to admit that much work needs to be done – especially to change school culture. In the high school he points to one content level team where two of the six teachers were resistant to the collaborative process, resistant to frequent assessments and to progress monitoring. The data reflected their antipathy, he said, noting that without fidelity to the process, success won’t happen. But he also understands that changing school cultures takes time. "What could devastate the whole (RtI) process would be the inability of educators, parents, state legislatures, and the federal government to be patient. You’re not going to see quick results," he said.

Denver Public Schools – RtI Implementation in a Large Urban District

For years Denver Public Schools (DPS), like many large urban school districts, has been plagued by low test scores and high drop-out rates. About 36 percent of the district’s 72,000 students are English language learners; an estimated 65 percent are poor. In recent years, with the unflinching pressure of NCLB to boost test scores, changes in IDEA 04, and a new superintendent at the helm, DPS has embraced RtI as a model to improve student performance in the district’s 150 schools. Last year DPS began the phase-in of RtI with 16 pilot programs in elementary, middle and high schools. This year that number has increased to 31. Jack Lindsay, the district’s RtI Development Coordinator, is admittedly passionate about RtI as a district wide "systems change" process and points to the Denver Plan as the basis for its implementation. The document was released 18 months ago to guide the district’s future. It calls for numerous measures to bolster RtI, including:

• Restructuring of leadership to enable principals to focus 75 percent of their time on instruction.

• Supports for teachers, such as Intervention Specialists in classrooms; and professional development on

differentiated instruction, data analysis, and the use of assessment data to inform instruction.

• Flexible scheduling to allow for continuous student assessment, appropriate instructional interventions,

and the flow of students among classrooms to meet instructional needs.

• Data Teams in every school.

To successfully expand RtI district wide and across content areas is clearly reliant on trained leadership and a substantial commitment to professional development at all levels. To that end, in August DPS announced a venture with Metropolitan State College and Sopris West Educational Services, a Colorado-based Cambian Learning Company, to pilot a new National RtI Certification program – The Denver Leadership Academy. DPS staff, along with three national RtI experts, are designing the Academy’s curriculum. Metro State will host the online portion of the program and provide certification authority, and, potentially, college credit. Principals at each of the 31 RtI pilot schools in Denver will select a staff person to become the school’s RtI expert, Lindsay said. Participants also will include administrators and instructional specialists. The Academy will begin with three full-day training sessions, followed by online training. Over the next few years Academy participants will receive continuing education and ongoing support. In addition, six schools are piloting data management systems.

Sally Whitelock, a DPS educational psychologist who headed up the initial RtI planning process, said when looking for RtI appropriate materials, the first thing the district looks at is the research. "There are a lot of materials, a lot of good materials, and there are a lot of materials that claim to be research-based that may, in fact, not be. "We look for intervention materials that have been researched with large numbers of students, by a third party, and replicated, and that have been shown to accelerate student growth in particular areas. So we have a high standard for determining which interventions we’re going to train our teachers in," she said.

Success at Schmitt

Lindsey points to Schmitt Elementary School as one of the 16 original pilot schools that has shown some real progress. Schmitt has 430 students grades PK-6. About 53 percent of the students enter Schmitt speaking only Spanish, said Anne Dalton, the school’s principal. An estimated 89 percent of the students are poor. "So it’s the challenges of second language as well as poverty," she said. The school’s third grade reading scores on the state’s CSAP test used to assess Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) jumped 16 percentage points from 2006 to 2007. Third grade math scores for the same time period rose 13 percent. Dalton, who’s been at Schmitt for four years, is cautiously pleased with the progress. "Yes, we did have some pretty good results. Would I attribute that just to the RtI model? Maybe."

The year before RtI start-up, Schmitt had begun to use the DIBELS assessment tool to screen students and monitor student progress. "It’s a really great progress monitoring device," Dalton said. The number of at-risk students identified through DIBELS was high – somewhere between 53 and 60 percent, Dalton said. "Because there were so many at-risk kids, the only way we could address them was to focus (the first-year RtI pilot) on reading in grades K-3. So it was really trying to change that triangle, because ideally when you’re using the RtI model, 15 percent of your kids are at-risk, but ours looked just the opposite." The district provided training for the staff at Schmitt in the core components of the RtI model, including the proper use of data to drive instruction and how to design a flexible schedule that would clearly identify staff responsibilities. "My psychologist worked on it (the RtI pilot), my literacy coach worked on it, and it really became their whole job. Either doing intervention groups or giving suggestions to teachers about how to do intervention groups, and then progress monitoring these at-risk students," Dalton said. "Some teachers did tutoring after school. My psychologist took some kids three days a week and did intervention groups. My literacy coach did intervention groups. My special education teacher did the Tier 3 interventions and also, while he was pulling some special education kids, he pulled some students that were at-risk from general education into his groups. "As far as staff buy-in, it wasn’t a problem," said Dalton. "What we tried to do was take as much off of the teachers’ plates as we could." Dalton and five other team members did all of the progress monitoring. "We would go in, six of us, and test the kids. So we would be in and out in 20-30 minutes, basically. And then we’d feed that information into the computer and we’d get a print-out. Because if teachers had to do it, forget it. It’s just too time-consuming," said Dalton. Dalton said she looks forward to the data management system at the central campus which will soon be in place to merge RtI data with other student information.

Because such a large number of students at Schmitt were reading below grade level, in addition to individualized and small-group interventions, Dalton decided to implement a few whole-class interventions throughout the school, focused on fluency. "So for the first five or ten minutes of the day, the teacher would read the passage, the kids would read it to themselves, then they would read it to each other. And we tried to get that down to fifteen minutes max. Which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but trying to get first graders to read grade-level material with one another and not spend your whole life doing it can be really challenging.

"So that was an intervention that we did early on that we think really paid off. We saw their fluency go up, we saw other assessment scores go up, and their benchmarks," Dalton said. "In looking at these scores, we could pretty much tell which kids were going to be proficient and which ones weren’t, we were really close in calculating. It wasn’t a surprise." Overall, said Dalton, the RtI process made teachers begin to think differently.

Instead of simply saying that a child couldn’t read with comprehension, they’d analyze the why. "Is it because of fluency? Is it rate? Is it because they don’t have phonemic awareness? Where are the specifics? We know they can’t comprehend, but what is it?" This year Dalton has expanded the RtI pilot to include reading in grades K-5. She also intends to put even more emphasis on data to not only track student progress and drive instruction, but as a way to encourage collaboration. "After we’ve tested, we’re going to put up everybody’s test results in the

faculty lounge. We’re going to blow up everybody’s bar graphs. We’re going to highlight all the kids that are at-risk, and the areas where they are at-risk." In two weeks, Dalton said, she expects to see progress. If there isn’t progress, in the grade level team meetings she’ll ask, "What’s happening? Is it a child that’s eventually going to need to be staffed (for special education)? Is it because you really don’t know what intervention to do? Did you see the other kids in the group move, but you still have that one that’s not moving?" Dalton’s hope is that the data walls will foster discussion and make all kids in the school everybody’s kids. "It’s trying to identify and understand and make it all ours. So maybe in second grade, I do have this group that’s struggling, but I can’t fit this intervention in. Can they do it in first grade? Is somebody doing this already? Or, what are you doing in first grade, because my kids are still suffering from the same thing in second grade," Dalton said. But scheduling and scarce resources remain a challenge. Her aim is to designate an intervention specialist in each class. When asked if she thinks RtI can really make a difference, her response is at once honest and equivocal. "Okay. Here’s what I really think in my heart," Dalton said. "I think it’s a great model. Nobody could look at that model and say it doesn’t work. But here’s the hugest, biggest piece: How you can have enough manpower to do those intervention groups correctly? I’m talking the talk because I believe it. But am I walking the walk totally? It’s really hard to walk everything to make this go."

So what does she need to really make it happen? "Trained paras (paraprofessionals) in the classroom. More support for teachers in the classroom. It’s huge, huge. If people don’t think class size matters . . . it matters. And until we can do something about that, especially at these schools that are at-risk, I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the point that we change that paradigm around to sustain our progress. Once we change it, we can sustain it. But it’s changing at first. And that’s the one thing I really, really worry about." Funds in the district are tight, in part attributable to decreased enrollment as students choose to attend school elsewhere. Presently, DPS is going through the painful process of targeting 30-some schools with low enrollments for closure. Savings from the closures could help the Denver Plan, which many say is under funded, go forward. Currently Lindsey said DPS is funding its RtI initiatives largely through a combination of general fund and Title I dollars. If the push from Washington and the states toward RtI is serious and sustained over time, one thing is clear – data-driven differentiated instruction to support low-performing schools is Title I at its best, but it won’t happen on the cheap. As Senator Edward Kennedy told members at a meeting of the National School Boards Association earlier this year, real school reform doesn’t happen on a "tin-cup budget." Congress faces many challenging decisions as it addresses reauthorizing NCLB in 2008. While that’s happening, on the ground at Schmitt Elementary School, there has been progress and some growing enthusiasm among teachers. "Excitement among teachers around RtI is slowly coming. I just announced today that we’ve made our AYP. This is the second year we’ve made AYP in reading and math. I think the excitement comes when they track and can see results," Dalton said.

Resources

Archuleta School District 50

Colorado Department of Education RtI Resources

Council of Administrators of Special Education

Denver Public Schools RtI Website

DIBELS

National Association of School Psychologists - Assessment Alternatives under IDEA 04

National Association of State Directors of Special Education

National Association of State Directors of Special Education RtI Project

National Center on Student Progress Monitoring

NCLB

Office of Special Education Programs

Research Institute on Progress Monitoring

San Juan BOCES

What Works Clearinghouse

Response to Intervention, November 2007 Page 12

About QED

Quality Education Data (QED) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Scholastic Inc., the global children’s publishing and media company. Since 1981, QED has been an industry leader in providing marketing, consulting, and list services to the education marketplace.

For more information about QED’s 360º Ed Marketing Solutions, please visit www.QEDdata.com or call 800.525.5811. 800.525.5811

www.QEDdata.com

info@QEDdata.com

1050 Seventeenth St, Suite 1100

Denver CO 80265