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RTI: Response to Intervention
Response to Intervention (RTI) is an administrative framework for organizing the resources of a school to provide appropriate instruction to all students. Through quality classroom instruction and increasingly intense interventions, RTI models are intended to reduce referrals to special education while increasing the accuracy of learning disabilities classifications through high-quality classroom instruction and increasingly intense interventions for students at risk (President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education, 2002). When interventions are carefully designed, fully implemented, and closely monitored, early grade small group instruction can achieve the goal of reducing the incidence of reading failure (Balu et al., 2015). Advisories on implementation of RTI (e.g., Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs & Barnes, 2007; Fuchs, Fuchs, & Compton, 2012; Spear-Swerling, 2015) consistently advocate the adoption of school-wide procedures, including universal screening, progress-monitoring, "high-quality" classroom instruction, tiered intervention, and flexible grouping so that students with similar instructional needs can be taught efficiently and effectively from their first years in school.
It is possible, however, for schools to adopt an RTI framework without embracing assessment and instruction practices that are consistent with current reading science (Brady, 2011; Foorman et al., 2016; Kilpatrick, 2015; Seidenberg, 2017). The framework alone does not ensure that optimal methods- language-based, explicit, systematic, cumulative, and handson-are used by all teachers. The stagnation of fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress reading scores between 2007 and 2015 (National Assessment of Educational Progress, National Center for Education Statistics, 2016) and the recent evaluation of RTI by the Institute of Education Sciences (Balu et al., 2015) suggest that reading instruction is far from optimal, even in schools that say they are implementing RTI.
As originally conceived, RTI depends first and foremost on effective classroom teaching so that fewer students need small group or intensive remediation. Successful RTI approaches also require alignment and compatibility among the "tiers" of service so that classroom teaching is supported and reinforced in supplemental small groups (Tier 2). Intensive remediation (Tier 3), necessary for students with the most severe reading disabilities, should be coordinated with regular classroom materials, strategies, and content. Otherwise, students may be caught between conflicting approaches or may simply not experience the comprehensive instruction, reinforcement, or consistency that will help them learn. This article discusses prevalent reading instruction...