Q & A with Alice Parker, special education expert

Alice Parker is director of Strategic Educational Services for Sopris West Educational Services. She is the past president of the National Association of State Directors of Special Education and the 2006 recipient of the group’s Heritage Award for service to children with disabilities. Parker will discuss response to intervention as a strategy for assessing students’ learning needs at CSBA’s annual Curriculum Institute July 6-7 at the Hyatt Regency in Monterey.

What is Response to Intervention—or RtI, as it’s known—and why is it receiving so much attention?

Response to Intervention is a systems change effort that looks to understanding students’ and schools’ needs based in problem-solving methodology using student, teacher and school-level data. It focuses resources and interventions on the parts of the system and the students in the system who most need those resources and interventions. It requires that systems work to identify resources, interventions, tools and training for staff so that the intensity, duration and fidelity of the interventions allow for the vast majority of students to achieve to high levels.

RtI has proven to be the way that school districts and schools failing to meet average yearly progress are able to improve outcomes and move out of state and federal sanctions. It is a requirement of federal special education law (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) when districts are identified as having disproportionate special education placement of minority youth. RtI has been used successfully across the United States to prevent schools and districts from falling into sanctions. Most importantly, students in schools and districts where an RtI program is in effect achieve to high standards!

How does it serve to support struggling students?

By using assessments and the data collected from them to pinpoint the areas of needed interventions for struggling students, schools and districts are able to support the success of all their students. Interventions are selected prior to need, staffs are trained, and when applied, these interventions are used with fidelity to reach our students most at risk of school failure.

What are its components?

The components of a quality RtI program include a highly effective problem-solving system which looks at both academic and behavioral issues; tiered interventions for students that are scientifically researched; professional development to provide staff with skills to not only use the interventions with fidelity, but to also understand the meaning of data and its implications in pedagogical decisions; and finally, a team of individuals working together to implement this tiered intervention model for the amount of time, intensity and duration needed to effect change in student learning and outcomes.

Where and how is it being successfully implemented?

RtI is being utilized all over the country with great success. Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan are just three states with initiatives to implement RtI. An example of a district using RtI is Heartland School District, a 36,000-student district in Ames, Iowa, that has been using RtI for many years with stunning results.

What makes the RtI model different than traditional strategies used to identify learning disabilities?

RtI is not a tool for identifying students with learning disabilities. It is a systems change effort that focuses on all students at risk of school failure. It may be used in the identification process for children who may be learning disabled, and when it is used in this manner the data and student records regarding the quality of the interventions, the results of the interventions and the assessments of the efficacy of the interventions together demonstrate the presence of a learning disability. In those places where RtI has been used with fidelity, incidence of special education identification for any disability category tends to be in the 7 percent range. By using RtI, students have their educational needs met without the necessity of special education identification.

What new skills do you hope participants at your CSBA Curriculum Institute session in July will walk away with?

1. What are the essential elements of RtI, and where is it being used in the United States?
2. Why would my district want to embark on an RtI initiative? 
3. How might we begin?
4. Where are the resources for my district as we implement RtI?