Response to Intervention: A Call for Educational Excellence

If you teach, you have heard of RtI: Response to Intervention, the most recent initiative or call to action on the educational front. Although a succinct acronym, the evolving concept of RtI is all encompassing. Initially, RtI was a practical response to the growing numbers of students placed in special education programs. Why? Prior to the 2004 reauthorization of NCLB, students receiving special education services had to demonstrate their need for specialized instruction by having failed in the classroom. That is not the legal-ease, but essentially that is what was happening. This approach, as antithetical as it seems, resulted in appropriate placement coming too late for some and inappropriate placement for others. Students really needing special services had fallen too far behind to catch up and students who were in need of additional learning support were placed in a program that labeled and limited their actual potential.

Anyway, let’s not dwell on things that were done…let’s talk about how the business of education is going to move forward. A long history of educational research informs teachers and administrators alike about the relationship between success and continuing academic motivation. Student failure undermines confidence and lack of confidence undermines motivation and performance. Surrounding that circumstance is a growing knowledge and skills gap between what struggling students know and can do and what successful students have been able to master. Such a gap only deepens the challenge of what struggling students need to learn.

And therein lay the opportunities of RtI. Instead of waiting for kids to fail, RtI implores us to look for kids flailing in educational waters and throw them a lifeline before the tide carries them out of the educational mainstream and into uncharted seas. RtI asks us to look for warnings of distress among all students and when finding kids who struggle to keep their heads above water, examine not only the student, but also the delivery system that seems to be failing their individual needs.

I will admit that early in my educational career, if most of my students failed a test or performed dismally, I blamed them: they didn’t study; they didn’t try hard enough; they hadn’t learned the prerequisite knowledge that would make them successful—I blamed the teacher that came before me. But none of that matters! If most kids can’t make achievement gains in a given classroom, the problem is not with the students, the problem lays in the teacher’s hands or head or attitude.

For regular education teachers, especially at the middle and high school levels, RtI is a hard pill to swallow. For many secondary educators, there is a tacit expectation that students arrive in our classrooms with a body of background knowledge acquired through their earlier years of schooling; however, the broadening gaps in student knowledge and skills