Response to Intervention is a Mess

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Mondays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each and Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

Today’s post is short and a bit ranty. I’ve been in a ranting mood lately, if you haven’t noticed. Usually I’m one to rush out and defend teachers and schools but even I break down sometimes. Response to Intervention is a mess and it’s a mess at every level, from teacher preparation to schools’ implementation, and even teachers’ understanding of the process and its purpose. So, today, I rant.

If you’re in education, especially at the elementary level, you probably hear a great deal about Response to Intervention (RTI). In the broadest sense, RTI is a process of providing struggling students greater levels of support in order to help them improve their academic performance or curb challenging behaviors. It’s broken into three tiers with tier 1 being the level of whole-class instruction, tier 2 being small group instruction, and tier 3 ideally being 1:1 individualized support. The way the process is supposed to work is that you screen the kids and use the outcomes of that screener to assign them to various levels. You monitor their progress as you give them that support and as kids improve, they move toward tier 1. However, this is often harder to pull off than many people realize. Sometimes, if the support tiers are not well aligned to the curriculum and the kids are not receiving support that targets their specific needs, it can even be counterproductive. This is a huge problem because kids who do not improve after receiving appropriate tier 3 support should be referred for disability evaluation. If the RTI process is done poorly, you’re going to be referring more students than may actually need special education services, straining the evaluation system.

There is another aspect of RTI that sticks with me, though, as a systemic problem. You see, RTI’s levels of instructional support have a way of becoming permanent fixture in classrooms. Rather than being a process of student improvement, they become part of the day-to-day fabric of classroom functioning. I see a few reasons this happens.

RTI is a process that requires more staffing and support than schools can offer. They put the burden of the entire RTI process on the classroom teacher who may or may not have the capacity to develop three levels of materials and deliver tier 1, 2, and 3 instruction. Tier 2 and 3 are supposed to be offered in addition to tier 1 but without some other adult to do that, kids receive tier 2 & 3 while whole class instruction is happening. Sometimes they do not receive tier 1 instruction at all and remain in groups for the entire class. What I have most frequently observed is that teachers often minimally modify what is made available for tier 2 & 3 and cannot spend the needed time with small group and individuals. Some teachers and administrators recognize this is a problem, but many simply think the targeted kids should stay in small groups forever and are fine with “differentiated instruction.”

The interventions themselves are too often left up to the classroom teacher (see above) who may not have a good grasp of what counts as an appropriate intervention or the time to deliver it in addition to regular whole-class instruction. The same teacher may be progress monitoring and developing assessments for the intervention. Teacher’s don’t always receive training on the RTI process. Colleges of education do incorporate RTI in their special education degree programs but the content area teachers may not receive any training in RTI unless they take an elective where that training happens. Schools, meanwhile, tend to assume all teachers learned about RTI in college/grad school and can implement it effectively while not offering the amount of support, staffing, and time to properly implement RTI!

Schools are often impatient and will not allow sufficient time for interventions to take place. Ideally, an intervention will last 10 or more weeks. Ideally, the kids in tier 2 are in groups of 3-5 kids three times a week for at least 30 minutes. Tier 3 would be typically every day for 45 minutes, usually individually or in pairs. And, again, this is in addition to their regular class time. That’s at least 5 hours of total intervention time spread over two and a half months. In my experience, schools try and make a determination too soon, often using the end of a content unit as the point at which an evaluation takes place. E.g. you just finished the character unit in ELA so they’ll look at all the progress data from that unit and make a determination even though it only lasted a month.

RTI is supposed to be about prevention but classrooms get stuck in kind of a permanent RTI mode where kids stay grouped by screening results all year long. Rather than seeing these groups and the instruction they receive as something special or out of the ordinary, both teachers and administrators come to think of these groups as part of regular teaching. These kids are no longer receiving an intervention at all, and instead are doomed to encounter less challenging content than their peers. They don’t get tier 1 and nobody sees this as a problem. Arguably, they’re also not expected to “catch up” with the rest of the class because of a mindset that says they’re already behind, they’ll stay behind. That is probably the case for some of the kids but most should be able to handle grade-level work. The only way they get there, though, is by being asked to do grade level work. If we never do this, then they stay perpetually behind their peers. It’s the opposite of what RTI is supposed to accomplish. The point of an intervention is to intervene.

Anyway, you get the point. Schooling is full of processes that are supposed to work one way but end up doing something else entirely. RTI is but one color on the rainbow of scholastic alchemy. If you’d like another great example, look at Melinda Karshner’s recent post Just Fold It In where she details the challenges of taking a reading curriculum off the shelf and actually implementing it effectively in schools.

It took them two years to get this right. RTI, which has been around in its current form since about 2004, has had plenty of time to bake. There’s no legitimate reason schools should let RTI practices languish unsupported and misunderstood. So long as they do, we’re not producing any educational gold.

Thanks for reading!