Jay Greene is dubious about Response To Intervention — trying to educate children well so they’re not diagnosed as learning disabled — because he thinks schools have an incentive to put kids in special ed.
Essentially, RTI frees-up money to get schools to do what they presumably should have been doing already — providing well-designed instruction in the early grades. Unless we think that the main impediment to well-designed instruction was that schools lacked the funding to do it, diverting 15% of special education money to early-grade instruction will not get them to do anything significantly different from what they were already doing.
Interesting debate (Greene has two posts on this issue; the second one can be found by linking to his first post).
There are undoubtedly significant monetary issues surrounding the RTI debate, but I’d suggest those issues sort of miss the mark and obfuscate the more important debate. And that is this: How should children who aren’t learning very well — but who are not developmentally disabled — be educated? What’s the best way to figure out (“indentify,” to use the current lingo) why they aren’t learning well, and what can educators do about it?
RTI in essence is an attempt to answer those questions in a better way — for kids — than past practices. Furthermore, it really is an attempt to do away with what I’d call the “silo-ing” of children — Child A learns OK, so let’s keep her in her regular-ed 1st-grade classroom, while Child B seems to be struggling, so let’s classify him as SLD and provide him with special education services.
In addition, I’d argue the financial incentives for IDing children as needing special education services are far less important than the day-in-and-day-out practices of how struggling children are identified and educated in schools. I would argue that, based on research that’s out there, far too many children are indentified as SLD by regular-ed teachers, and “sent” to a school’s special ed. teachers for a significant portion of their day. (I’d further argue, knowing it might generate some debate, that there are incentives for special ed. staff to “accept” those students.) Furthermore, I’d argue most districts have done a pretty poor job of providing tools to their teachers (and not just money in terms of staffing; certain assessment tools can be quite effective in indentifying specific learning needs of young students) to better identify whether or not children have specific learning disabilities (SLD). The old methodology, still in place in many districts, is to rely on comprehensive IQ testing. But those tests, largely invalid before 2nd or 3rd grade for most students, come far too late in a student’s academic career, when earlier interventions at kindergarten and 1st grade can notably improve the proper identification of children.
I would think finding ways to better identify the needs of children, at a younger age, would be met with open arms in the education community. That’s really what RTI is about. But perhaps not.