If your child is receiving special education services, you have probably had to learn a lot of acronyms (words formed from the first letters of a name–like IEP for Individualized Education Program). Here’s one you may not have heard yet–RTI. It stands for Response to Intervention, a scientifically proven method to track student progress and provide help to struggling learners.
RTI is understood by many as a system that is used by general education teachers to catch students who are starting to fall behind grade-wise. It’s broader than that. RTI is a system for improving both academic and behavior outcomes for ALL students in all grades. It is also used as part of the identification process for determining whether a student might have a learning disability.
When Congress reauthorized the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 2004, it offered states an alternative way to identify children with specific learning disabilities. Instead of requiring students to show a “severe discrepancy”–a large gap between what they were capable of doing and their actual performance– IDEA 2004 allowed the eligibility team to consider data from “a process based on the student’s response to scientific, research-based intervention” (meaning RTI). RTI alone is generally not sufficient to identify a learning disability, but it rules out that a student’s learning difficulties are due to a lack of proper instruction, and opens the door to a comprehensive evaluation under IDEA.
Once a student has been made eligible for special education and related services, nothing in IDEA prevents a student from receiving instruction using RTI strategies unless they don’t match up with the IEP. For more information and resources on RTI go to our RTI handout.
Logo for Response to Intervention
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