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January/February 2007
A new approach to reading instruction
aims to catch struggling readers early
by Nancy Walser
It’s two weeks before Halloween in Carolyn
Callender’s first-grade class. After sitting in a circle and
reciting the October poem from Maurice Sendak’s Chicken
Soup with Rice in their scariest voices, 15 youngsters split
up into four groups to practice literacy skills. Working from teacher
guides and scribbled notes, an intern, a student teacher, and an
assistant teacher help Callender put the groups through their paces.
Each adult staffs a work station, equipped with an assortment of
props—computers, white boards, letter tiles, grids, and markers.
Each group of students moves from station to station to count sounds,
combine them to make and write words, spell out sight words, illustrate
main ideas, and read silently from leveled readers.
Callender already knows ten of her students are
having trouble. The good news is that it’s October, not June.
But she knows the clock is ticking: When it comes to creating strong
readers, first grade is a pivotal year.
Four years ago, Callender’s school, the
Haggerty School in Cambridge, Mass., began a new approach to reading
instruction when it received a federal Reading
First grant. The approach, called Response to Intervention or
RtI, is at once simple and complex. All K–3 students in the
school are tested for critical prereading and reading skills in
the fall, winter, and spring. Students who score in the “some
risk” or “at risk” categories are scheduled for
intensive interventions to help them catch up. Student progress
is recorded on graphs and discussed in monthly meetings. Depending
on the results, children may be reassigned to different groups for
different kinds of interventions, with schedules changing accordingly.
Despite the complicated logistics, Callender
says the new approach is worth it. “Before, there was only
one plan all year, no matter what,” the 17-year veteran recalls.
“In June there would always be four to five kids who hadn’t
made the kind of progress I knew they could. I wondered, why am
I always missing this same 20 percent?”
What was missing were alternatives for these
children. At some point in the day, Callender’s ten troubled
readers will be pulled out of the class to work one-on-one with
a specialist or in small groups for more reading practice. Some
have learning disabilities, some don’t. With RtI, Callender
says, there are no more end-of-the-year surprises.
RtI is only one name for an approach to early
reading intervention in the general classroom that has emerged out
of research dating back to the 1980s, showing that reading difficulties
can be prevented by early intervention, starting as soon as prekindergarten.
Variously known as “response to treatment,” “response
to instruction,” or “problem-solving,” versions
of this approach have been used in some states and districts for
a number of years. RtI entered the mainstream, however, with No
Child Left Behind, embedded in the $1 billion a year Reading
First program. Last August it got another boost from the federal
government in final regulations issued for the 2004
IDEA, the law governing special education. Some proponents argue
that by getting help to struggling readers sooner, RtI could reduce
the number of poor readers in special and remedial education by
as much as 70 percent.
“It’s a complex idea with a lot of
moving parts, and no two people have quite the same view of it at
this point because it’s new,” says Douglas Fuchs, an
education psychologist at Vanderbilt University, who has written
extensively about RtI. Although many issues remain to be resolved,
he says, “there are many good reasons” schools and parents
should be excited about its potential. “It can provide schools
with much-needed help to better distinguish between the truly disabled
and those who might seem to need special education, but who really
don’t.”
Beyond the Discrepancy Model
Interest in RtI is fueled in part by concern
over the increasing number of children diagnosed with learning disabilities.
The number of children categorized as learning disabled has nearly
tripled, from 1.8 percent of U.S. children in the late 1970s to
5.2 percent in the late 1990s. Reading problems account for 80 percent
of students in this category. The increase in the number of children
receiving special ed and the disproportionate representation of
minority children within this group have alarmed many educators
and raised suspicions that schools are overidentifying as learning
disabled children who simply lack prereading skills from home or
preschool or who received inferior instruction—what some educators
now call “curricular casualties.”
RtI advocates argue that the emphasis on special
education should be replaced by an emphasis on high-quality, research-based
reading instruction and interventions to help struggling kids catch
up sooner. The most important aspect of RtI, says Thomas
Hehir, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
is that it changes the mindset around reading disabilities and special
ed. “RtI assumes that all children can learn to read, which
nearly all can,” says Hehir. “Philosophically, it puts
the onus on the institutions, not on six-year-olds.”
Recent research has added a sense of urgency
to the teaching of reading skills in the early grades. An influential
study by Connie Juel, an education professor at Stanford University,
showed that poor readers in first grade remain poor readers in fourth
grade. The same study found that certain key skills measured in
first grade were strong predictors of later reading ability. In
another oft-cited longitudinal study published in the journal Pediatrics
in 1999, researchers found that children as young as six with low
reading achievement never catch up with their stronger reading peers,
and that it didn’t make much difference whether the struggling
readers were formally identified as learning disabled or not.
The current system for identifying children as
learning disabled, known as the discrepancy model, makes early intervention
almost impossible. Since the late 1970s, the working definition
of learning disability has been a discrepancy between children’s
reading performance and IQ. This means that children who perform
poorly on IQ tests don’t necessarily qualify to receive additional
help. Moreover, since IQ tests are most reliably administered when
children are in the second or third grade, children cannot be labeled
as learning disabled until it’s almost too late. By the end
of third grade, children are widely expected to be ready to make
the transition from “learning to read” to “reading
to learn.” For this reason, the discrepancy method has been
labeled “wait to fail” by detractors.
Though the new IDEA regulations fall short of
mandating RtI as a method for identifying children with learning
disabilities, they say that states “cannot require”
the use of IQ tests to diagnose learning disabilities and they permit
states to use “alternate methods” such as RtI to identify
learning disabilities. To support early intervention, the regulations
allow up to 15 percent of federal special education funds to be
used for this purpose in general education classrooms.
“[RtI] is a way to structure early intervention,
especially in preK–3, in order to identify all kinds of learning
problems, including those due to lack of exposure to quality teaching
and poverty,” asserts James Wendorf, executive director of
the National Center
for Learning Disabilities (NCLD). In conjunction with the University
of North Carolina’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development
Institute, NCLD is collaborating on a new model, ¬“Recognition
and Response,” which is an adaptation of RtI for preschoolers
(see “Recognition & Response”).
Many Variations
While the details of RtI can vary, most applications
involve a three-tiered structure, according to Vanderbilt’s
Douglas Fuchs. The primary level of intervention is the regular
classroom, where teachers begin by using “evidence-based”
reading curricula. Students who don’t respond sufficiently
to classroom instruction are put in small groups with others who
are struggling with a similar skill, like reading fluency, for secondary
intervention. This is a short period of more intensive, systematic,
explicit, and expert-driven instruction, during which students’
progress is closely monitored. Those determined to be “not
responsive” at this level of intervention are either evaluated
by a multidisciplinary team to see if special education is needed
or sent directly to special education, a third tier of intervention
where they receive one-on-one instruction. It’s currently
up to schools and districts to decide what constitutes nonresponsiveness
and when or if students are considered remediated.
What RtI is, how it’s best implemented,
and what interventions are the most useful “are all in ferment,”
notes the NCLD’s Wendorf. In addition, some educators are
skeptical of the approach, due to recent controversies over the
criteria for selecting reading curricula and interventions to be
funded through the Reading First program.
Although Reading First brought RtI into the mainstream,
the same concept has been practiced in some places for decades.
In Long Beach, Calif., where it’s been used in schools since
the mid-1980s, it’s called problem-solving. According to Long
Beach assistant superintendent Judy Elliott, the new approach came
into play when Long Beach dropped the use of IQ tests in response
to a court case.
The district’s decision to embrace early
intervention reflected the recognition “that special education
can’t always ‘fix’ kids and that the general classroom
is the best place to start addressing learning problems,”
Elliott says. As the early intervention approach gains traction
nationwide, she says, “people will now start looking at instruction
instead of [focusing on] ‘What do we call this kid?’”
Long Beach also divides intervention into three
tiers.
At least 80 percent of the student body are expected
to perform well in Tier I, the general curriculum. Ten to 15 percent
need “an extra something”—short-term assistance
in Tier II—and 5 to 8 percent are in special education, or
Tier III, says Elliott. “The last place we put a kid is in
special education,” she emphasizes.
Questions and Concerns
Some experts voice caution about claims that
early intervention will reduce the number of children in special
education. Abandoning the discrepancy model “could result
in more, rather than fewer, students identified [as learning disabled],”
says Thomas E. Scruggs, a professor of special education at George
Mason University. He points out that the criteria for classifying
children as learning disabled under RtI “are presently only
general, not precise,” and that it’s not clear what
the criteria will be for considering students remediated. Moreover,
he adds, the current focus of RtI “seems to suggest that early
reading instruction will address most problems.”
“My overall concern [about] RtI is that
it may be a good idea for addressing general classroom learning
problems … but it may ultimately prove to be problematic as
a diagnostic instrument for learning disabilities,” he says.
Fuchs confirms that there is as yet no data showing that shifting
federal funds from special education into general education, as
the new law allows, will reduce the number of children in special
education.
There may also be high opportunity costs to using
such an elaborate system, Michael Gerber, an education professor
at the University of California at Santa Barbara, points out. “Large
allocations of time to reading instruction and monitoring progress
clearly takes time, energy, and resources that might be better used
for other purposes,” he says. “Individual students who
actually have a learning disability might benefit from other—and
not merely more—instruction.”
Back in Massachusetts, early signs indicate that
interventions for struggling first and second graders in Callender’s
school are moving some from high-risk to low-risk categories, but
more studies are underway to see if fewer students are being referred
to special education as well.
For Callender, though, there’s no doubt
what the study will show. “The potential is there for many
fewer children to be referred,” she says.
They are totally teachable, but we just weren’t
using the right techniques. [RtI] is not the cure-all, but it gives
me time to try different things first. There are steps now before
we send up the red flags.”
Nancy Walser is assistant editor of the Harvard
Education Letter.
For Further Information
M.R. Coleman, V. Buysse, and J. Neitzel.
“Recognition and Response: An Early Intervening System for
Young Children At-Risk for Learning Disabilities.” Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, FPG Child Development
Institute, 2006.
D. Fuchs, D. Mock, P.L. Morgan, and C.L. Young.
“Responsiveness-to-Intervention: Definitions, Evidence, and
Implications for the Learning Disabilities Construct.” Learning
Disabilities Research & Practice, 18, no. 3 (2003): 157–171.
G.R. Lyon et al. “Rethinking Learning Disabilities,”
in Rethinking Special Education for a New Century. Washington DC:
Progressive Policy Institute and Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2001.
L.C. Moats. “Teaching Reading Is Rocket
Science: What Expert Teachers of Reading Should Know and Be Able
to Do.” Washington DC: American Federation of Teachers, 1999.
Available online at www.aft.org/pubs-reports/downloads/teachers/rocketsci.pdf
S.E. Shaywitz et al. ”Persistence of Dyslexia:
The Connecticut Longitudinal Study at Adolescence,” Pediatrics
104, no. 6 (1999): 1351–1359.
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