Is Response to Intervention a Money Grab?

Originally published here on March 8, 2008.

Dr. John Wills Lloyd published a short post on Response to Intervention (RtI) on Wednesday at his Teaching Effectively! blog. Dr. Lloyd is a professor at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education and has been on the faculty there for 30 years now.

Dr. Lloyd linked to a video by George Buzzetti, from the Association for Accountability and Equitable Education. I listened to the video a couple of times. You can listen yourself and see if you hear the same things...

Buzzetti sounds as though he believes that RtI (as it is set forth in IDEA 2004 related to the process of identifying learning disabilities) is little more than a tool for moving special education funding into the general funds of school districts. Under IDEA 2004 a school district can use 15% of Federal special education funding to work with general education students who haven't yet been placed in special education. According to Buzzetti, school systems can also mirror that process with state special education funds; whether that's true nationwide or just in California where he works is unclear to me.

Buzzetti goes on to say that not only does funding from special education get used to work with general education kids under this scheme, he points out that the goal of RtI is to reduce the number of students in special education - and that that would also reduce special education funding. Buzzetti's conclusion is that IDEA 2004 and the RtI approach to identifying learning disabilities could reduce the money being spent on children with disabilities by as much as 50% in some districts (at least in California).

Is Buzzetti right? Well, I'd say he's both right and wrong. IDEA 2004 does allow special education money to be spent on services to general education children in the framework of RtI. But I think it also allows specialists outside the framework of special education (Title I reading specialists, for example) to be used to provide direct services to special education students.

I work at a school that implemented RtI this year. I'm a special education teacher providing Tier II and Tier III instruction to mixed groups of special education and general education students. I provide RtI instruction in those tiers to four different grades. The special education students that are in those classes have their needs met along side general education peers, which makes me feel good about least restrictive environment issues. And the truth is that some of the general education students in my RtI classes have disabilities that just haven't been formally identified yet. I like that fact that someone trained in disabilities (like me) is already working with them.

It's not like a child comes into an eligibility committee meeting one day without a disability and leave with one just because the committee recognized his disability and placed him. So while Buzzetti is right when he says that we 're moving money, I'm not sure that bothers me as a special education teacher. And I don't see the instant cynicism in it that he seems to see.

Will we reduce the number of students placed in special education by using the RtI model? I expect two things to happen. First, I expect some students to be place in special education by the first or second grand when before they might have had to wait until the fourth (or even fifth) grade because of the nature of the old discrepancy model. I think that's a good change. I also expect some children to be kept out of special education who might otherwise have eventually been placed. I'm less sure how I feel about that...

Can we prevent learning disabilities? I've expressed my doubts on that topic elsewhere. The discrepancy model was broken. The RtI model seems to leave a lot of room for ambiguity in the process. If most learning disabilities are caused by dyslexia (which seems to be true) and dyslexia is a genetic, neurological condition (there's some evidence of that) - I have a hard time believing that RtI will prevent dyslexia.

The question is this: Do we have a clear enough idea of what constitutes a learning disability?

I don't think identifying learning disabilities less often is the same thing as preventing them. And I think that the answer to the above question is probably "no."