Taking Action. Austin Buffum
in the top-three education practices proven to best increase student achievement.
Based on his meta-analysis of more than eighty thousand studies relating to the factors inside and outside of school that impact student learning, researcher John Hattie (2009, 2012) finds that RTI ranks in the top-three education practices proven to best increase student achievement. When implemented well, RTI has an exceptional average yearly impact rate of 1.07 standard deviation (Hattie, 2012). To put this in perspective, consider the following.
► A one standard deviation (1.0) increase is typically associated with advancing student achievement within two to three years (Hattie, 2009).
► Based on longitudinal studies, the yearly typical impact rate of a classroom teacher’s instruction ranges between 0.15 and 0.40 standard deviation growth (Hattie, 2009). This means a school that successfully implements RTI leverages a process that is considerably more effective than a school that leaves it up to individual, isolated teachers to meet students’ instructional needs.
► The greatest home or environmental factor that impacts student learning is a family’s economic status. Students that come from more affluent homes—defined as middle class or higher—gain a yearly academic benefit of 0.57 standard deviation growth per year (Hattie, 2009). This home support contributes to an achievement gap on standardized tests between affluent households and students of poverty that has grown more than 40 percent since the 1960s (Reardon, 2011), while the college graduation rate gap has increased more than 50 percent since the late 1980s (Bailey & Dynarski, 2011). RTI’s impact rate of 1.07—more than twice as powerful as what some students might receive at home each night—provides educators a proven, powerful tool to close the United States’ largest achievement gap.
Equally important, we know that a successful system of interventions must be built on a highly effective core instructional program, as interventions cannot make up for a toxic school culture, low student expectations, and poor initial instruction. Fortunately, our profession has near unanimous agreement on how to best structure a school to ensure student and adult learning.
Comprehensive study of the world’s best-performing school systems finds that these systems function as professional learning communities (Barber, Chijioke, & Mourshed, 2010; Barber & Mourshed, 2007). Additionally, virtually all our professional organizations endorse PLCs (DuFour, 2016). When implemented well, the PLC process is the best way to build the learning-focused culture, collaborative structures, instructional focus, and assessment information necessary to successfully respond when students don’t learn.
At a time in which our students’ lives depend on educators utilizing practices proven to be most effective, should we allow professional educators to disregard this overwhelming evidence and cling to outdated procedures? Would this be acceptable in any other profession? Imagine if you are diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, and you ask your doctor to identify your best course of action. In response, your doctor says, “There is a treatment process that, based on over eighty thousand studies, is the most effective way to cure your illness. It is proven to be multiple times more powerful than traditional treatments used throughout most of the past century. Additionally, the most successful hospitals in the world utilize this practice, and virtually all our medical organizations endorse this treatment.”
How would you respond? “When can we start?”
Now imagine if your doctor knows of this near unanimous professional consensus on the best possible treatment of your illness, yet disregards it and utilizes a less effective, outdated procedure. You would be outraged. We would consider such actions as professional malpractice, profoundly unethical, and grounds for removal from the field. Knowing what we know today about how to best respond when students struggle, there is no debate: implementing RTI within a professional learning community framework is the right work.
Knowing what we know today about how to best respond when students struggle, there is no debate: implementing RTI within a professional learning community framework is the right work.
If RTI Works, Why Is There Still an Achievement Gap?
In fall 2015, the following headline appeared on Education Week’s front page: “Study: RTI Practice Falls Short of Promise” (Sparks, 2015). The research, which the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance conducted, studies the yearly reading progress of over twenty thousand grades 1–3 students. It finds that first graders who received reading interventions actually did worse than identical peers who did not receive the RTI support. More troubling, students who were already in special education or older than average for their grade performed “particularly poorly if they received interventions” (Sparks, 2015, p. 1).
Yet, when you dig deeper, the researchers find that the implementation practices at a majority of the participating schools were misaligned to the guiding principles of RTI, including the following.
► Sixty-nine percent of schools in the impact sample offered at least some intervention services during Tier 1 core instruction. As noted, “In such schools, intervention may have displaced instruction time and replaced some small-group or other instruction services with intervention services. As a result, reading intervention services may have been different from, but not necessarily supplemental to, core reading instruction” (Balu et al., 2015, p. ES-11). A basic tenet of RTI is that we should provide interventions in addition to effective Tier 1 core instruction, not in place of it. When students miss new critical grade-level core curriculum to receive interventions, it is akin to having students take one step forward (improvement in a remedial skill), while taking one step back (missing a new essential grade-level skill).
► The study finds that “even in schools using the more traditional model of providing intervention services only to readers below grade level, classroom teachers played an additional role and provided intervention services to 37 percent of those groups in Grade 1” (Balu et al., 2015, p. ES-11). RTI advocates that staff members with a higher level of expertise in a student’s target area of need should be the ones providing the interventions. While a classroom teacher might meet these qualifications, it would be unrealistic to expect that same teacher to always have more effective ways to reteach this skill to the same students who did not learn it the first time. Our experience is that teachers don’t save their best instructional practices for Tier 2 interventions. More often, teachers provide students with the same pedagogies from core instruction, only in a smaller group setting.
When interviewed about this study, coauthor Fred Doolittle states, “We don’t want to have people say that these findings say these schools aren’t doing RTI right; this turns out to be what RTI looks like when it plays out in daily life” (as cited in Sparks, 2015, p. 1). We strongly disagree with his interpretation.
To apply this conclusion to a similar situation, we know that there is tremendous consensus in the medical field regarding the best ways to lose weight in a healthy and effective way. According to the Cleveland Clinic (n.d.), “To lose weight, you must eat fewer calories or burn up more calories than you need. The best way to lose weight is to do both.” Translated into practice, this means the best diets should include eating better and regular exercise. Armed with this knowledge, millions of Americans each year commit to diets based on these principles, yet more than 90 percent of their efforts fail (Rodriguez, 2010). Should we assume then that the current research behind losing weight is at fault? Should medical researchers conclude, “We don’t want to hear that people aren’t dieting right—this turns out to be what eating fewer calories and burning up more calories looks like when it plays out in daily life.”
In reality, and as the Cleveland Clinic (n.d.) makes note of, the reason why most people don’t lose weight is because they briefly commit to eating somewhat better and increasing their exercise but ultimately fail to make these practices part of their ongoing lifestyle. Likewise, many schools are committing to some disjointed efforts at interventions but are failing to fully commit to the collaborative, learning-focused PLC lifestyle required to ensure every student’s success.
Common Missteps When Implementing RTI
While we disagree with Doolittle’s interpretation