Response to Intervention .........Teach the child, not the program
Source: No Quick Fix - RTI edition by Dr. Richard Allington

What is RTI?
RTI is a federal initiative to stem the escalating number of children identified as pupils with disabilities simply because they struggle with learning to read.

What does it mean to educators?
...American schools have been spending enormous amounts of money on remediation and special education programs with little discernible effect on the achievement of struggling readers.....Two large federal programs, Title I ....and special education services... have provided billions of dollars to state and local education services. But the monies rarely fund intervention designs that actually solve the problems of struggling readers.


What about the use of packaged programs in RTI?
Almost none of the most successful intervention studies use packaged programs. Again, the key to an effective RTI plan is to provide the targeted, specific instruction that each student needs. No two students ever have the identical instructional needs. The success of any RTI initiative will rest largely on the ability of the teachers to select appropriate instructional activities based on the the diagnostic evidence each student provides at the onset and throughout the intervention.

This does not mean that packaged programs may never be used, but rather that expert teachers of reading would select from an array of materials and approaches based on the needs of individual students. It is almost inconceivable that any RTI would simply provide every student with standard lessons from a single packaged program. As the available research shows, in many cases it was just this sort of one-size-fits-all reading instruction that created many students' learning difficulties in the first place.


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