RTI effects in Tennessee

Did the prevention process contribute to lower identification rates?

State and local education agencies have widely adopted “response to intervention” or “multi-tier systems of support” as means of helping to improve outcomes for students, especially in the early grades and especially in reading. Although there were justifiable cautions about adopting response to intervention (see, e.g., Division for Learning Disabilities, 2007),¹ educators adopted the concepts and, ultimately, practices often described as “RTI.” ²

Evaluations

There have been multiple evaluations of the effects of RTI over the years. They range from early, relatively small-scale studies (with many sensible features to their methods) examining effects on schools within an LEA (e.g., VanDerHeyden et al., 2007) to a full-on US national evaluations (especially Balu et al., 2015) that generally employed sensible methods (still, it was subject to high-profile discussions; see Arden et al., 2017; Fuchs & Fuchs, 2017; Gersten et al., 2017).