Response to Intervention Program

¶ … Intervention Programs

The value, characteristics, and purpose of an RTI program to a professional educational environment.

What are the advantages of an RTI ("Response to Intervention") program for an inner city school environment? A peer-reviewed article in Learning Disabilities Research & Practice explains that first of all, RTI refers to a "school-wide prevention framework" that provides a way for school staff to make the right decisions for students when students need help academically and behaviorally (Prewett, et al., 2012). Typically the RTI strategy will use accumulated data and other resources so that instructors can make well-educated decisions about which interventions are working, which are not effective, and which ones are needed in particular student situations.

Basically, teachers and administrators and of course counselors use certain interventions to "maximize student achievement" and "reduce behavior problems" (Prewett, 136). Then there must be a response to those interventions to see how helpful they were in smoothing out behavior problems and encouraging better academic outcomes. Students that are at-risk or have learning disabilities can be helped dramatically through RTI: is the strategy working so that the student is improving his or her social studies, science, history and language arts competencies? That's the big question being pursued through RTI (Prewett, 136).

In this article the authors located middle schools that were implementing RTI (that was phase one); next, the schools that were using RTI were contacted and monitored as to their screening, their tiered intervention practices, as well as "…their implementation fidelity checking procedures" (phase two). In phase three of this investigation 52 of the 65 schools that the authors contacted agreed to allow the authors to investigate the success of the RTI programs that had been launched. The authors sought "…qualitative indicators of RTI implementation," and they preferred schools where the RTI practices were "…more precisely defined" and used "specific tools" and "clear administration" (Prewett, 138). In phase four the authors conducted 90-minute phone conversations with the schools they had selected as good examples of the use of RTI; in this phase the selected schools were "…required to provide verbal and documented evidence" of their data collection and other procedures (Prewett, 138).

Phase five included an even deeper investigation into how the schools chosen had conducted the RTI program; observations were made of the intervention procedures and more interviews were conducted. What was the outcome of this research? It was determined that there is a great deal of value for schools when they incorporate RTI. Indeed, RTI has "the potential" to be the basis for a "…effective school-wide framework" that can help schools ensure that at risk students (and others) find success (academically and in terms of student deportment) (Prewett, 146). In other words, just intervening in schools to help under-achieving, at risk, and learning disability students is not sufficiently thorough without the follow-up response to those interventions.

Qualifying the Value of RTI -- There are Potential Flaws

Maria E. Hernandez Finch has researched the RTI programs and she finds -- through a "detailed qualitative study" of a school that is heavily populated with Latino students -- that the use of RTI "…gave false confidence that assessment…and instructional practice were aligned" (Finch, 2012, 286). Another research project looking into the helpfulness of RTI (Orosco and Klingner, 2010) referenced by Finch showed that teachers "…too easily blur pre-referral processes and RTI"; and hence those teachers "…wrongly assume that their implementation removes bias from assessments and special education determinations" (Finch, 286).

Another very important consideration when implementing RTI or in reviewing the success or failure of RTI is how it works when ethnic minorities are part of the original intervention. In her Abstract, Finch claims that there is "insufficient research…to support full implementation of an RTI model…" with students that are ethnically diverse (285). In other words, to be responsive to culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) populations in schools, efforts must be made to develop strategies appropriate for that milieu. "What works with whom?" is a question Finch raises on page 286, and it is germane to the RTI because some estimates project that CLD students "…will be the majority as soon as 2023."

Part TWO: select an educational environment to modify including a plan of action to accommodate a response to intervention.

Certainly inner city schools like those in Trenton, New Jersey, need modification because these schools are constrained by community issues such as gangs, crime in the streets, a sense of hopelessness, dysfunctional families (resulting in low parental participation in educational activities) and poverty. Hence, interventions should be designed help prevent the poor academic and behavioral problems found in those inner city schools. And moreover, a "Smart RTI" should be part of the process, because Smart RTI can make "efficient use of school resources while maximizing students' opportunities for success" (Fuchs, et al., 2012, 263). The whole point of Smart RTI is to "…implement tertiary prevention…featuring data-based individualized instruction, or experimental teaching" that includes "…meaningful access to the general education curriculum" (Fuchs, 276).

The educational environment suggested in this paper -- which should perhaps implement Smart RTI features -- is an after-school intervention program "…in an alternative education setting" designed to serve "…urban African-American youth at high-risk for life-long problem behaviors" (Carswell, et al., 2009). The authors reference an after-school program of alternative education called "The Village Model of Care," which entailed a number of aspects both in clinical and school settings, Carswell explains (445). The program consisted of: a) structured group mentoring; b) parental support; and c) community outreach services "…administered to alternative education students and their primary caregivers during the school year" (Carswell, 445).

Many inner city young people (notably boys) experiment with tobacco, alcohol, and various drugs -- and they also are known to be involved with "risky sexual behaviors" -- hence, schools have a responsibility to intervene in any way that can prove to be helpful (Carswell, 449). Studies show that there are thousands of alternative educational programs (AEPs) around the country, but still the graduation rates of African-American males hovers around 43% and more pertinent to this issues is the fact that "a significant number of African-American youth who drop out of high school" are subsequently arrested and end up in prison in their lifetime. So, how will an after-school program emulating the "Village Model of Care" do what other AEPs have not done?