In my experience with RTI, the provision that deals with academic standards and all children being successful in their grade level is terribly challenging when you receive students from other districts that are low achieving. Almost every student in our RTI program has NOT been in the district since kindergarten or early elementary school. Every time we get a transfer student from a neighboring city, they are put in my reading recovery class and, most of the time, end up in RTI because of the low literacy. The students that are staying in our district for their entire elementary and secondary educations are not being identified as needing the intervention.
Our state mandated ECA tests in Algebra and English 10 have led to a whole new set of problems with retesting and waiving. The idea of 100% literacy is not just shown on a standardized test for two subjects. It is frustrating to have a student whose scores do not reflect their abilities in your class, but they are the graduation qualifying exam so their achievement in your class is clouded by the test scores. Being a teacher of mainly AP courses, I using only witness the NCLB issues in my reading recovery class. Many teachers refer to it as the unrealistic act to a realistic problem. In my reading class, only a few are not students with IEPs or 504 plans. They are much more accomplished in a remediation class than they are in their mixed ability classes. Just because you have a student with a lexile of 500 sitting next to someone in their grade with a lexile of 1200 does not mean they will benefit from being integrated. These are some issues that have been brought to the light by the response to intervention.
“Highly qualified teachers” has
