The Effects of Response to Intervention on Disability Identification and Achievement

• In Event: Staffing for Special Education Service Delivery and Impacts of SPED Service Delivery Models

Abstract

Debates about the best ways to identify students with disabilities and provide supports to struggling students have persisted for decades (Skiba et al., 2008). Spurred by changes in federal policy,  Response to Intervention (RTI) has emerged as a model for addressing both challenges and has witnessed increased adoption across the U.S. in recent years (Berkeley et al., 2020). RTI involves a shift from a uniform to a tiered instructional approach consisting of strong evidence-based core instruction for all students and increasing levels of intervention support for students not making adequate progress. RTI is also meant to replace prior methods of identifying specific learning disabilities (SLD) by providing special education (SpEd) services only to the most persistent intervention non-responders (Fletcher & Vaughn, 2009). Although RTI has been scaled in thousands of schools over the past 20 years (Balu et al., 2015), little causal evidence exists on the impacts of RTI on student outcomes as it is brought to scale (Torgesen, 2009; Gilmour et al., 2023). 

In this paper, we leverage the staggered rollout of RTI across districts in Oregon to examine the effects of RTI adoption on elementary students’ disability identification and achievement. Between the 2005 and 2018 school years, the Oregon Department of Education rolled out RTI by providing training and technical assistance to cohorts of districts selected through a competitive application process. Selected districts received programming support to adopt RTI. In return, districts worked to implement the RTI model with fidelity: using RTI to identify SLD, adopting a research-based core instructional program, using universal screeners and progress monitoring tools, and providing tiered interventions. Notably, these efforts were targeted towards improving reading achievement.

Using state administrative data for all K-5 public school students from 2008-2022, we employ a difference-in-differences design using the Callaway & Sant’Anna (2021) estimator to examine average changes in student disability identification and reading achievement. We find that RTI reduced SpEd identification rates by 1.4 percentage points (10%; p<.01) and SLD identification rates by 0.5 percentage points (15%, p<.01). Overall, these changes to disability identification did not accompany increases in average reading test scores nor were there spillovers on math achievement or student discipline. Nevertheless, we can rule out average decreases in test scores greater than .03 standard deviations (SD), suggesting that test scores did not meaningfully decline due to changes in disability identification. Finally, we find evidence that Black students in RTI schools experienced reading test score gains of .15 SD (p<.001), suggesting that RTI adoption was equity-enhancing for some student populations. 

Together, these results provide novel evidence on the impacts of a longstanding and understudied education policy reform as it was implemented at scale and contribute to conversations on how to structure school systems to meet the needs of students with and without disabilities. On balance, our findings indicate that RTI in Oregon achieved its intended disability identification outcomes and was at least partially successful in ameliorating inequities, highlighting the promise of the RTI model for effectively supporting students at scale.

Author

• Nicholas James Ainsworth, University of California, Irvine
  Presenting Author