Education Week - November 11, 2015 - 1

EDUCATION WEEK

VOL. 35, NO. 12 * NOVEMBER 11, 2015

edweek.org:

BRE AKING NEWS DAILY

RTI Practice Falls
Short of Promise,
Research Finds
First Graders Who Were Identified
For More Help Fell Further Behind
By Sarah D. Sparks

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Melissa Golden for Education Week

House down to school administrators,
bedeviled the law that would come to be
known as the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act.
Those concerns persist today.
The law remade the country's education
system for an often-vulnerable, once-overlooked population. More than 6 million stu-

Response to intervention has become ubiquitous as a framework to teach students to read in
elementary schools, but the most comprehensive
federal evaluation of the approach to date finds
that it may hold back some of the children it was
originally designed to support.
First graders who received reading interventions actually did worse than virtually identical
peers who did not get the more targeted assistance, according to the study released last week
by the National Center for Education Evaluation
and Regional Assistance. The study focused on
schools that were using RTI for literacy. Students
who read just below grade level at the start of the
year had been referred to RTI intended to catch
them up with the rest of the class.
Moreover, students who were already in special
education and those who were older than average
for their grades (suggesting they had either entered late or failed a grade) performed particularly
poorly if they received interventions.
The study, involving more than 20,000 students in
13 states, does not look at how students with more severe learning problems fare under RTI. But it raises
questions about the evolution of a model originally
designed to target students as soon as they started
to struggle, and prevent their difficulties from escalating to the need for a special education evaluation.
Now, with more than 70 percent of school districts
across the country incorporating RTI in at least some
classrooms, it has become more of a general education approach, with all of the trade-offs that entails.
"We're looking at this framework that has de-

Paraprofessional Vicky Henderson works with a 3rd grader, Payton, during story time in his special education classroom at Clinch
County Elementary School in Homerville, Ga. The law now called the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act turns 40 this month.

Special Ed. Law Wrought Complex Changes
Schools See Four Decades of Increased Services, Inclusion-and Red Tape
By Christina A. Samuels
Forty years ago, by overwhelming margins, both houses of Congress decided that
children with disabilities could no longer be
allowed to languish in classrooms that did
not meet their needs-if they were even allowed through the schoolhouse doors at all.
Goaded by dogged advocacy work at the

Districts Confront
Transgender Policies
By Evie Blad
As federal civil rights officials ramp up
pressure on a suburban Chicago district to
give a transgender student full access to its
girls' locker rooms, similar flare-ups in public
schools recently are presenting educators with

state and local levels and more than two
dozen state court decisions, lawmakers-in
a landmark piece of legislation signed Nov.
29, 1975-agreed that schools must identify
students with disabilities, provide them a
free and appropriate education, and adhere
to a process that protected their rights.
But right from the start, concerns about
money and about red tape, from the White

complicated questions about their responsibilities to students whose gender identity doesn't
match the sex they were assigned at birth.
In a 14-page letter to Daniel E. Cates, the
superintendent of Township High School District 2011 in Palatine, Ill., last week, officials
with the U.S. Department of Education's office
for civil rights said the district is violating a
transgender girl's civil rights by not allowing
her unrestricted use of her high school's girls'
locker rooms.
"OCR finds by a preponderance of the eviPAGE 15 >

FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT 101
This special report aims to give educators
a deeper understanding of what formative
assessment is, how it differs from other forms
of assessment, and how they can best use
formative-assessment techniques to target
instruction to the gaps in their students'
learning-in real time.
See the pullout section opposite Page 14.

Top Teacher's Resignation Spurs Certification Debate
Former Alabama
teacher of the year
deemed not
qualified to teach
in new grade

By Ross Brenneman
Alabama educator Ann Marie Corgill has taught
for more than two decades and has no shortage of
credits to her name. She's been an author, a public
speaker, a TEDx Education Fellow, and a steering
committee member for the National Council of
Teachers of English. In 2014, she was selected as
her state's teacher of the year, and she was a final-

ist to be this year's National Teacher of the Year.
At the end of last month, though, she resigned
from her teaching job, citing burdensome and inconsistent state regulations about her qualifications to teach as the primary cause.
Every state has different rules on teacher certification, which are further influenced by federal
regulations. How those rules play out in the field
can pose big challenges for teachers and adminis-

trators trying to navigate them.
Corgill's situation puts a compellingly personal
face on the issue of who is allowed to teach and
where: a renowned and outspoken educator, pressured out of teaching after getting mired in multiple layers of bureaucracy.
"From the very first day of my career, I've tried
to make the most of every opportunity that came
my way," Corgill said in an interview last March
with Education Week Teacher. So it's understandable that when Corgill was offered a 2nd grade
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Education Week - November 11, 2015

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