New York and RTI

Apparently, the New York (US) Board of Regents, the state education agency oversight committee, has discussed plans to implement response-to-intervention (RTI) procedures for the NY public schools and decided to defer implementation at least temporarily. Rebecca Cort, one of the folks who testified about special education during the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (“No Child Left Behind”; NCLB), presented materials about RTI to the Regents in a September 2007 meeting. However, a statement by the New York State Union of Teachers indicates that at an earlier meeting the Regents slowed implementation of the RTI approach.

NYSUT applauded the Regents decision to move more slowly in efforts to shift to Response-to-Intervention, or RTI, programs to identify students with learning disabilities.

In regulations adopted over the summer, the Regents agreed to delay phasing out the IQ discrepancy model for K-4 students in determining reading problems until July 1, 2012. Originally, the State Education Department recommended prohibiting the discrepancy model to measure learning disabilities for all academic areas effective in 2010.

If there’s a reader from New York who can clarify (with pointers to relevant documents), please drop a comment or send a note. I’d like to know what’s going on. What are the facts and the arguments?

Link to the materials Ms. Cort presented. Link to Ms. Cort’s March 2007 NCLB testimony, in which she argued that RTI should be focused on improving general education more than on identifying students who have Learning Disabilities. Link to the NYSUT statement.