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....

.....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 developed over the years and how it has really played out in classrooms... We weren't expecting to see this pattern," said Fred Doolittle, a study co-author and a vice president of MDRC. "We don't want to have people say that these findings say these schools aren't doing RTI right; this turns out to be what RTI looks like when it plays out in daily life....."

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