Responding to RTI

Early-reading expert Richard Allington believes response to intervention is possibly "our last, best hope" for achieving full literacy in the United States. So why does he sound so unhopeful?

By Anthony Rebora

Richard Allington, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee and the author of a number of prominent books on reading policy and instruction, is one of the country's most recognized experts on early literacy. A former president of the International Reading Association and the National Reading Council and co-editor of No Quick Fix: Rethinking Literacy Programs in America's Elementary Schools (Teachers College Press, 1995), Allington has long advocated for intensifying instructional support for struggling readers, and he is often credited with helping lay the groundwork for the response to intervention concept. But while he believes RTI is "our last, best hope" for achieving full literacy in the United States, he is critical of the way it has been conceptualized and implemented in many schools. Allington's most recent book, tellingly, is titled What Really Matters in Response to Intervention (Allyn & Bacon, 2008).

In No Quick Fix: The RTI Edition, you describe response to intervention as an "old wine with a new label." What do you mean by that?

Well, I'm 62. And literally, since I entered the education field at 21 and became a reading specialist the following year, the promise has been held that we're going to teach all kids to read. The good news is that, in the past five or 10 years, we've had large-scale demonstrations that show that in fact we could do that if we wanted to. We have studies involving multiple school districts and hundreds or thousands of kids demonstrating that, with quality instruction and intervention, 98 percent of all kids can be reading at grade level by the end of 1st or 2nd grade.

So it's not a question that we don't know what to do. It's a question of having the will to develop full literacy in this country, and to organize schools and allocate money in ways that would allow us to do that. Instead, we've tended to come up with flim-flam excuses for why it's not possible.

So you see RTI as a way of building on the research that's been done on successful literacy instruction?

I'd like to think it could be. I've called it perhaps our "last, best hope."

Why do you think it holds promise?

If for no other reason that, for the first time in many years, the federal government wrote a law that is not very prescriptive. It simply says: Take up to 15 percent of your current special education allocation and use that money instead to prevent the development of learning disabilities or reading disabilities. And do it in a way that, while there's no mention of specific intervention tiers, incorporates increasingly expert and increasingly intensive instruction. It's just telling schools to stop using money in ways that haven't worked over the past half-century and start investing at least some of that money in interventions that are designed to actually solve kids' reading problems.

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