Diagnosis: The Missing Ingredient in RTI Assessment

     As a high school special education teacher, my students are usually long past the RTI process by the time they get to me.  This article helped give me some insight into the RTI process which I don't normally experience.  I couldn't help but think of several SLD students that maybe could have avoided being deemed learning disabled if their specific reading problem had been identified early on. As the article pointed out, using a standard single measure to identify kids in need of intervention is bound to both miss some students and unnecessarily place some kids into Special Education when, perhaps, a more focused intervention could have been all they needed.
   At the same time, I am excited that I am now learning ways to identify a student's area of weakness now that I do have the opportunity to help them improve.  By the time kids are in high school and they still don't read or comprehend well, many have already given up all hope.  The way they read has become normal to them so they "hate reading" and avoid it as much as possible.  I am particularly interested in how I can analyse the data that I have to discern what area is the problem for each student. It seems much more manageable to have a focus and plan for each child.  Given this information, the student may also feel it is possible to improve his or her reading, even in the 11th grade.
     Before this reading certification program, I felt like I blindly wanted to help my students but did not have the tools I needed to effectively do so.  I could really relate to the teachers in the Vermont school who were probably doing much the same thing. Literacy is going to be a huge focus at our school in the coming years, and the only way to implement real change is through differentiation.