Responsiveness-to-Intervention Symposium

December 4-5, 2003 * Kansas City, Missouri

The National Research Center on Learning Disabilities, a collaborative project of staff at Vanderbilt University and the University of Kansas, sponsored this two-day symposium focusing on responsiveness-to-intervention (RTI) issues.

The presenters, discussants, and participants assembled represented the wide diversity of individuals with a vested interest in LD determination issues. Advocates, instructional staff, researchers, and state-level education officials brought their collective and considerable expertise to the discussions.

Lou Danielson, Director of OSEP's Research to Practice Division, presented the following luncheon remarks during NRCLD's Responsiveness-to-Intervention Symposium.

Luncheon Address

Lou Danielson, Director of OSEP's Research to Practice Division
Lou Danielson's PowerPoint

Don Deshler: It's my pleasure to be able to introduce Lou Danielson. Lou has been at the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) for 27 years. Think of what has transpired during that period of time! The fact that Lou has been so centrally involved in the broad array of initiatives and activities that have been so important in shaping the direction and very nature of the field of learning disabilities is significant. The fact that he is able to be with us during this symposium is very important because of the perspectives and insights that he brings to the conversation from a research, policy, and practice perspective.

Additionally, he's a person who has the necessary research and technical skills that enable him to sit as an equal at the table. His contributions to the dialogue are always significant, and he is skilled at moving groups to the resolution of the problems with which they are grappling. When it comes to individuals with disabilities, Lou is very tenacious in pursuing causes that he deems critical. Perhaps most significantly, he has a great passion for the work that he does.

Lou, it's a pleasure to have you here, and my pleasure to introduce you. Please welcome Lou.

Lou Danielson: I thought that I would attempt to provide a historical perspective. I believe that it is important to understand the issues we are addressing in this symposium within a broader context. At this point, I think it's more about having a perspective of where we've been and where we're going, and I think that's an important distinction.

1976, of course, was a critical period because this was the point at which there was a lot of debate about learning disabilities. It was not a stand-alone category prior to the passage of P.L. 94-142, but it formalized in law with the passage of that landmark legislation. There was a great deal of attention spent then about how the field should operationalize the category of learning disabilities. It's interesting now, nearly 30 years later, that we're still talking about that foundational issue! Understandably, Congress was deeply concerned that the category of learning disabilities would explode if it was not well prescribed and well defined. At the time the law was passed, there was a 2 percent cap placed on the LD category, and once the Department developed its regulations, that 2 percent cap was removed. Of course, many people might say that is when it exploded. In spite of the relatively regular growth of the numbers of students classified as LD in the 1980s and '90s, during these last few years, the rate of identification has actually been fairly stable. One interesting thing is that for younger aged children, the child count for children with learning disabilities is actually starting to decline, which I think is noteworthy.

In the late 1970s,the Department made money available for investment in discretionary activities, such as research and development work. At that point, most of that money was actually being put into developing model projects (the Child Service Demonstration Center initiative). That program actually went away rather quickly, and while many felt it was unfortunate to lose funding for demonstration projects, the field was not really ready to create "demonstration" centers when there was such a paucity of research on students with LD. Hence, a decision was made to shift the investment to research. There are actually many people in the room who were a part of the LD research centers, either as investigators or as doctorate students. Among those at this conference who were centrally involved in one of the five Institutes for Research in Learning Disabilities (IRLDs) were Doug and Lynn Fuchs, Mike Gerber, Don Deshler, and Jean Schumaker.

One of the most significant things that comes out of research investments is the professional training that doctoral and post-doctoral students get. This is seldom acknowledged. I feel it is one of the most important ways that we can add to the intellectual capital and problem-solving capacity of our field. The PowerPoint presentation contains some important information on the five LD research institutes. [Download Lou Danielson's PowerPoint presentation.] One of the things that often is not acknowledged in the importance of the research investments that we made is that in addition to the research knowledge it produced, it also trained a new generation of researchers and scholars.

Before turning my attention to the current LD initiative that brings us all together, I want to say a few things about the 1997 amendments and No Child Left Behind (NCLB), because I think they're both critically important pieces of legislation in terms of the evolution of policy as related to students with disabilities. In the '97 IDEA amendments, we saw a lot of focus on access to the general education curriculum. I think that represents an extremely important point of the IDEA. The other important thing that happened in the '97 amendments was the inclusion of language requiring students with disabilities to be a part of our accountability systems. For a very long time, many students with disabilities were excluded from the accountability systems and, subsequently, from efforts to improve the outcome results for these children. NCLB is notable in that it requires that students with disabilities be integral to the assessment and accountability system. We're at a very critical point with the implementation of NCLB. Reports in the media would suggest that there are some groups arguing to remove the full participation of students with disabilities from the accountability system. This, in my opinion, is tantamount to turning the clock back to those days when students with disabilities weren't held to the same expectations as their non-disabled peers. The challenge for us right now is to try to scale up these research-based strategies to support schools as they are working to improve results and outcomes for students with disabilities. Implicit in many of the stories you hear are the low expectations that teachers have for students with disabilities. Deborah Speece addressed this when she spoke about the challenges that are encountered when you're working with school systems. We need to help change beliefs and attitudes if we're going to be successful.

I would like to make some observations about the national LD Initiative sponsored by OSEP to address the broad array of issues surrounding LD identification.

The initiative actually came about during the reauthorization of IDEA '97. The Department received a letter from the National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities asking it to address the issue of discrepancy in the reauthorization process. The Department opted out of doing that. The professed reason was that the discrepancy is not in statute; it's in regulation, and you don't have to amend the statute to fix the regulation. I think the real reason was that the Department already knew that the IDEA '97 was going to represent the most significant set of amendments to IDEA that had occurred since PL 94-142 in 1975. So, to add this, which everyone believed would be a Herculean thing to deal with, would be just too much to do in the reauthorization process. I think that was ultimately the real reason. As you will recall, one of the major issues on the table was discipline of students with disabilities. This was a very complex and contentious issue. Thus, dealing with the discipline issue was challenge enough, so the decision was made not to address LD identification as a part of IDEA '97.

There was, however, at that point, a very strong commitment to not put the LD identification issue off any longer. At the tail end of the Clinton administration, we began the process. The first step was taken in May of 2000, when we convened a group of stakeholders--including parents, researchers, administrators, and teachers at state and local levels--to plan what the process would be. A big part of this process was to produce a set of papers that described the existing research base in the field. We wanted this process to be driven by the existing research knowledge base to guide us through what we predicted would be a difficult path. I was in the Department during the regulation process, during the 1977-78 period, when we did the initial LD regulations. That was brutal, and this was going to be way tougher than that, simply because now we had three times as many students! We anticipated this process was going to be a challenge, so we felt it would be imperative to connect our initial efforts to the research base and get consensus on what the research told us. We felt the papers presented at the LD Summit in August 2001 represented the research base and presented us with an excellent start to this process.

Following the summit, we did two major things. One was to create a consensus process among the researchers. We had this set of papers that all together added up to 800 pages. Neither Renee Bradley nor I wanted to be the one to extract from the papers and make the determination that this is what the research is telling us. So, we pulled together a group of researchers, some of whom were the authors of the papers and some of whom were respondents, and some were neither. The other thing that we did is set in place a process that we called the Defining Common Ground Round Table. Those participating in this initiative were representatives from those organizations that make up the National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities. What we were hoping to achieve was consensus on a set of factors that were foundational to the condition of learning disabilities and to capture these into a small document that could be broadly disseminated. We felt that if we could work together through some of the issues presented in the papers, when we were ready to do a reauthorization, we would be on more solid ground. Not that everybody would agree, and clearly everybody doesn't agree, but my sense of where people don't agree is primarily about how fast to go about doing certain things. I don't sense that there's real disagreement on where we need to go. That is, there was broad consensus among the researchers and there was also consensus among the organizations from the Joint Committee that the discrepancy approach to identification was not the way to go. Now, you'll note that the consensus paper includes a minority position. The minority position basically held that there was, indeed, a place for discrepancy. Not that discrepancy should be the central way, but that there was still room for considering discrepancy as a part of what we do in a multidisciplinary and multifaceted evaluation process. So, in terms of clarifying the process and understanding what the current research base had to offer us, we believe that our process served us very well.

There was, as you can see, consensus among the researchers to see response to intervention and the problem-solving model as a promising approach to identification. That's what basically leads us to where we are today and why we're here and what we're talking about.

A final step in this overall initiative was to develop a funding priority to fund the National Research Center on Learning Disabilities. The rationale for that was we wanted to establish a mechanism for putting research as a cornerstone of work that would be done from this point on as we continue to seek clarification to the many issues still remaining to be addressed. That was the initial benefit of doing the work that we did. It not only laid the groundwork for helping support some policy and practice changes we wanted to make, but it also laid the groundwork for new sets of research questions, new directions, and new work we need to do in the knowledge production area. It made good sense for us to make this research investment. One of the requirements of that center is that they would conduct this symposium.

The other thing I wanted to mention about the center is the work that it is doing with the six OSEP-funded Regional Resource Centers (RRCs). The purpose of the work with the RRCs is to identify some sites that can serve as demonstration sites for others in the field as well as to help us begin the process of bringing RTI models to scale. We are currently in the process of looking for sites for which there is sufficient evidence that what is being implemented should be scaled up at this point. We do anticipate that in some cases, actually in many cases, there may need to be some technical assistance offered by the NRCLD to bring these sites to a place where they can legitimately serve as demonstration sites. That is, many of these sites may not have all of the kinds of features that one would need to have to be ready for full implementation and demonstration and subsequent research. In the event that we find sites that have implemented RTI and collected sufficient data to prove its efficacy, then we're ready to support the expansion of these practices at a national level. We anticipate that in many of these sites, there will be the need for additional data collection, and we're prepared to do that. In fact, we've been spending a good deal of time identifying what data we need.

We gave each of the RRCs additional dollars to do this work. Those from the RRCs working on this project have been not only willing participants but have brought a good deal of enthusiasm to this work. They certainly have asked great questions. They're very, very reflective about the work we have asked them to do, and we're excited about the partnership. The whole strategy is a unique one. The marriage of the NRCLD and the RRCs came about because we anticipated moving rapidly with full-scale implementation.

I believe it is important to highlight another activity of the NRCLD Specifically, in a national study of existing LD identification practices in all 50 states, Dan Reschly has found that 94 percent of states require severe discrepancy between achievement and intellectual ability. Not surprisingly, he found little consistency in how states implement discrepancy models: 32 percent of states provide no guidance in the determination of discrepancy or size of discrepancy; some states use standard score differences; about a quarter are using regression methods; and 42 percent did not specify method or criteria. For those of you who read Don McMillan's paper or heard his presentation at the LD Summit, know that one of Don's main findings was that it probably doesn't matter much what state guidelines specify because, at the local level, administrators do what they want anyhow, or may pretend to be doing what it is the state wants, but ignore it when they make their decisions. Clearly, it's very important to have a better understanding of what is happening at the state and local levels.

The other thing that I want to emphasize is that there is a lot of readiness and a feeling that now is the "right point at the right time," because many states are in the throes of looking at LD identification. The fact that states are waiting for the change puts this initiative in a very good position. Certainly, there will be aspects of this that will be very tough to do, particularly at a local level. It's not always easy to change adult behavior and existing practices.

During this past year, OSEP made two awards that are extremely relevant to this work. Specifically, the awards were to further our understanding of the progress monitoring process. One was a research center that is at the University of Minnesota. Its purpose is to expand the work in progress monitoring that currently exists, primarily to address areas where there really has been no work in progress monitoring. This would probably include some curricular areas, monitoring students at secondary level, and students with more significant disabilities. We also funded a technical assistance center to basically begin scaling up progress monitoring in the areas where, really, there is well-developed research. I believe this work needs to look very much like the work we've been doing in positive behavior supports, where we're doing it on a school-wide basis for all students. I can't imagine that we could implement progress monitoring in schools just for the sake of students with disabilities. I think we really have to take it on more of a system-wide basis. I do think it's one of the things that special education has to contribute to all students, because it's something, clearly, we know works for all students.

Finally, I'd like to say a few words about the reauthorization of IDEA that relates to what we're doing in this symposium. As the legislation is crafted, it's important to keep in mind that discrepancy is regulatory and not statutory. The attorneys in the Department said that we cannot change the regulations without some statutory language. The reason for that is that there is statutory language that prohibits the Department from regulating in any way that would lessen the protections or rights for children. The Department attorneys have indicated to me that unless there was some legislative language that authorized us to change the statute, it's unlikely we could change the regulation. Provided that our general counsel continues to interpret the law in the same way, it could mean that nothing will happen in terms of actually changing the regulations.

From my perspective, the good news about this is that it actually gives us time to do some important work. It does not affect the importance or the urgency of the work that we're doing. Clearly, our work will become more urgent if there were a law passed soon, but the reality is there will be something at some point, and I think we need to use the time we have now. We can do things in a rational, defensible way that people feel comfortable with so that at the end of the day, we have not just policies that people can live with, but policies that will ultimately work.

I want to thank all of you here today. Many of you have been with us in this process since the very beginning, and I know we certainly appreciate the efforts of all the folks who are willing to continue to work with us on this challenging but important work. I would say the one very good thing is that there is a performing research community in our field, and because of its capacity, we have the wherewithal to address some of the challenges surrounding LD identification. I've been at OSEP for a long time, but it's only been in the last several years that I've been in the leadership role there. I stand shoulder to shoulder with many people who preceded me, and I think the field certainly is indebted to all those folks who preceded me at OSEP.

Thank you for all that you are doing in this vitally important cause.

The symposium was made possible by the support of the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs. Renee Bradley, Project Officer. Opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the position of the U.S. Department of Education.