by Allison Hertog

Hertog

Last spring the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a study concluding that charter schools enroll a lower percentage of special education students than traditional public schools. Some commentators have questioned this study’s methodology and conclusions, while others believe it confirms what they have seen in practice. Regardless of where you stand on that debate, charter schools have a great opportunity to increase their special education admissions and improve how well public education serves all struggling students.

Charter schools can do this by using a bottom-up model called Response to Intervention, along with the Common Core standards. Response to Intervention can be employed in any school – private, public, charter, maybe even virtual – but it is particularly well-suited for implementation and success in charter schools because of their enhanced freedom to enact school-wide reforms.

Response to Intervention (RTI) is a special education reform codified into the 2004 reauthorization of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. It's designed to decrease the rolls of special education students. Following a dramatic rise of the number of students identified as specific learning disabled (SLD) in the 1990s, researchers from the Progressive Policy Institute and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation suggested in a landmark 2001 paper, Rethinking Learning Disabilities, that the SLD label was a “catch-all” for low-achieving students which serves as a “sociological sponge that attempts to wipe up general education’s spills and cleanse its ills.” A 2002 report from a presidential commission on special education stated up to 40 percent of children identified for special education weren’t truly disabled, but were simply not taught to read properly. (more…)