The Illinois State Board of Education has just issued a draft policy on the implementation of Response to Intervention procedures for children suspected of having Learning Disabilities AND OTHER DISABILITIES.This draft has many problems and in some areas omits important elements and safeguards of the IDEA. ISBE is requiring school districts to have their Response to Intervention procedure in place no later than the 2010-2011 school year. It is also troubling because it was developed by a small group advising ISBE and was not disseminated to the general public for input. The groups involved in working on the draft were invited to respond to Kathy Cox at ISBE by March 31. I would highly encourage concerned parties to response to Kathy as well, by March 31, at 217-782-5589 or kcox@isbe.net.
Although the proposed requirements have a number of important elements, there are many aspects about it that are highly problematic and potentially illegal.
1) ISBE invites school districts to use the pre-intervention RTI procedure for diagnostic purposes not only for children suspected of LD but for all disability categories.
2) ISBE's procedure makes no mention of the IDEA definition of a learning disability, which requires a determination that the student has a neurological processing disorder.
3) ISBE's procedure has no mechanism for even making a determination of whether the student has a neurologically based processing disorder and makes no mention of the role or value of psychological test data in making these determinations. Pyschological and neuropsychologcial evaluation is completely omitted from the process.
4) The requirements require the provision of scientifically-based instructional methods. This requirement goes somewhat further than IDEA, which requires a determination that EFFECTIVE REGULAR ED INTERVENTION HAS BEEN PROVIDED, BUT DOES NOT REQUIRE SCIENTIFICALLY BASED INTERVENTION AS A THRESHOLD FOR THE ELIGIBILITY DECISION ITSELF.
5) ISBE narrows the scope of benchmarks to which the student's performance can be compared, focusing on comparison to age, standards and peer group performance, and omitting the IDEA option of comparing the student's performance to their own intellectual development.
6) The proposal goes further in implying that it is inappropriate to look at gaps in the student's performance in comparison to their own strengths, which is contradictory to the explicit language of IDEA. (p.8)
7) ISBE allows for assessment of the student's progress in comparison to local norms and state assessment data, without consideration of how the student performs in relation to national data, which is most reliable.
Please circulate this memo to other interested parties.
Matt Cohen
