Abstract
Despite years of school reform intended to help students reach high academic standards, students with disabilities continue to struggle, suggesting a need for more intensive intervention as a part of special education and multi-tiered systems of support. At the same time, greater inclusion of students with disabilities in large-scale assessment, expanding knowledge of evidence-based practices, and improving assessment technology in recent decades provide important points of progress. This article summarizes this progress, notes potential areas for expansion, and suggests future implementation and policy research questions as they relate to observed challenges with provision of intensive intervention for students with disabilities.
Education policies intended to ensure that all students reach high academic standards represent a noble, but daunting goal, particularly for educators of students with intensive needs. As a case in point, despite over five decades of school reform (Jennings, 2012), students with disabilities who require special education continue to struggle to meet academic proficiency standards. Over a decade of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data highlight students with disabilities’ persistent low achievement at the same time their non-disabled peers have made steady progress (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2013). This low achievement, combined with high dropout, unemployment, and incarceration rates (Planty et al., 2008; Sanford et al., 2011) suggests that school reform efforts to date have done little to improve outcomes for students with disabilities who have intensive needs (see Note 1). To truly move the bar, service delivery options for this population must be dramatically different, and arguably more intense than what is currently available in most schools. That is, students with disabilities who do not respond to standard remediation efforts must have access to a program of intensive intervention that includes data-based individualization (DBI), an approach comprising a dynamic combination of assessment, intervention, and data-driven, individualized academic and behavior supports (National Center on Intensive Intervention [NCII], 2013b).
Additionally, and importantly, expanding research evidence over the past four decades suggests that students with intensive needs can benefit from interventions that include elements of DBI such as progress monitoring, targeted explicit instruction, evidence-based intervention platforms, and data-driven adaptations that address students’ individual needs (Coyne et al., 2013; Deno & Mirkin, 1977; L. S. Fuchs, Deno, & Mirkin, 1984; Vaughn, Wanzek, Murray, & Roberts, 2012; Wanzek et al., 2013). This expanding research in assessment and intervention is exciting because it suggests that improvement is possible for students with intensive learning needs, despite stagnant national achievement data. At the same time, school systems continue to struggle to effectively implement, scale-up, and integrate these promising practices in the context of other systemic reforms (McInerney, Zumeta, Gandhi, & Gersten, 2014; NCII, 2013c). These challenges point to a need for policy and implementation research to help the field understand how to effectively and sustainably implement intensive intervention in real schools. The following sections discuss these issues in greater detail and suggest directions for future work.
Awareness, Assessment, and Intervention
As educators, researchers, and policymakers consider the future of intervention for students with disabilities with intensive needs, three areas of progress merit particular attention and future expansion. First, expanding participation of students with disabilities in large-scale assessment has provided data to highlight the population’s pressing and persistent needs. Second, the growing body of evidence-based interventions targeting at-risk learners provides educators with more high-quality remediation options. Finally, advancing assessment technology may permit more efficient identification of students with intensive needs, and evaluation of progress.
Awareness Through Large-Scale Assessment
Across education, a significant advance in recent decades has been the use of data to document student progress. As an important part of this movement, the inclusion of students with disabilities in the NAEP, as well as in states’ and districts’ high-stakes assessments under the 1997 amendments of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA; 20 U.S.C. Chapter 33, §1412(17); Ahearn, 2000) and the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA; see Note 2), brought much needed attention to the poor achievement of students with disabilities. Although implementation of these assessments and related accountability measures resulted in consequences that go beyond the scope of this article, the participation of students with disabilities provided a metric, and thus a potential leverage point, to make schools, districts, and states attend to their poor achievement outcomes. In addition, it provided an empirical basis for evaluating progress, as well as a useful database for identifying achievement trends, and comparing students with disabilities to peers.
Despite this attention, results suggest that assessment and accountability alone are insufficient to improve achievement. The 2013 NAEP results revealed that a mere 18% of students with disabilities met or exceeded proficiency targets in mathematics at fourth grade; for eighth graders, this number dropped to 8%. In reading, 11% of fourth graders and 9% of eighth graders with disabilities met or exceeded proficiency targets (NCES, 2013). Achievement of students with disabilities has remained persistently low since they were first included in the assessment.
In addition to the NAEP, accountability data from state assessments suggests that the students with disabilities subgroup is a reason many schools failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) as defined under ESEA accountability. Of the 35% of schools accountable for the students with disabilities subgroup (see Note 3) in states with relevant data in 2008–2009, 40% failed to make AYP due solely or in part to students with disabilities (Harr-Robins et al., 2012). Although these data are sobering, they are important because they underscore the national need for better services for students with disabilities, including access to intensive intervention. In addition, variability in cell size requirements means that most schools were not accountable for students with disabilities under ESEA accountability, which may also mean that non-accountable schools had little incentive to focus their resources on them.
Furthermore, beginning in 2011, ESEA flexibility (see Note 4) introduced additional variation by allowing for the elimination of minimum participation requirements for students with disabilities, and the creation of “super” subgroups for monitoring achievement and annual growth (The Advocacy Institute, 2013). In other words, states may consolidate subgroups (e.g., English learners, students with disabilities) into a single group, potentially masking the performance of particular subgroups. Furthermore, states are allowed to set different annual measurable objectives across groups, resulting in additional variation in monitoring and reporting of results (The Advocacy Institute, 2013). These flexibility options have the potential to obscure the true performance and progress of students with disabilities, further reducing schools’ incentive to attend to them.
Taken together, these NAEP, AYP, and ESEA flexibility trends suggest that recent school reform and accountability efforts are unlikely to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. Thus, future research should seek to inform how to effectively design policies that expand accountability for this population to more schools. In addition, research to develop large-scale assessment methods that are feasible, technically sound, and sensitive to student growth across the achievement continuum would be particularly useful in making accountability more relevant and meaningful. Finally, it would be useful to evaluate the achievement impact of school improvement efforts that incorporate explicit plans for students with disabilities, including access to intensive intervention.
Evidence-Based Intervention
A second important point of progress related to intensive intervention over the past two decades is the growing body of high-quality intervention research targeting at-risk learners, including students with disabilities. In particular, advances in early reading and mathematics intervention (e.g., Connor, Alberto, Compton, & O’Connor, 2014; Coyne et al., 2013; L. S. Fuchs et al., 2005; L. S. Fuchs et al., 2008) have provided an increasing array of instructional platforms to use as part of DBI or other intensive intervention efforts when traditional core instruction alone fails to meet students’ needs. At the same time, reviews of intervention research indicate that even when programs are successful overall, they may not yield an effect for about 20% of the sample, or up to approximately 5% of the student population (NCII, 2013b). In other words, although these interventions are generally effective, they are not universally effective (L. S. Fuchs et al., 2008).
One potential explanation for this trend of non-response is that “at-risk” designations for student participation in intervention studies are often based on teacher judgment, demographic factors, or achievement cut scores as high as the 40th percentile (NCII, 2013a). This creates a large potential achievement range and introduces the possibility that interventions are not consistently effective across the achievement continuum. That is, it is possible that a student with achievement at the 30 or 40th percentile has markedly different instructional needs than a student with achievement at the 10th percentile or below. Similarly, the presence of a disability may also impact a student’s responsiveness to a generally effective intervention.
Review of the NCII Intervention Tools Chart (NCII, 2013a) showed that few intervention studies reported disaggregated response data. Thus, the extent to which generally effective interventions work for students with the lowest achievement, or as a function of disability status, warrants further study. In other words, it would be useful to know whether at-risk students’ responsiveness to intervention varies as a function of the severity of their low achievement or disability status. Grant-making organizations and journal editors should encourage authors to include analyses of effect size variation when they write grants, plan studies, report findings, and submit manuscripts for publication. These analyses would be invaluable in helping schools to identify promising instructional platforms for their most at-risk learners, including students with disabilities.
Improving Assessment Technology
Finally, an exciting line of assessment research led by Compton, L. S. Fuchs, D. Fuchs, and colleagues suggests that educators may improve the accuracy and timeliness with which they identify students who have the most severe and persistent learning challenges. Their work on screening, dynamic assessment, and evaluation of growth trajectories of very low-achieving early readers indicates that it may be possible to reliably identify students who are likely to need intensive intervention using general education responsiveness data (Compton et al., 2012) or their performance on dynamic assessment (i.e., assessments that evaluate students’ response to instruction in a single sitting; D. Fuchs, Fuchs, & Compton, 2012). That is, students with very low initial achievement or who show poor initial response to instruction may not need to spend time in lower intervention tiers within a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) before being referred for a comprehensive evaluation or intensive intervention.
These findings have important implications for reducing identification delays for the neediest students, particularly in schools implementing an MTSS system such as Response to Intervention (RTI). While some students with borderline performance may continue to require Tier II, these assessment advances may enhance classification accuracy for intensive intervention, reduce the number of students receiving Tier II who are unlikely to profit, save resources, and provide students more timely access to appropriate levels of support. Work by Seethaler, Fuchs, Fuchs, and Compton (2012) yielded similar results for early mathematics, contributing to a growing technology of assessment that is likely to promote much needed efficiencies for schools attempting to implement intensive intervention, particularly within the context of tiered systems.
The Challenges: Implementation, Policy, and Access
Despite the advances summarized above, several persistent issues related to integration of research, policy, and practice require attention to ensure that students with disabilities who need intensive intervention can access it. As noted, data indicate that academic achievement of students with disabilities remains low despite decades of school reform and research evidence indicating that it is possible to improve outcomes for this population. This persistent low achievement suggests that despite growing intervention resources, schools continue to struggle to access and implement them with sufficient intensity to meet the needs of many students with disabilities. Thus, the field needs research to guide how to support implementation of elements of intensive intervention, and ensure that the policy environment allows students with disabilities to access these services.
The field of implementation science provides useful guidance for thinking about how to plan, support, and sustain systems change within an organization (Fixsen, Naoom, Blase, Friedman, & Wallace, 2005). At the same time, students with intensive needs comprise a relatively small percentage of the overall student population (typically up to 5%, but may be higher in some schools; NCII, 2013b), and implementation of intensive intervention is likely to occur within broader systemic school reforms such as MTSS, Common Core State Standards, teacher evaluation, or other school improvement efforts. Given this reality, considerations related to readiness, installation, and sustainability may vary when planning implementation against the backdrop of these school-wide reforms. The field would benefit from research to identify critical implementation considerations for initiatives that target small groups of students, particularly when they take place in concert with systemic change. Specifically, what policies, staff, time, resources, and technical knowledge are essential for implementation success? What elements of implementation are negotiable?
In a related way, conventional wisdom about MTSS implementation has suggested that schools should emphasize the primary (i.e., Tier I) and secondary (i.e., strategic, Tier II) prevention levels prior to implementing the most intensive (i.e., tertiary, Tier III) level. Although this makes logical sense within the context of broader school reform because it emphasizes the needs of a large majority of students in the school first, it may have unintended consequences for students with the most intensive needs. For example, many schools never “get to” intensive intervention. And if they do, educators often have difficulty articulating how this most intensive level of intervention is substantively different from Tier II (NCII, 2013c). In cases where they can describe differences, most note changes in intervention time or group size, but not alterations to content or how teachers deliver instruction. While these changes may be necessary, they are often insufficient to improve outcomes for students with intensive needs (Vaughn et al., 2012).
Taken together, these issues call into question the extent to which intensive interventions must be delivered within the context of a tiered service delivery system. And, in cases where intensive intervention does occur within an MTSS framework, does implementation need to occur in a linear fashion, or can installation of intensive supports occur concurrently with implementation of lower tiers? Both of these questions warrant further empirical investigation, and would provide useful guidance for schools engaged in various levels of MTSS implementation.
Finally, the field would benefit from research that investigates the impact of federal and state policies related to funds use, disability identification, and provision of services for students with disabilities who require intensive intervention. Despite meaningful research advances in intervention and assessment and awareness of the persistent low achievement of students with disabilities, many schools continue to struggle with how to accurately identify and provide sufficient services to this population, particularly within the context of MTSS. NCII staff members regularly hear anecdotal evidence that students with disabilities cannot access the most intensive interventions available in their schools due to perceived policy or funding constraints. Conversely, many teachers note that they avoid referring students with suspected disabilities for comprehensive evaluation because they believe the interventions that students receive as part of MTSS are more effective than special education. In other words, many educators perceive MTSS and special education as separate entities funded by separate streams of money, which may create additional barriers to timely identification and service delivery. In cases where special education services are less intense regardless of student need than what is available through general education, it also may create a scenario where students with disabilities are denied access to educational opportunities on the basis of their disability that are available to their peers.
Although evidence of these trends is anecdotal, they warrant further empirical study because they suggest potential systemic problems with providing access to a continuum of services and implementation of the Child Find requirements mandated under IDEA. Future evaluation should seek to determine whether there is a policy basis for these barriers—whether real or perceived—so that such problems may be remedied through appropriate legislation and guidance.
Getting There From Here
Despite the challenges of educating students with disabilities, recent research progress related to intensive intervention and efforts to increase awareness of the needs of this population provide reasons for optimism. Researchers continue to investigate important questions, and the expanding knowledge base has the potential to help educators provide better service to students. In addition, students’ participation in large-scale assessment has drawn attention to the needs of students with disabilities, creating an important leverage point. And, improving identification procedures means educators are better able to efficiently find and support the right students.
At the same time, there is a need to further develop and expand upon important advances in intensive intervention to enhance the evidence base about how to intervene with culturally and linguistically diverse students, older students, across various content areas, and to support students who present with unique and complex needs. In addition, there is an ongoing need for policy and implementation research to ensure advances get into schools where real students may benefit. In particular, we must identify variables, including particular contextual and policy barriers that impact the successful implementation of intensive intervention within the context of MTSS and other school reform initiatives. Finally, we must better understand the impact of policy implementation to ensure that policy decisions yield intended consequences, including access to a continuum of services that includes intensive intervention for students with disabilities who require it.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.