Wide Range Achievement Test, Fifth Edition (WRAT5) - Reading
Category: Student Learning
The rise of specific learning disability (SLD) identification from 1975 to the early 2000s prompted the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to permit states to use a student's response to intervention (RTI) in eligibility determination to improve identification. Single-state studies report that RTI adoption reduced SLD identification by 11% to 15%. We test whether that pattern holds nationally, using a state-year panel of all 50 states and the District of Columbia from 2000 to 2019 and a staggered-adoption difference-in-differences design that exploits variation in when states adopted RTI. In aggregate, we find no detectable effect on identification of SLD, speech or language impairment (SLI), or any disability. State-level interrupted-time-series analyses describe how individual states’ trajectories moved around the national average; they do not, by themselves, attribute any state’s movement to RTI. In both methods, identification changes are also unrelated to the strength of state policy: states that required RTI in eligibility determination are statistically indistinguishable from states that supported it. We discuss implications for interpreting single-state findings and for the distinction between requiring and supporting RTI policy.
Keywords
response to intervention, specific learning disability, disability identification, state policy
Education level
Topics
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/se4t-2y83
