This case focuses on a novice principal who advocates for a student who was assigned to the first grade for 3 consecutive years. As the instructional leader of the school, the novice principal is troubled by ethics and social justice issues involved to make the decision to assign the student to his age-appropriate grade. The student was placed in…

Recent years have brought many changes to the ways in which schools in the United States address learning disabilities in their students. In an attempt to provide all students with appropriate reading instruction and to identify struggling students in a more timely manner, the 2004 revision of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act…

Federal legislation allows local education agencies to use a student's response to scientific research-based interventions as a method of identifying specific learning disabilities. As a result, educational leadership is challenged to implement response to intervention (RTI). Despite increased literature addressing RTI, no consensus on…

Response to Intervention (RTI) is an instructional framework through which schools can provide early intervention for students experiencing academic and behavioral difficulties. It is also promoted as an alternative to the IQ-discrepancy model for identifying students with learning disabilities. Most states have developed, or are developing,…

Given the vital importance of using a scientific approach for curriculum development, the authors employed a design experiment methodology (Brown, 1992; Shavelson et al., 2003) to develop and evaluate, FUSION, a first grade mathematics intervention intended for students with or at-risk for mathematics disabilities. FUSION, funded through IES…