The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 in conjunction with the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act amendments of 2004 (IDEA) have created incentives to improve how K-12 instruction is provided and to improve the achievement of all students, including those with disabilities. To reach these goals, however, a thorough research base is needed, practitioners and administrators must be provided with training in how to use this research effectively in practice, and systems must be put in place to support practitioners and administrators in implementing and sustaining the use of evidence-based practices in schools. An emerging framework that provides an infrastructure to support the use of evidence-based practices and provides a model for instructing and intervening on behalf of all students to help improve their achievement is response to intervention (RTI). Although the RTI framework holds this potential, many practical questions need to be answered for practitioners and administrators to proceed successfully in its full implementation. The article in this issue by Kratochwill, Valopiansky, Clements, and Ball (2007), which both lays out the key components of a system of RTI as it should be implemented in an education setting and sets the framework for the series of articles in this special issue, states: "Successful implementation of RTI is multifaceted and involves knowledge of evidence-based interventions, multitiered intervention models, screening, assessment and progress monitoring, administering interventions with a high degree of integrity, support and coordinated efforts across all levels of staff and leadership within the school, and sustaining systems of prevention grounded in an RTI framework." For each of these components the authors describe the salient issues, current research, and next steps needed to ensure the use of valid and reliable evidence-based practices within a system responsive to students' education needs and supportive of practitioners' implementation. The results of research are not useful if practitioners are not sufficiently trained in their use. In addition, this training is unlikely to occur in a high-quality, supported way without changing the systems within which schools work and without building capacity to support practitioners in their implementation. Thus, in this article, the authors reflect on professional development and building the capacity necessary for sustained implementation, and address current research needs for the RTI model.