Mesmer and Mesmer on RTI and testing

While reading Mesmer on RTI, I can see that students are given a variety of tests from grades K-3. These universal literacy practices can be tied to federal funding and assess the student at least initially on speed, word identification, and phoneme awareness. Using this testing and running records, the teacher can begins to get an idea of the students' accuracy. "If the benchmark score does not meet the grade-level minimum, then additional diagnostics are administered and collected."(Mesmer, p. 284) Response to Intervention is a great way to get special education students the help they need while the assessments are being administered, instead of "admiring the student's reading problem-discussing the problem, and collecting data on it months before they can do anything about it " (Mesmer, p. 289) as in the current discrepancy model. I can see two points of worry here. First, is what about ELL students who may even after exiting ELL not perform well on standardized testing, are we pushing them into special education when they need the syntax and word meaning backgrounds to increase their comprehension? Also, I worry about the lack of acceptable testing for reading comprehension and too much reliance on standardized testing with too little time for informal assessments. Routman says that "we need to make sure we are documenting student's progress at the classroom and school level. We must balance formal assessments with informal assessments." (Routman, p. 111) It is a fine balance to have to walk between the meeting the needs of our students and assessing them as the state, fed and districts tell us to. RTI provides another way to help our students sooner than later, and that is probably a good thing.

Here is the link to Kristen's blog at http://kristen-bringonthebooks.blogspot.com/.
I found Kristen's questions on how RTI can help older students in middle school and high school to be thought provoking.