District Takes Care Labeling 'Learning Disabled'
- The Tigard-Tualatin School District is a state and
national leader in a new method known as Response to Intervention (RTI)
used to identify learning disabled students. In the past, identifying
and labeling a child as “learning disabled” involved finding the
“point discrepancy” between a reading test score and an IQ score.
However, the discrepancy number chosen is arbitrary with no consistent
agreement between districts. Also, because many professional believe
that a child has to be at least 9 years old before he can be tested,
the “discrepancy approach” left many students struggling without help
until they began to fail in the third or fourth grade. But, in Tigard
and Tualatin, the points don’t matter.
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