Policy Implications at the State and District Level with RtI for Gifted students

As a field, gifted education does not endorse any one approach to serving students because of the range of student abilities and resulting concomitant diverse needs. Therefore, service delivery in gifted education is still heavily teacher dependent. Yet, many of the components of Response to Intervention (RtI) are employed in gifted education, albeit inconsistently, such as preassessment. Although some of the current gifted curricular and instructional models embed key components of RtI within them, they are not implemented in a coherent or strategic fashion and educational policies undergirding both RtI and effective practices in gifted education are scant. Unless RtI has leadership support and district and/or state policies, it will not be implemented with fidelity and will lose its potential as a framework for overall student achievement. Leadership and policies become the infrastructure for RtI to not only become operational but systemic. Therefore, a need exists to create state and local policies that allow for the congruence of RtI and gifted education. In the absence of federal laws or mandates governing gifted education, state and local policy are the cornerstone driving gifted education programming in school systems across the United States. The need for coherent policies in gifted education that address the components of RtI is an opportunity to bring a comprehensive perspective--one from special education, gifted education, and general education--to the table to create policies that address differentiation, tiered services, and teacher education from a common framework. As the use of state standards and accountability measures intensify, the gifted field will find it necessary to use policies as the base for creating an infrastructure to support student growth. The way people approach the practice of education is experiencing tidal waves. There are competing demands for limited resources. People can ill afford to operate on separate agendas if they want to address the need for developing optimal opportunities for their best learners. The essential question is how to embrace the betterment of all learners, including the gifted. As a result, considering a model such as RtI affords the field an opportunity to partner with regular education and special education in developing policies undergirded by research that are more dynamic and comprehensive in nature by merging and integrating the best of each field. Gifted learners and indeed all learners' educational futures depend upon it. (Contains 1 table.)