Do you have an achievement gap or an instructional problem?
For years, it looked like our school had a really big achievement gap based on race. By third grade, the gap was huge. Our students of color were way more likely to be in our bottom two tiers. But as I dug into the data, I found a really different story. This is how I learned that an instructional problem can appear like ONLY an achievement gap problem and hide a more pervasive problem. I am an IB coordinator at my school and have been asked to run our reading RTI program in my spare time. (When I'm not teaching Spanish, doing duty, managing our IB program etc.) My second year in the job, I noticed that our kindergarten students were not making a a half years of growth in reading. This was not difficult to figure out. If you do some sort of a screener (our school uses DIBELS), you can look at the percentile change from fall to winter to spring. Imagine you take your child to the Dr. She does a physical and measures her height. Your child is exactly at the 50th percen...