Question: Why is intensive intervention important?

Answer: What we know about students with disabilities, even kids with the most intensive cognitive challenges, is that they can all make progress; all students can learn and can make improvement from where they're starting. And so this approach, this focus on intensive intervention, it's really about helping move the bar for kids to the extent that we can. Students with disabilities on the whole have really had very flat achievement. When you look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress proficiency rates for students overall hover around 30 percent that and that number has gone up over these last 15 years whereas when we look at students with disabilities at 4th and 8th grade in reading and math the proficiency rates hover around 10 percent. As the students get older and we are start looking at things like graduation, post-secondary outcomes, incarceration rates, and so on also the numbers are much more dismal. There has been more recently a focus on making sure all students make progress towards standards, and so I think sometimes that gets interpreted to mean we have to teach everyone the same way because we have to get them to the same place. There is no such thing as acceptable failure rate. And this is a group of kids is where we need to continue to look at data to individualize our instructions so that we can get the students closer to where we want them to be and so that their performances is more in line with that of their peers