You Can’t Intervene Your Way Out of a Tier 1 Problem
When we start talking about literacy, it often leads into talking about intervention. It’s so tempting to assume that pulling or pushing students for Tier 3 will catch them up. But current research points to something more foundational: the quality of core classroom instruction: Tier One determines whether students need intervention in the first place. What I’ve noticed is that it’s not intervention that most students need- it’s strong first instruction. That starts in the classroom.
Tier One instruction refers to the daily teaching that all students receive in the general education classroom. In literacy, this means systematic, evidence-aligned instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Tier Three, by contrast, is intensive, individualized support for students who are significantly behind.
While Tier Three has an important role, positioning it as the primary solution for literacy difficulties misunderstands how reading development works. Decades, and I mean decades, of cognitive science research show that proficient reading is not a natural process! It requires explicit teaching of the alphabetic principle, orthographic patterns, and language structures. When these components are embedded in Tier One, far fewer students struggle to read. Without systematic instruction, many children fail to make the connections between letters and sounds needed to become proficient readers.
When your core instruction is aligned with this science, explicit and sequenced instruction in phoneme-grapheme correspondences, many opportunities for practice (and repeated practice) in connected text, and attention to morphological and semantic understanding, students build a strong foundation. This reduces the number who fall behind and need remediation.
Why Prevention Beats Remediation
There are three pretty strong reasons why strong Tier One instruction is more beneficial than waiting to focus on Tier Three:
Efficiency of Learning
When students receive aligned literacy instruction within their classrooms (with their classroom teacher), they internalize key skills during the typical day. This minimizes the cognitive gaps that require later remediation and also reduces the cognitive load down the road. Intervention is costly in time and resources while robust core instruction reduces that burden.Equity Considerations
Students from diverse linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds have often been under-served by weak core literacy programs. Strong Tier One instruction provides equitable access to the foundational skills that all students need. Waiting to intervene often means that students spend years lagging behind peers before support occurs.Long-Term Outcomes
Reading proficiency is cumulative. Students who never fully acquire decoding skills are limited in their ability to comprehend grade-level texts, even if they receive later intervention. In contrast, students with solid Tier One experiences are able to progress more fluidly through complex texts and academic discourse.
Putting Research into Practice
Research suggests that classrooms with a strong core literacy program show lower rates of reading difficulty. For example, studies of structured literacy approaches demonstrate significant gains in decoding and comprehension compared to typical basal programs. Furthermore, implementation research shows that when teachers are trained to deliver systematic, explicit literacy instruction, student outcomes improve schoolwide.
However, quality Tier One instruction doesn’t happen by accident. It requires:
Professional development rooted in the science of reading
Curriculum materials that reflect structured literacy principles
Ongoing formative assessment to guide instruction
Collaboration among educators to analyze student data
To Summarize:
Tier Three intervention will always have a place in supporting students with persistent reading challenges and learning disabilities. But the evidence is clear: strengthening Tier One instruction has a greater impact on overall student reading achievement. When the core literacy program is strong, fewer students require intensive support, and more students gain the skills needed to access rich, complex texts.
By focusing on what all students experience daily in the classroom, we can ensure that instruction reflects what we know about how reading develops and set learners up for long-term success- academically, socially, and emotionally.
