Building cross-cultural competency through evidence.
Tiered Supports: MTSS & Disproportionality
What does it mean?
A Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) is a proactive, prevention-focused framework designed to ensure all students receive the academic, behavioral, and social-emotional supports they need to succeed. At its core, MTSS is built around four essential components: universal screening, a multi-level prevention system, progress monitoring, and data-based decision making.
When these components are implemented through an equity lens, MTSS becomes a powerful framework for addressing disproportionality––the overrepresentation or underrepresentation of student groups, relative to their overall enrollment, in special education identification and school discipline. Rather than waiting until disparities emerge, equity-centered MTSS uses data and provides increasingly intensive supports before exclusionary discipline or inappropriate special education referrals become the default response.
Our resources help educators and school leaders integrate equity into every stage of MTSS implementation by using data to uncover disparities, strengthening Tier 1 instruction and behavioral supports, improving decision-making processes, and ensuring interventions respond to student needs rather than reinforce systeming inequities. Explore practical tools for building an MTSS framework that promotes both student success and equitable outcomes.
