Tiered Supports: MTSS & Disproportionality

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-centered dispositions as the organizational purpose of MTSS implementation by using data to uncover disparities, strengthen Tier 1 instruction and behavioral supports with culturally inclusive dispositions, improving decision-making processes, and ensuring interventions respond to student needs rather than reinforce system inequities. Explore practical tools for building an MTSS framework that promotes both student success and equitable outcomes.