Unpacking Education & Tech Talk For Teachers · AVID Open Access

RTI and PLCs, with Mike Mattos

January 7, 2026·48 min·3 clips

RTI has been federal law since 2004, yet many schools treat it as a compliance paperwork game to route kids into special ed testing — and Mike Mattos says the national redesignation rate out of special ed since 1974 is just 1.8%.

1. Unpacking Education hosts Rena Clark, Paul Beckerman, and Winston Benjamin interview Mike Mattos, a 38-year educator and internationally recognized author on RTI and professional learning communities, about transforming schools through systematic collaboration and intervention. 2. Mike Mattos was a middle and high school mathematics teacher for most of his career before serving as principal of Marjory Vale Elementary and Pioneer Middle School in Tustin, California; he frames himself as a practitioner implementing research, not a researcher generating it. 3. The episode's central argument is that if educators earnestly want every student to succeed, then the system must be organized to provide collective, embedded help — not leave it to individual teachers working as 'educational missionaries' on their own time. 4. Mattos strips away acronyms by starting from common premises: all educators want kids to succeed, students enter with different skills and support levels, and teachers cannot meet all student needs alone. 5. He frames the individual-teacher-as-solution approach as a 'one-room schoolhouse model' appropriate for rural 19th century America but not for modern schools where collective expertise and resources exist. 6. He introduces two complementary research bases: the professional learning community (PLC) process, which organizes how educators collaborate, and response to intervention (RTI) or MTSS, which organizes how schools systematically provide extra help. 7. RTI has been federal law since 2004 under the reauthorization of special ed legislation, but Mattos says the compliance-versus-commitment problem means many schools implement it only enough to appease the mandate rather than to genuinely intervene. 8. He identifies two major misconceptions: first, that RTI is a documentation process to qualify students for special ed testing rather than a proactive intervention system; second, that if the goal is to get students into special ed, schools should examine why the national redesignation rate out of special ed since 1974 is only 1.8%. 9. Mattos attributes that 1.8% figure not to special ed teacher failure but to the fact that special ed law was originally a civil rights law ensuring access to buildings, not a system designed to ensure learning and reintegration. 10. He argues the real prerequisite for RTI is a culture shift: from 'my kids / your kids' to 'our kids,' and from blaming external factors to focusing on what educators can control during the roughly 40% of student waking hours they are present. 11. The four PLC at Work critical questions — developed by Rick DuFour and Bob Eaker — are: what do we expect kids to learn, how will we know they learned it, how do we respond when they haven't, and how do we extend learning for those who already have. 12. He argues teacher-team-created or selected common formative assessments are, in the words of assessment researcher Doug Reeves, the 'gold standard' of data for intervention — real-time, teacher-owned, and tied to what was actually taught. 13. He criticizes reliance on delayed state test scores, noting that by the time results arrive, the year is over and intervention is no longer possible. 14. Host Rena Clark describes how her current middle school implements a 35-minute intervention block three days per week where students self-select or are assigned based on common formative assessment data — Mattos confirms the 'open or closed' session model was pioneered by a teacher task force at Pioneer Middle School 19 years ago. 15. For elementary schools, Mattos says each grade level can shave minutes from ELA and math to build 30-minute intervention windows without affecting other grade levels; at secondary level, the whole-school bell schedule requires everyone to stop at the same time, often solved using an 'assembly schedule' that banks minutes from each period. 16. Mattos describes how he became an AVID advocate first as an assistant principal in a district that was already an AVID demonstration site, then as a principal who expanded AVID's executive functioning tools and career exploration framework school-wide. 17. He argues AVID's core benefit — equipping students who lack college-going cultural capital at home with the behaviors and skills to navigate post-secondary — should not be limited to an AVID elective but distributed across every student. 18. The tone is energetic and conviction-driven; Mattos is the dominant voice with hosts asking targeted follow-up questions and validating with personal classroom experience; the conversation is practical and example-heavy rather than theoretical. 19. Best for school administrators, instructional coaches, and educators seeking a practical framework for organizing RTI and PLC implementation within existing contractual constraints. 20. Listeners already deeply familiar with PLC at Work theory, or seeking new research rather than implementation guidance, will find limited novel conceptual content here.

As heard by us

A practical case for using PLC time to focus on student learning and timely intervention.

It frames RTI and PLCs as practical supports for student success, whether the need is academic help or behavior support. The strongest stretch of the argument keeps returning to everyday classroom pressure, where teachers have to sort out what matters most, decide how learning…

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Why you'd press play

If you need PLC time to stop feeling abstract, this gives you a cleaner path.

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