The 25th anniversary year continues[horizontal ellipsis]

Honoring the past

Portraying the present

Foreshadowing the future

This second issue, on the topic of "Responsiveness to Intervention and the Speech-Language Pathologist," opens further windows to the past, present, and future by addressing issues associated with services to students with language disorders in schools.

Barbara J. Ehren, EdD, is uniquely suited to edit this issue. In her current position as a research associate with the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning, Ehren is a member of a research team that is actively involved in the national conversation on responsiveness to intervention (RTI) initiatives for students with learning disabilities. Ehren's educational and work histories also have tailored her for this role as editor of an issue devoted to RTI and the speech-language pathologist. Ehren's master's degree and clinical certification are in speech-language pathology. She followed those accomplishments by earning her doctoral degree in Educational Leadership, with emphasis on the interface between general and special education. Ehren was a school district administrator for 11 years, holding a variety of positions that spanned general and special education. In addition, she was a professor of learning disabilities and communication disorders for 15 years at Florida Atlantic University, where she taught about language disorders and learning disabilities and their interrelationships.

Discussions of the topic of RTI also span the past, present, and future; general and special education; and language disorders and learning disabilities. Although RTI may feel solely like a wave of the future to those just encountering the terminology, Ehren's authors point out many links to the past, both within the fields of learning disabilities (especially Graner, Faggella-Luby, & Fritschman) and speech-language pathology (especially Staskowski & Rivera).

The journal editor's own educational experiences and memories reach back even further than the roots to RTI discussed by the authors of this issue. Those experiences extend to a time when a budding field known as "speech correction" was just finding its way into a few universities across the nation. When Katharine joined a program led by Dr. Charles Van Riper in the 1940s in Western Michigan University (where TLD's new Associate Editor now holds a professorship named after Van Riper), it was to enroll in Speech Correction 101, thus entering a world where she lives still, helping individuals with communication disorders to communicate better.

Little attention was devoted then to identifying language disorders because childhood language disorders were not yet recognized as a separate entity. Language concerns were focused on issues related to aphasia in adults, and although potential links between articulation disorders and reading difficulty were mentioned, references to language development and disorders in children were minimal and focused on early delays in first words, not on associations with academic difficulties in the school-age years. It was not until Van Riper (1972) published the fifth edition of his landmark introductory textbook, Speech Correction: Principles and Methods, that entries in the index began to refer to such concepts as language development and language delay. In that edition, Van Riper described the role of the "speech therapist" in the public schools in contrast to the role of the general education teacher:

She prepares her own schedule, selects her own cases, designs her own therapy, and does not have to put on overshoes or collect the milk money [horizontal ellipsis] A good therapist can usually dismiss over a third of her cases each year, and most of the rest show improvement. (p. 426)

We share this window into the past, to highlight the incidental attention given then to issues of "case selection" (along with at least passing notice to "responsiveness to intervention"). Many years have now passed, including the last 25 in which a whole journal has been devoted to Topics in Language Disorders, with many issues illuminating the breadth and depth of language-literacy links to academic success. In this present day in which practitioners and administrators recognize the inadequacies of current methods for identifying students who need speech-language pathology services (see B. Ehren & Nelson, this issue), solutions are just beginning to emerge, or at least the questions are becoming clarified as a means of moving toward solutions. In the meantime, the authors of this issue (particularly B. Ehren & Nelson; Staskowski & Rivera; and Troia) are presenting a window into how the future might look. It is a future with many links to practices and skills that have been evolving over past decades. That should be reassuring to current practitioners who are seeking new ways to increase their relevance to children and adolescents.

Now to the future [horizontal ellipsis] Readers with a research bent (and we know you all have that in this day of evidence-based practice) will find researchable questions jumping out of almost every page. Many of the issue's authors also point to the need for close practitioner-researcher partnerships in conducting this desperately needed research. T. Ehren and Whitmire describe these and many other forms of leadership that speech-language pathologists might take as they seek to participate fully in the discussions and activities of the paradigm shift portended by RTI. Moore-Brown, Montgomery, Bielinski, and Shubin show how the future is now in presenting the results of their research on an RTI initiative in Southern California. It is a future in which comprehensive assessment under the joint responsibility of general and special educators and speech-language pathologists promises to provide better answers about which students need what kind of assistance to benefit from education, and where selecting one's own cases will be replaced by a system that works better for all.

Katharine G. Butler, PhD, Journal Editor

Nickola Wolf Nelson, PhD, Associate Editor

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