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School systems are often challenged to meet the needs of students who are not
performing at grade level expectations and provide support services to help those students to
close the achievement gap. One program that has been adopted in the hopes of achieving that
goal is Response to Intervention (RtI) which promotes early intervention for students who are
only slightly behind their peers; however, state funding isn't available to operate this type of
program. If schools cannot independently fund an RtI program, students must struggle until they
fall far enough below benchmark to qualify for special education services, which are state
funded. Logically, as the achievement gap grows larger, the odds of students closing it become
increasingly less likely. Schools must take action early, but a full scale RtI program that can
target students' needs in multiple subject areas is expensive. For school sites where funding is
limited, such as the one involved in this study, it is possible that the limited resources available
for early intervention programs can be allocated towards a single subject area which can improve
student performance in other areas. Since reading is a skill utilized in every academic subject
area, it is a logical domain to examine for a correlational relationship with other subject areas. In
this study, data was collected on student reading performance and math performance at the
school site of study. The data was then assigned to performance levels and an average
performance level was determined for each student in reading and mathematics. Finally, the
performance levels for each student were analyzed to determine if a correlation existed between
student reading performance and mathematics performance in individual grade levels and overall
in grades two through five.