Building Shared Leadership Across General and Special Education
There is a question that surfaces in nearly every district I work with, usually spoken quietly and sometimes with a little frustration: “Is MTSS a general education thing or a special education thing?”
The honest answer is that it is neither — and both. But how district leaders respond to that question in practice, through how they structure governance, assign roles, allocate resources, and hold people accountable, largely determines whether a Multi-Tiered System of Supports becomes a genuine district-wide infrastructure or simply a new name for the same siloed work.
For special education directors and superintendents navigating this terrain together, the ownership question is not merely semantic. It has direct consequences for student outcomes, staff coherence, and legal compliance. This post makes the case for co-leadership as both an ethical and strategic imperative — and offers practical guidance for building the governance structures to sustain it.
The Silo Opportunity is Structural, Not Personal
When MTSS implementation stalls or fractures along departmental lines, the instinct is often to blame individuals — the special education director who “keeps pulling kids out,” the general education curriculum coordinator who “refuses to share data.” In most cases, however, the breakdown is structural. Districts designed separate administrative systems for general and special education long before the MTSS framework existed, and they rarely redesigned those systems when they adopted tiered supports.
McIntosh and Goodman (2016) identified this as one of the core challenges in integrated MTSS implementation: the parallel-play problem, in which academic (often general education–owned) and behavioral (often special education or counseling–owned) systems operate adjacent to one another without meaningful integration. The result is what practitioners recognize immediately — students experiencing both academic and behavioral challenges falling through the gap between two systems that were never designed to communicate.
Fixsen and colleagues’ (2009) implementation science framework is instructive here. Sustainable implementation requires competency drivers — the selection, training, and coaching of staff — operating within organization drivers that include leadership and decision support structures. When those organizational structures are misaligned or uncoordinated across divisions, even well-trained staff cannot execute MTSS with fidelity. The problem is upstream of the classroom.
What the Law Actually Requires - and What It Doesn't Say About Ownership
Part of what makes the ownership question so charged is that it carries legal weight. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004) explicitly permits the use of a tiered response-to-intervention process as part of the evaluation process for specific learning disabilities — but it does not prescribe who, administratively, owns that process. Similarly, IDEA’s Child Find obligation is a district-wide responsibility, not a special education department responsibility alone.
This matters because it means that when a student’s needs are not identified or addressed in a timely way at Tier 1 or Tier 2, the legal accountability is shared — even if the operational accountability has been left entirely to special education. Batsche and colleagues’ (2005) foundational policy guidance from NASDSE made this point clearly: RTI/MTSS represents a reconceptualization of the relationship between general education and special education, not a handoff from one to the other.
District superintendents who understand this legal architecture tend to approach MTSS governance differently. Rather than allowing the special education department to carry the compliance burden of tiered supports alone, they build accountability structures in which general education leaders are explicitly responsible for Tier 1 and Tier 2 outcomes — because that is where the legal and moral obligation actually begins.
A Co-Leadership Model: What It Looks Like In Practice
Building shared leadership across general and special education does not mean creating committees where everyone has a seat but no one has a role. It means deliberate role delineation at each tier, structured joint decision-making, and accountability that runs in both directions.
At the District Level
Co-leadership typically means designating both the Director of Teaching and Learning (or equivalent) and the Director of Special Education as co-owners of the district MTSS leadership team — with the superintendent holding both accountable in equal measure. Eagle and colleagues (2015) found that MTSS teams with explicit, shared leadership and clear role definition across disciplines demonstrated significantly stronger implementation fidelity than those with ambiguous or single-discipline governance. The district-level team should include representation from general education, special education, school psychology, and building administration, with a shared data calendar and a common decision-making protocol.
At the Building Level
The principal’s role is pivotal. Harlacher, Sanford, and Walker (2015) emphasized that the building principal is the linchpin of MTSS implementation — not because the principal delivers instruction, but because the principal controls the schedules, staffing configurations, and meeting structures that make tiered support possible. A principal who sees MTSS as “the special education coordinator’s job” will, consciously or not, create conditions that make that belief true. Superintendents must be explicit in their expectations: principals are accountable for MTSS at every tier, including Tier 1 core instruction.
At the Team Level
The composition and facilitation of problem-solving teams should reflect shared ownership. When these teams are composed exclusively of special education staff, they send a clear message about who “owns” the students in need. When they include the classroom teacher, building administrator, a general education instructional coach, and the special education liaison, they operationalize the shared-leadership principle. Facilitation matters, too — whoever facilitates the team shapes whose knowledge is centered and whose expertise is treated as authoritative.
The Data Conversation Is Also a Leadership Conversation
One of the most reliable indicators of whether shared MTSS leadership is functioning is who shows up when data are reviewed — and whether the data conversation produces decisions that require both general and special education to act.
In districts where ownership remains siloed, data reviews often function as referral conversations: Tier 2 and Tier 3 data are reviewed primarily to determine which students need to be referred for special education evaluation. This is precisely the pattern that Fuchs and Fuchs (2006) cautioned against — using tiered intervention less as a genuine support system and more as a procedural precursor to evaluation.
Effective co-leadership reorients the data conversation. When both general and special education leaders are genuinely accountable, the questions shift: Is our Tier 1 core strong enough that only 15–20% of students need supplemental support? Are our Tier 2 interventions producing measurable response? What does non-response tell us about the intervention — not just about the student? These are questions that require general education to be answerable, not only special education.
This reorientation also has equity implications. Artiles, Bal, and King Thorius (2010) documented how systems that treat disproportionate special education identification as a special education problem — rather than as a symptom of inadequate Tier 1 supports — consistently fail to address the structural conditions that drive disproportionality in the first place. Shared leadership is not just operationally effective; it is a prerequisite for equity.
Superintendent Leadership of This Shift
Co-leadership across general and special education does not usually emerge organically. The organizational histories, budget structures, and professional cultures of these two divisions have been separate for decades. In many districts, they occupy different physical spaces, report through different channels, and operate on different professional calendars.
Elmore (2004) argued that the only way to change the instructional core of schools is through disciplined, system-level leadership that builds internal accountability — accountability that is shared, transparent, and tied to what students actually experience. This is precisely what a superintendent must model when it comes to MTSS governance. When a superintendent explicitly expects the Director of Special Education and the Director of Teaching and Learning to present together at board meetings, to share a common improvement plan, and to be evaluated in part on the coherence of their collaboration, the organizational culture begins to shift.
This is not soft leadership work. It requires superintendents to be willing to reorganize reporting structures, revise job descriptions, and sometimes navigate significant institutional resistance. But the alternative — allowing MTSS to be absorbed into special education as a compliance function — virtually guarantees that the system will not deliver on its promise for the students who need it most.
Leadership Reflection: Four Questions to Start the Conversation
If you are a superintendent or special education director reading this and wondering where your district actually stands, start here:
1. Who chairs your district MTSS leadership team, and does that person have positional authority over both general and special education functions?
2. When a student fails to respond to Tier 2 intervention, does the accountability conversation include the general education administrator responsible for Tier 1 — or does it begin and end with special education?
3. Are your principals evaluated, even in part, on MTSS implementation outcomes that include Tier 1 and Tier 2 — or is MTSS performance measured only at the special education level?
4. Do your general education and special education directors share a common data calendar, a common improvement goal, and a common accountability conversation with you?
If the honest answer to any of these questions reveals a gap, that gap is the work. The good news is that it is leadership work — and leadership work can be changed with intentionality, structural redesign, and a superintendent who is willing to say clearly: MTSS belongs to all of us.
References
Artiles, A. J., Bal, A., & King Thorius, K. A. (2010). Back to the future: A critique of response to intervention’s social justice views. Theory Into Practice, 49(4), 250–257.
Batsche, G., Elliott, J., Graden, J. L., Grimes, J., Kovaleski, J. F., Prasse, D., Reschly, D. J., Schrag, J., & Tilly, W. D. (2005). Response to intervention: Policy considerations and implementation. National Association of State Directors of Special Education.
Eagle, J. W., Dowd-Eagle, S. E., Snyder, A., & Holtzman, E. G. (2015). Implementing a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS): Collaboration between school psychologists and administrators to promote systems-level change. Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 25(2–3), 160–177.
Elmore, R. F. (2004). School reform from the inside out: Policy, practice, and performance. Harvard Education Press.
Fixsen, D. L., Blase, K. A., Naoom, S. F., & Wallace, F. (2009). Core implementation components. Research on Social Work Practice, 19(5), 531–540.
Fuchs, D., & Fuchs, L. S. (2006). Introduction to response to intervention: What, why, and how valid is it? Reading Research Quarterly, 41(1), 93–99.
Harlacher, J. E., Sanford, A., & Walker, N. J. (2015). Distinguishing between Tier 2 and Tier 3 instruction in order to support implementation of RTI. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 47(5), 289–300.
Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004, Pub. L. No. 108-446, 20 U.S.C. § 1400 et seq. (2004).
McIntosh, K., & Goodman, S. (2016). Integrated multi-tiered systems of support: Blending RTI and PBIS. Guilford Press.
