The 2004-05 school year didn't start off well for the Sanger Unified School District. The district, located east of Fresno, had entered its first year of "program improvement"--a gentler way of saying that Sanger was among the 98 lowest-performing districts in the state based on success criteria in the No Child Left Behind law. The district had failed to make adequate yearly progress. Now, six years later, the district's turnaround has been dramatic. In two years, it exited program improvement and racked up honors for academic achievement. One key piece of the district's success was committing to response to intervention. RTI is an instructional practice that involves identifying students with specific learning or behavioral weaknesses and then providing progressively intensive interventions to help them improve. In Sanger, response to intervention was seen as a way of improving education for the entire district, including students with disabilities.