Do you know whether your child is making meaningful IEP goal progress? Does your IEP team provide you with hard, objective data quarterly explaining how close to their IEP goal your student is at that time? If not, the school is not meeting their obligations to report meaningful progress on IEP goals. Writing “making progress to meet the goal” is not sufficient. Without data that is just an opinion.
The first marking period has come to an end in most school districts by now. You should receive a progress report on each IEP goal (unless your school uses a quarterly IEP system separate from report cards, which is also ok, as long as it happens). The report you receive should include meaningful IEP goal progress reporting. Not all progress reports are created equal. This is one of the number one areas IEP teams and school districts do NOT want parents to ask questions– so you should definitely be asking.
Here are some examples of bad “progress” reports from REAL IEPs that school teams have produced (I’m not kidding here, I pulled out real IEPs and collected these):
Academic Goals — Unacceptable Progress Reporting
Goal: writing complete sentences — “Making progress to meet the goal. B needs to practice this skill at home.”
Goal: math calculation — “Student is making progress to meet this goal but should practice on Khan Academy dot com [a free online program].”
Goal: read 1st grade sight words — “Making progress to meet the goal. She is doing so much better with her sight words, I am so proud of her.”
Goal: reading comprehension — “Student is making steady progress and is a pleasure to have in class.”
Goal: Reading Fluency — “K reads with better automaticity and reads sufficiently for comprehension.”
Better Progress Reporting
What you’ll notice in almost all meaningful IEP goal progress reporting is that there are numbers, the numbers are objective, and dates of assessment are given. Additionally, the type of data matches the specific goals and objectives from the IEP goals section on that topic, and the same method of measurement is used each time the child is assessed.
For example, if the IEP goal is for reading fluency, the goal should have specified how many words per minute the student would read by the end of the year (or quarter). If your student’s IEP goal doesn’t read this way, you need to insist that the team revise the goal as your first step. More on that below. Reporting on a words per minute goal would look something like: “Given grade level text, N read 43 words correct per minute on 9/1/23, 51 wcpm on 10/1/23, and 53 wcpm on 11/1/23.” Specific numbers are given, along with dates of assessment and the reading material provided.
Behavior Goals
A similar technique is used for behavioral goals. For example, data might be collected during each period of the day for either the number of a specific type of incident (for example, leaving the assigned area) or the percentage of time the student refrained from doing a problematic behavior (stayed in seat).
Just like with academic progress reporting, a student’s behavior goal and progress reporting should include numerical data– which requires data collection based on the IEP goal. A subjective statement about progress being made or not made is not sufficient or legal. So, in this example, saying, “J is doing better staying in his seat” is NOT good progress reporting. Instead, the progress report would look something like, “J stayed in his seat 49% of the time based on daily behavior logs in September. In October, J stayed in his seat 65% of the time.”
In a behavioral goal, “reducing acting out behavior” is not measurable. First of all, what is “acting out?” Behaviors must be defined– a good way to think about it is to ask yourself if you can demonstrate/act out the specific behavior. Describing a specific behavior might include “raising hand before speaking,” which is an observable behavior that can be tracked. The progress reporting could then track what percentage of time the student raises his hand before speaking.
HINT: When developing the IEP goals, ask to see the data collection sheet your team proposes to use to collect behavioral data during the school day to determine if you believe the method they propose to use will produce objective data (and if they even have a plan!).
You may want to seek a private professional, like a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, behavioral psychologist, or educational consultant to help you with this if your child’s behaviors are complicated. Behavioral progress is more likely to need to be charted or graphed over time in order to provide information that will be useful in making decisions moving forward.
IEP Goals Dictate How Progress is Reported
The key to getting started with good progress reporting is good goal writing. IEP goals must be measurable. That means for example, a reading goal should include “words correct per minute,” not “B will read with sufficient fluency for comprehension.” The reason this goal langauge is a problem is that there is no definition of “sufficient.” Sufficient is subjective and is not measurable over time. Therefore, “read with sufficient fluency” is not a measurable IEP goal, and neither is “read with sufficient fluency for comprehension.” Words correct per minute on the other hand, is measurable and can be tracked over time.
HINT: Reading comprehension (understanding what is read) and reading fluency (how fast a student reads) are not the same. For some students, in particular bright students with reading difficulties, students can appear to comprehend their reading because they use context clues, pictures, and background knowledge. The student is demonstrating that they can compensate, not that they can decode/read words and sentences. School systems often use measurement tools that combine decoding, fluency and comprehension into one “level” or score. You absolutely must insist on separating these skills. Ask questions about the assessments being used– did they combine comprehension and decoding to come up with a score? That is not a good tool.
HINT: Does your student have good verbal or listening comprehension but your IEP team proposes a reading comprehension goal? Ask yourself if your student really has a reading “comprehension” problem and needs a reading comprehension goal or if what they actually need is a reading decoding and/or fluency goal. Insist on testing or assessment and discussion that separates out these skills. If a student has good verbal comprehension scores, and can answer questions about what is read TO them, they likely do not actually have a reading comprehension problem that needs to be addressed yet– they have a decoding problem that is preventing comprehension when reading. Address the decoding problem (by providing evidence based structured literacy intervention) and the “comprehension” problem may fix itself (in this particular group of students with high verbal comprehension). Also ask if standardized testing (like MCAP, PARCC, ERB) that is supposed to test a student’s reading ability is actually being read aloud to the student because they have accommodations, yielding “reading” scores that are absolutely meaningless at assessing reading skills.
HINT: Does your school use a certain reading program/assessment with the initials F&P resulting in a report that your child is on “level C…or… D… or…N”? This program and its assessment combines comprehension and decoding, inflating the reading level of students who can “compensate” by using context clues, pictures, and background knowledge to figure out what they couldn’t actually decode in order to answer questions about the text– they basically filled in the blanks using their own knowledge. This might work in 1st grade, but it sure doesn’t work in 4th grade or in high school physics. This program has been debunked— the evidence shows that it is not an effective tool to measure reading levels. Do not rely on assurances that you child is making reading progress because they moved up a letter level.
Also, for basic reading skills 80% mastery is not good enough, but 80% seems to be the standard IEP teams default to when writing all IEP goals. Imagine if you could only read 80% of the words in this post– how frustrated would you be? How much would you really understand? Reading phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, and decoding goals should be mastered at 95% — at least.
If you think you may need assistance with your student’s IEP goals and progress reporting, schedule a free call to discuss how a special education attorney or parent advocate can help.
This blog post is for informational purposes only. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship.