Making Special Education Actually Work

Given that IEP writing can be as much of an art as a science, it’s sometimes a challenge for IEP teams to determine just how many goals to write for a specific student. There are no regulations that set minimums and maximums, though you obviously need at least one goal if the child is legitimately eligible for special education. The reason that minimums and maximums aren’t set is because IEPs must be individualized to the unique needs of the individual learner and you can’t use a cookie-cutter approach when you’re individualizing anything.

The short answer to the question “How many goals should be in this child’s IEP?” is “However many he needs.” Of course, that doesn’t really help all that much when you’re trying to wrap your brain around what to do for a particular student.

Presuming that you have adequate present levels of performance data with which to establish the student’s baselines, the first task is to go through all of that data and pick out individual areas of learning need. Where do the deficit areas lie? What is the basis of each area of need? And, how fundamental is the problem?

To explain what I mean by that, let me use an example. Let’s say that you have a child who has difficulty retelling the events of a short story that he has just read. The child remembers details from the story, but in retelling it, he’s all over the place with the details, telling you about things that happened towards the end of the story first and then adding details that first appeared near the beginning of the story. There’s no flow of the events from beginning to end in logical order, just a swirling maelstrom of loosely related details that fail to build up to a climax and make a point.

Assessment also reveals that when asked to place blocks with different symbols on them in the same order in which they were presented from memory, the child cannot remember the order in which they were first presented and, thus, cannot replicate the pattern. What you’re looking at, then, is a problem with sequencing and/or working memory.

To write a goal focused purely on retelling a short story in proper sequence may be too demanding of a place to start. You may have to develop a goal or goals in the more fundamental underlying areas of sequencing and working memory before you can start compounding the issue with language. Goals targeting pattern imitation from a visual model might be the starting point, from which you can expand into pattern imitation from memory. After that, you can add repetition of sequenced events using language.

If you’re not seeing the same difficulties with sequencing and remembering things in proper order with visually presented items such as symbols and objects, and the problem only arises when language is involved, you may be looking at problems in auditory memory and/or a language-based sequencing problem. If auditory memory is the culprit, then goals targeting the repetition of simply auditorily presented tonal patterns may be the place to start; then you can graduate to repeating words presented in a specific order until you eventually graduate up to retelling the details of a story in proper order.

As another example, I’ve worked with children in the past who have had difficulties in math and their IEPs contained goals targeting addition and subtraction, but when it came right down to it, they didn’t even have basic quantitative concepts down or understand the concepts of less and more. They didn’t even understand that written numerals correspond to specific quantities; without a concept of quantity in general, written representations of it were meaningless. You can’t expect a conceptual understanding of addition and subtraction if the child doesn’t have a basic understanding of quantity, less, and more.

You may be able to get a kid to memorize addition and subtraction facts and produce the right answers to single- or even double-digit addition and subtraction problems purely from rote, but the child wouldn’t understand why or how 16 +14 = 30; only that it does. So when presented with 160 + 140, the child wouldn’t know how to arrive at the answer because it wasn’t memorized. The actual concept hadn’t been taught.

The point is that you first have to tease out exactly where the breakdown is occurring before you start writing goals. This impacts the number of goals that should be in a child’s IEP.

You have to start with the most pressing needs first. This is about prioritization and the regulations are fairly silent on how IEP teams are supposed to do this. You have to be realistic about how demanding of a program a particular child can handle. It’s tempting, particularly for parents, to want to load up with all kinds of goals in all kinds of areas of need when their children have a lot of ground to cover. But, if the child is struggling with really fundamental concepts, you have to focus on the quality of what you’re doing, which is laying the foundation for future learning, more than the quantity. Children are natural learners – they want to know things. If you spend time in the beginning focusing on the core deficit areas to ensure that a solid foundation is put down, everything else will build upon it as they move forward and they will pick up momentum over time. What you don’t want to do is spread your child so thinly tackling so many areas of need that they don’t really master any of them.

Start by looking at skill deficits that impact the child in more than one way. Problems with sequencing and memory have implications for all the core content as well as following teachers’ directions, participating in group activities according to the rules, turn-taking, and dealing with interpersonal situations. You may not have a lot of goals and the ones you have may be in some pretty basic areas of knowledge and skill acquisition, but until these foundational skills are mastered, you’re not going to be able to successfully tackle a larger body of goals that are specific to each area of academics, self-help, social/emotional functioning, language, and whatever other areas will eventually need to be tackled.

As the foundational skills get mastered, you’ll start tackling more specific areas of academic need where the student is having difficulty applying these more foundational skills or where more advanced foundational skills need to be mastered. Here you’ll start getting into more academic goals as opposed to goals that speak to the foundational elements of learning in general.

If what you need to do is work on a bunch of little areas that, collectively cause big problems, then you’re going to have a lot of goals, but each one isn’t all that time-consuming to work on and the data collection is going to be pretty straightforward and simple for each individual goal. If what you’re working on are several big fundamental concepts upon which everything else is dependent, you’re not going to have that many goals. Most kids are going to end up somewhere in the middle.

And, you have to bear in mind that you don’t have to work on all the goals every day, necessarily. The goals describe what is going to be accomplished within a year and because special education students are entitled to be educated with their non-special education peers as much as possible, you don’t want to create a situation where the child spends the whole day working on nothing but goals without the opportunity to participate in other school activities unless his needs are so great that working on the goals at the expense of participating with his peers is an educational necessity. A child has to be pretty severely handicapped for that to be the case. An example of this might be a child with profound autism who is so lacking in social skills and awareness of others that intensive ABA is needed to get the child to the point where he can follow adult instructions in a classroom setting, requiring him to start out in a 1:1 instructional setting.

We’re working with a student right now who is largely non-verbal and resorts to aggression, self-injurious behavior, and elopement (running off) when he gets frustrated or has a need that he doesn’t know how to meet. Until we get his communication needs addressed and get him equipped with more appropriate ways of seeing his needs met than to engage in these inappropriate behaviors, we can’t do a whole lot with him academically. It’s frustrating because he’s actually pretty smart in many kinds of ways and his learning potential is largely untapped because of the barriers created by these communication problems and inappropriate behaviors.

As many needs as have been identified for him, the communication and behavioral challenges are the most important ones for us to address right now because, until they’re resolved, we can’t even begin to work on a lot of the other stuff with any kind of success. We’ve had to stop and focus primarily on the communication deficits because they are the source of the behaviors and giving him a successful way of communicating with others is the need with the highest priority. As a result, we’ve pulled out a lot of his goals for right now, leaving in and adding more goals that target his communication skills, his behaviors, and his self-help skills. As the communication issues become resolved, we will start reintroducing his academic goals, but we’ve come to realize that it could be a year or more before he’s going to have the communication skills he needs in order to tackle some of the academic demands.

The communication deficits are just so profound that we’re having to build this skill set practically from the ground up. If he didn’t have the communication problems, I could see him easily tackling 15 to 20 very surgically precise academic goals that, collectively, would catapult him forward academically by several academic years in one school year. But, for right now, we’re working on just a handful of goals that all focus on communications, behavior, and self-help because so long as these underlying foundation skills remain partial and fragmented, they fail to serve as an adequate foundation upon which greater learning can occur.

There is no magic bullet for determining how many goals a kid needs in his IEP. It depends on the kid and what’s reasonable for him to accomplish in a year’s time. The problem in this for IEP teams is that parents in particular often want to push to do as much as possible, sometimes not understanding what is realistically achievable and pushing for more than what can be accomplished, while some school districts will deliberately try to get away with doing as little as they can. This makes it difficult for parents to know whether their school district is cutting corners in bad faith or simply being realistic about what can be achieved in the annual period covered by the IEP.

In either instance, the school district will tell the parents that they have unrealistic expectations. School districts operating in good faith have to be cognizant of this. School districts operating in bad faith will say exactly the same thing but for different reasons and parents aren’t going to know how to interpret this feedback. Plus, parents tend to know their kids better than anyone at all, so when school personnel try to suggest that they don’t know their own children’s limits and capabilities, they usually become incensed.

In a situation in which the parents really do have unrealistic expectations and the school district really is trying to target what is realistically achievable, having solid assessment data and empirical baselines is the best way to demonstrate what is logically realistic. If the present levels are mostly anecdotal accounts from the classroom with no empirical baselines and the proposed goals are not measurable, then the school district cannot reasonably demonstrate what is realistically achievable. If the IEP content is solid and logical, then the school district’s logical arguments are supported by solid evidence and it doesn’t turn into a he-said/she-said battle of subjective opinions.

Click here to listen to the podcast “How Many Goals Does an IEP Need?”

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