Tag: goals

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California SLPs Sometimes Confuse Legal Requirements

Today’s posting will hopefully lay to rest a misunderstanding that seems to plague special education in California. I can only presume that, like many other “urban myths” that root themselves in special education lore, at some point in time, somebody somewhere in California conducted a training seminar on speech-language assessment and services within special education and miscommunicated something that has now led to speech-language specialists throughout the state making improper conclusions to the detriment of some children in need of speech-language services.

The problem is this: the distinction between who is found eligible for special education on the basis of a speech-language impairment (“SLI”) and who qualifies for speech-language services as a student already eligible for special education under any other category. Eligibility for special education as SLI is not required in order for a child otherwise eligible for special education to receive speech-language services in order to benefit from his/her IEP.

The critical piece of legislation, which gets erroneously cited in speech-language assessment reports all the time, is 5 CCR  3030(c). Title 5 of the California Code of Regulations Section 3030 describes all of the criteria for each of the eligibility categories under which a student may qualify for special education and related services. These categories include Specific Learning Disability (“SLD”), Other Health Impaired (“OHI”), Emotionally Disturbed (“ED”), and many others, including SLI. The critical thing to understand here is that the 3030s describe who can receive special education and on what basis, not what services they will get.

What ends up happening, though, is a child will be assessed for special education purposes and a speech-language assessment will be conducted. In the course of the overall assessment, even though the child is found eligible under some category other than SLI, because he did not score below the 7th percentile on two or more speech-language assessments, the speech-language specialist will determine that he doesn’t qualify for speech-language services according to 5 CCR   3030(c). It is a complete and utter misapplication of this Code, which deals strictly with eligibility under SLI and not what services an otherwise eligible child should receive.

A typical example of this would be a child who is eligible for special education pursuant to 5 CCR   3030(g) for autistic-like behaviors (in special education in California, a medical or psychological diagnosis cannot be made by the school psychologist, so this section of the code provides alternative language and defines the criteria by which a special education eligibility category can be identified for a child exhibiting the symptoms of autism), but who is relatively verbal. While his scores may hover just above the 7th percentile on the speech-language tests he was administered, they are still very low and his low language functioning compounds his other problems arising from the other needs arising from his handicapping condition.

In this example, anyone in their right mind can see that the child needs pragmatic (social) language intervention and help with idiomatic and figurative (non-literal) language. He doesn’t have any friends, he doesn’t get jokes, and he doesn’t understand clichs and colorful sayings, such as “Clear as mud.” This makes it difficult for him to participate in group projects with peers and understand the writings of Mark Twain. He needs goals that address these areas of need and speech-language services in order to benefit from his IEP.

No subsection of 5 CCR  3030 drives the selection of services that any child gets, only whether or not a particular child is eligible and, if so, under what category. The IDEA mandates that children who are eligible for special education, regardless of what category they qualify under, receive whatever supports and services are necessary in order to afford them a FAPE.

Specifically, the federal regulations found at 34 CFR  300.320(a)(2) state that IEPs must include for each child measurable annual goals, including academic and functional goals designed to meet the child’s needs that result from the child’s disability to enable the child to be involved in and make progress in the general education curriculum and meet each of the child’s other educational needs that results from the child’s disability.

An eligible child is a child who requires, as a result of one or more handicapping conditions, special education and related services in order to receive educational benefit. 34 CFR  300.39 “Related services” is described at 34 CFR  300.34. In none of this is there anything that suggests that the only way that an otherwise eligible child can receive speech-language services is if he is also found eligible as SLI.

In fact, 34 CFR  300.304(c)(6) states that, when evaluations are conducted for special education purposes, they must be “sufficiently comprehensive to identify all of the child’s special education and related services needs, whether or not commonly linked to the disability category in which the child has been classified.” Congress understood when it crafted the IDEA that you don’t individualize a child’s program by resorting to “cookie-cutter” strategies that are based on a kid’s eligibility category.

The IDEA is the skeleton of special education law. It establishes the basic framework and minimal standards. It is left to the states, if they want any federal special education dollars, to add the flesh to the bones by creating their own state-level legislation that explains how each state will implement the requirements of the IDEA. While states are free to add more obligations to their schools than what the IDEA requires, they are prohibited from reducing the protections offered to students and parents under the IDEA lest they sacrifice their funding.

What this means for speech-language services to special education students in California is that the IDEA basically says each eligible child must get whatever he/she needs in order to receive educational benefit, regardless of what type of services are required and regardless of the applicable eligibility categories. That’s the whole concept of individualizing a child’s education plan based on his/her unique educational needs.

There is nothing at the state-level that reduces this federal mandate, nor could there be unless California were to choose to go it alone to cover its special education costs and we all already know that California can’t pay its bills even with the federal funding it receives. It absolutely cannot afford to give up its federal special education funding.

We’re curious to know if there are any other state-level debacles involving misinterpretations of the law happening elsewhere. Readers are encouraged to post comments to this posting about such misinterpretations that may be occurring where they live.

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What is a Serious Behavioral Problem?

Today’s posting is a podcast in which I discuss what constitutes a serious behavioral problem within the context of special education. Contending with aggression, assaultiveness, verbal outbursts, noncompliance, off-task behavior, inattentiveness, elopement, and other problem behaviors is no small matter.

Equally important, but less often addressed, are more passive behaviors that impact learning, such as sitting quietly without asking questions when the student doesn’t understand what is going on rather than asking for the information to be repeated or rephrased and requesting clarification.

Please do post your comments and questions. We want to bring you the information you seek about special education-related issues and need your feedback to help guide our selection of content.

Serious Behavioral Problems podcast- Part 1
Serious Behavioral Problems podcast- Part 2

34 CFR  300.34
34 CFR  300.304

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Behaviors that Interfere with Learning

Federal and state laws provide guidance to educators regarding their responses to children with disabilities who exhibit behaviors at school that interfere with their own learning or that of others. But, how do you determine whether a behavior meets the regulatory standard for triggering these provisions of the law?

 

I worked on a case just over a year ago in which the student had been found eligible for special education as only OHI (see our new acronym glossary) on the basis of her ADHD even though she was also clinically depressed and receiving psychiatric treatment outside of the special education process. We’d first attempted to get the District to also find her eligible as ED, but the District created an offer of services and placement that seemed at the time to be legitimately intended to address all of her issues regardless of her eligibility category, so we didn’t make a big deal about the secondary eligibility category after a while, which we later regretted.

 

The services offered to the student included on-site counseling with the school psychologist assigned to our student’s campus. The problem was, as nice and well-intended as the school psychologist was, she was grossly under-qualified to provide adequate mental health support to a tenacious young lady with a psychiatric disorder. Without making a single effort to coordinate push-in mental health services by qualified psychologists and therapists so that she could remain in the LRE, the school district kept pushing a COE-operated special day school for students with emotional problems, even though it wouldn’t find our student ED.

 

The parents refused to consent to the COE placement on a number of grounds, not the least of which was that their 13-year-old daughter who engaged in loud, over-sexualized dialogues with whomever would listen would have been the only girl in her class of 13 emotional disturbed teenagers. Those poor boys wouldn’t have stood a chance. She would have stood that class on its ear in the first five minutes.? No one would have benefitted from that arrangement.

 

We thought we had things worked out. The IEP seemed like a step in the right direction once we got it all wrapped up. The goals were measurable. Everyone had a game plan and people were assigned to contend with specific issues. But, our student had needs that were too severe and demanding for the staff assigned to her case, as it turns out, and entirely beyond her control. Her biochemistry was a train wreck. Her psychiatrist was challenged to find a blend of medications that worked properly. She was experiencing side effects from some of the medications. She was far more difficult and mouthy than usual for several months while the attempts to develop the proper medication regimen were being made.

 

At some point, she said the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time and got sent to the office to talk.  While sitting in the office waiting to be seen, she loudly announced that she and her boyfriend should just come to the school with guns and blow everybody away.? She was immediately sent home and school site taff instantly initiated expulsion proceedings.

 

In accordance with federal law, a Manifestation Determination IEP meeting was called to ascertain whether or not the student’s behavior was a result of, or was significantly impacted by, her disability. Her parents and I thought it was pretty self-evident. The girl’s various handicapping conditions, including those for which she was being treated outside of the special education system, were documented in various reports and letters from her treating doctors and therapists over the years as well as the district’s own assessment reports.

 

 

However, when we got into the meeting, it very quickly became clear that the meeting already had a pre-determined outcome. It was a total sham. The principal had collected letters from this child’s teachers vilifying her for the record, many of which described her as “disturbed” and “irrationally angry,” which, of course, were the untreated symptoms of her mental health disorders. Combine this state of mind with the poor impulse control that come part and parcel with many cases of ADHD and a smart mouth, and you’ve got one of the most difficult children in special education to serve.

 

 

She was too much for the school psychologist, who really was not qualified to serve her needs, as it turned out. In California, where this case took place, school psychologists are not, by default, real psychologists. The title is a misnomer.

 

All that is required to be a school psychologist in California is a Master’s degree in school psychology and a special credential, much like a teaching credential, issued by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. There is no license from the California Board of Psychology, which licenses holders of PhDs and PsyDs as clinical psychologists, or the Board of Behavioral Sciences, which licenses holders of Master’s degrees and PhDs in Educational Psychology to practice as educational psychologists.

 

As a result, California law, specifically 5 CCR  3030, fails to require any kind of clinical diagnoses by school psychologists and, instead, provides non-clinical criteria by which children are found eligible for special education. This is the case even when the school psychologist involved also happens to be a licensed clinical or educational psychologist.

 

Because most school psychologists in California are not qualified to render DSM-IV diagnoses, such diagnoses are not used in the special education process at all unless conducted under the auspices of a mental health evaluation by a licensed psychologist acting in that capacity and not in the capacity of a school psychologist. Mental health evaluations are done through interagency agreements between local school districts and county mental health agencies.

 

 

The problem with our student’s situation was that the school psychologist who was supposed to be providing her with in-school counseling support was not a mental health professional and as much as she tried to do the best she could, she simply wasn’t trained or equipped to contend with needs as severe as our student’s. And, she was more than willing to admit it. She was a good person. However, the district chose to stand behind the principal of the school who clearly hated our student and simply wanted her off the campus forever.

 

 

I’m not going to take the position that this child’s behavior should have somehow been tolerated. It was atrocious and had no place in a learning environment. The point that kept getting lost on the district, though, was that her behavior was being influenced by her medication changes and her defective processing. Her judgment was impaired by her biology plus a cocktail of psychotropic drugs that weren’t quite working out. 

 

 

She was crawling inside her own skin most of the day. This made her agitated and easily set off, which still didn’t make the behavior okay; but knowledge of what she was going through should have led the adults involved to come up with an appropriate offering of supports and services that would help her overcome these feelings and function more successfully at school. These could have included the district consulting with her treating psychiatrist to make sure that everyone knew what was going on, as well as everyone involved working collaboratively towards common outcomes and responding consistently across all settings to her behaviors.

 

 

That’s not what happened, though. What happened was that the district decided to limit its examination of whether the behavior resulted from, or was impacted by, her disability to only her ADHD. The district argued that she had only been found eligible for special education as OHI on the basis of her diagnosed ADHD and, therefore, the examination was limited to that disorder only. We argued that the IDEA requires that once a child is found eligible under any category, all of the child’s educational needs must be met even if they are not normally associated with the disability for which the child has been found eligible.

 

 

Even if, arguendo, she really hadn’t met the eligibility criteria of ED, she nonetheless carried a clinical diagnosis of depression for which she was receiving medication in addition to her severe ADHD. Looking at the language of the statute, it seemed pretty straightforward to us: we had to determine whether the behaviors were the result of, or were impacted by, her disabilities, not her eligibility category(ies). And, her disabilities included ADHD, depression, and possibly bi-polar disorder, for which she had a provisional diagnosis.

 

 

It was never our intent to suggest that her placement remain unchanged or that everyone should pretend like what she did never happened. We simply believed that expelling her for something that wasn’t entirely within her control, being that it was, at least in part, a manifestation of her disability and depriving her of intervention, was counter-intuitive to what the situation required. We needed to beef up her programming, not kick her out of school and place the burden on her parents to figure out how to remediate her educational delays themselves. The school was just sick and tired of dealing with her and simply wanted her gone.

 

 

The whole thing ultimately got resolved in a confidential settlement agreement that achieved a more appropriate placement without expulsion. She also got her meds straightened out shortly afterwards, which made a huge difference in the success of her program.

 

My point here is that we got burned by accepting the earlier argument that “Once she’s in, she’s in and we have to serve all her needs regardless of her eligibility category; you don’t need us to find her ED to give her what she needs.” We didn’t push for the ED eligibility category back when we first realized that she qualified for it because we believed the district was nonetheless making a good faith effort to address all of her needs, including her behavior.

 

 

It wasn’t until later that we realized that our trust had been abused. The reason the district didn’t want to find her eligible as ED on the basis of her diagnosed depression was to leave itself what it thought would be a loophole it could exploit to get rid of her down the line and force the COE placement on her parents, which it again tried to do at the manifestation determination meeting.

 

 

On the record, the district vehemently denied that it had done any such thing, though it still couldn’t reconcile its story against the evidence otherwise also available on the record. Assessment reports, the hate letters collected by the principal from the student’s teachers, incident reports, comments on her report cards, IEP meeting notes and indications of teachers’ and parents’ concerns, audio recordings of IEP meetings – all of it captured the symptomology of the very things with which she had been diagnosed as well as our initial attempts to add the ED eligibility to the IEP prior to our decision to let that issue go.

 

 

The record also made clear the kangaroo court-style nature of the manifestation determination meeting. The district would have had some explaining to do had the case gone to litigation.

 

 

Children who have behaviors that interfere with their own learning and/or that of others are some of the most difficult students to serve. We’re going to devote several postings to the topic of behavior because it is such a complex issue. There are so many considerations and even more theories of how things should be done that it becomes confusing and overwhelming even to people who have been working with these issues for a while.

 

Both the IDEA and Section 504 have rules about how behaviors are to be dealt with when they involve children with disabilities. You can download the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’ notice regarding appropriate interventions under Section 504 and the ADA by clicking here.

The IDEA’s implementing regulations include 34 CFR 300.304(b)(3), which states that the schools must use “technically sound” tests that “may assess the relative contribution of cognitive and behavioral factors, in addition to physical or developmental factors.” [Emphasis added.]? 34 CFR 300.4(c)(10)(iii) states that, as a related service, psychological services include “obtaining, integrating, and interpreting information about child behavior and conditions relating to learning.”

 

34 CFR 300.324(a)(2)(i) states that IEP teams must give consideration to special factors, including behavior. It literally reads: “The IEP Team must … [i]n the case of a child whose behavior impedes the child’s learning or that of others, consider the use of positive behavioral interventions and supports, and other strategies, to address that behavior.”20 USC  1415(k) explains when a child’s placement can be changed on the basis of behaviors and describes the process by which the determination is made regarding placement when behaviors are the issue at hand.

State laws can vary. In California, we have The Hughes Bill (5 CCR 3001 and 3052).It’s pretty specific about what can and cannot be done.

Minnesota has some pretty straightforward regulations when it comes to identifying and serving children with behavioral problems. (See MAR 3525.1329.) Indiana’s special education rules contain language that define behavior-related terms and spell out processes for assessing and serving the behavioral needs of children with disabilities. (See Title 511 Article 7 Rules 32 – 47 and search the PDF using “behavior” as your search term.)

 

Research your own state’s rules and regulations to learn more about how the behavioral challenges of special education students are supposed to be responded to by schools in your area. You can access your state’s department of education, which should have a link to an online source for the rules and regulations, or at least a method of ordering a hard copy of them, by going to the US Department of Education’s directory of state agencies.

 

Please be sure to subscribe to our feed so that you can receive our next few postings, which will also be dedicated to dealing with behaviors that interfere with learning. If you have any comments or questions, please do post them.

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Placement & the Least Restrictive Environment

We’ve mentioned placement and Least Restrictive Environment (“LRE”), in previous postings. Today’s posting focuses specifically on these aspects of special education.

 

As discussed previously, placement is the last decision made by an Individualized Education Plan (“IEP”) team and is that setting in which a student’s measurable annual goals can be met using the services determined necessary by the IEP team and which is the least restrictive when compared to all other possible educational settings in which the goals could be met using the services determined necessary. In other words, once you’ve figured out goals and services, the IEP team has to examine all of the possible settings in which the services could be provided and the goals met, then pick the one that is the least restrictive.

 
“Least restrictive” is a relative term specific to the individual child. What may be least restrictive for one child may not be least restrictive for another. The language found at 34 CFR ? 300.114 states that:  “To the maximum extent appropriate, children with disabilities … are educated with children who are nondisabled;”  and “Special classes, separate schooling, or other removal of children with disabilities from the regular educational environment occurs only if the nature or severity of the disability is such that education in regular classes with the use of supplementary aids and services cannot be achieved satisfactorily.”

What this means in plain English to parents is that if your child’s needs can be met in the regular education setting with push-in supports, the regular education setting is the LRE. The public schools cannot segregate special education students from the regular education setting purely on the basis that these students have disabilities. The needs created by their respective disabilities have to be so severe in nature or so unique to serve, that the necessary services cannot feasibly be pushed into the regular education setting and met with success.

So, how do you know when it’s time to consider pull-out options or alternative placements to the regular education setting? It all depends on the child.

Let’s say, for instance, that you have a teenage daughter with significant social anxiety. She’s become a recluse and refuses to go to school at all and refuses to go places with the family except at night with a hoodie pulled over her head. Her IEP includes a behavioral goal targeting attendance, since this is an area of measurable need that requires specific attention in her IEP.

Clearly, regardless of how academically capable she might be, you’re not going to successfully place her on a comprehensive high school campus in a whole bunch of different classes throughout the day and passing in the halls between classes, much less lunch and PE.  A very small class with pushed-in mental health services on a continuation school campus may be more appropriate.

 

 

As another example, let’s say you have an 11-year-old son with delayed cognition, impaired attention, and mild autistic like behaviors, most of which involves perseverative thought, ritualistic behaviors, and inappropriate dialoging skills. While it would be possible to push an appropriate curricular program into the regular education setting, the reality is that the inattention could easily make the regular education setting highly distractible to this young man and his behaviors could require constant adult redirection. It could quickly become an exercise in frustration for everyone involved and derail not only this young man’s receipt of an education, but also that of his classmates. But, if you don’t know for sure that this is what will happen, you should at least try it. Then, at least, if things don’t work out, you know you that your decision to move the child to a more restrictive setting is informed and everyone knows that a less restrictive setting proved unsuccessful.  You should never presume the worst automatically when considering placement options.

 

A young man like this might actually benefit from spending at least part of his day in either a Resource Specialist Program (“RSP”) or a Special Day Class (“SDC”) setting. Perhaps, his day would end up being divided among the regular education, RSP, and SDC settings. That’s the thing about placement: you can mix and match components to come up with the most appropriate combination for each individual child. But, this requires flexibility on the part of the public education system and special education placements designed with this mix-and-match type of planning in mind.

 

It has been my unfortunate experience in many situations that placements have been offered by public education agencies based on what they already have in place rather than that necessarily serves as the LRE for a particular student. In fact, almost one year ago, we launched web site devoted to this very issue regarding the schools located in San Luis Obispo County, CA, http://www.slocoesdc.info.

 

This web site was inspired by the cases of children coming from tiny rural K-8 districts in SLO County that only offered placement up to RSP. Students of these tiny districts who needed more intensive placements than RSP usually had only one other choice: a Severely Handicapped SDC operated by the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education (“SLOCOE”). Of course, this wasn’t appropriate if the students weren’t severely handicapped.

 

There were no in-between placements being offered or created to meet the needs of students who needed more than RSP but not so restrictive a level of intervention as a Severely Handicapped SDC. While neighboring districts offered Learning Handicapped SDCs, SLOCOE did not and neither did these children’s home K-8 districts. Some of these children would have been most appropriately placed in a Learning Handicapped SDC but were not placed in these classrooms due to inter-agency politics, even when these Learning Handicapped SDCs were operated on the same campuses as the Severely Handicapped SDCs to which they were being bused every day.

 

When http://www.slocoesdc.info failed to facilitate productive discussions between local schools and parents to address this serious placement issue, KPS4Parents filed a compliance complaint with the California Department of Education (“CDE”) against San Luis Obispo County Special Education Local Plan Area (“SLOSELPA”) alleging that the full continuum of placements was not being made to all the children served by public education agencies within SLOSELPA’s jurisdiction, as is required by State law. The matter remains pending at this time and, according to our last conversations with CDE, its Focused?Monitoring and Technical Assistance?(“FMTA”)?Unit is working with SLOSELPA to address this concern.

 

The point, here, is that placement and the LRE requirements are complex issues that involve constantly changing needs that public education agencies have to address from one school year to the next. Creating cookie-cutter solutions isn’t the answer. There are people working in public education who actually think that placement is (or should be) driven by the IQ score of the student. There remains entrenched in some public education agencies the mentality that actually educating children with special needs is an unachievable goal and an utter waste of time and resources and, as such, warehousing such children and minimizing their expense to the public agency is the most prudent form of administrative stewardship that can be exercised.

 

There are sometimes teachers and other school site staff who just don’t want to have to work as hard as the situation actually requires. So long as they go through the motions and enough kids leave their classrooms knowing at least something more than they knew when they first arrived, these “educators” believe they have earned their paychecks and no one can expect any more of them than that. 

 

I once had a student we represented enrolled in a mainstream computer class where she was receiving a “C” as her grade. She was, however, bombing out all of her other mainstream classes. Thinking that maybe the computer teacher had found some way to get through to her somewhat, we invited him to this young lady’s IEP meeting so he could share his insights with the rest of us. Unfortunately, once he got to the meeting, he admitted that he gave “Cs” to all of the special education students who enrolled in his class because they at least showed up and he didn’t know what else to do with them. The young lady’s special education case carrier, who was also her RSP teacher, was horrified. 

 

There wasn’t much need for me to stick around after that. The school site special education team jumped all over the situation, reassessed this young lady to figure out what was going on, and developed a much more appropriate IEP after that.

 

Reassessment is often a perfectly appropriate way to respond to a failed placement. If a special education program fails, it’s because there was a variable that either wasn’t known or was ignored as was, therefore, left unaddressed. In many instances, the variable simply was not identified, making reassessment or additional assessment necessary.

 

Everything in special education is dependent upon thorough, accurate assessment data. It’s the foundation upon which present levels are identified, goals are written, services are selected, and placement is chosen.? Assessment conducted in an effort to ascertain why a child is not responding to intervention should include observations and analyses of the settings in which the child is succeeding and not succeeding. That way, when the IEP team sits down to revise the IEP, it has data about all kinds of things that will help in determining what placement is the LRE.

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How Special Education Services are Supposed to be Selected

Several of our prior postings have emphasized that services are selected based on what will see a child’s annual IEP goals accomplished. Placement is determined based on how the services necessary to achieve the goals can be delivered in the least restrictive environment possible, so a discussion of services has to include some discussion of placement, though we’ll be talking specifically about placement in our next posting.

 

Today’s posting concentrates specifically on the process that an IEP team goes through (when things are done properly) to identify the services necessary to achieve a child’s annual IEP goals and how they can be described in the child’s IEP.

 

As we discussed in our posting, “Why Placement Isn’t Where You Start: Understanding the IEP Process,” before parents can legitimately advocate for more service hours of any particular kind, they have to examine the goals and ask themselves, “Is the amount of services being offered consistent with what needs to be done to achieve the existing body of goals?” If the amount of service hours matches what is necessary to achieve the goals the child already has, the next questions are “Are more goals needed? Have we failed to address a need?”

 

This is often where the real problem lies when parents are insisting on more service hours in any particular area of need. For example, I’ve heard more than once, “My child can’t write! He needs more OT!” but there are not sufficient writing goals in the child’s IEP. So, we have to back up and address the goal deficiencies so we can then increase the OT hours to see the new additional goals met.

 

Parents really need to understand this because there are instances in which less-than-ethical education professionals will play games. Here’s what it looks like:

 

Parent: “My child needs more speech-language services!”

Ed Pro: “But the speech-language services we’ve offered to your child are appropriate to meet his goals.? What would more speech-language services accomplish?”

 

This is a loaded question! If you know the rules, you interpret this question to mean, “Do you think your child needs more speech-language goals “If you’re a lay person, however, you’re likely to miss the subtleties, become incensed, and cry out, “My child is non-verbal! He needs more speech-language services!” If game-playing is going on, the conversation will stalemate as a vicious circle of “He needs more!” and “What would that accomplish ” without any explanation forthcoming from the educational professionals about how goals drive services, so more services require more goals. 

 

Once the goals have been hammered out, then it’s time to determine services. This includes not just how much time will be devoted to services necessary to meet the goals, but also the location and method of delivery. A comprehensive speech-language service model may include a small amount of time in individual speech-language services, some group speech-language services, and speech-language programming embedded in the classroom setting, for example. 34 CFR   300.320(a)(7) requires that the frequency, duration, and location of each type of service offered be described in the IEP.

In this example, this means that the frequency, duration, and location of the individual speech-language services would have to be described separately from the frequency, duration, and location of the group service and the frequency, duration, and location of the embedded speech-language services. Even though they all address speech-language needs, each type of intervention is distinctly different from each other and, therefore, must be regarded as an individual service offering.

 

Parents should be leery of an offer in a situation like this where the IEP states something like:  “90 minutes per week speech-language services, individual/group/embedded programming.” This language fails to delineate the frequency, duration, and location of each aspect of the speech-language intervention, meaning that the delivery of the services is left entirely up to the discretion of school site staff.

 

The problem with this lack of specificity is that it is the nature of a government bureaucracy, which the public education system is, to default to whatever requires the least amount of effort on the part of the government workers. What is provided to a child becomes driven by how existing resources within the education agency have been allocated rather than the unique needs of the student. This is why federal law mandates that frequency, duration, and location be specified in the IEP in the first place; Congress had to have been aware of this aspect of bureaucracy when it crafted the Individuals with Disabilties Education Act (“IDEA”).

 

Yet another consideration is where the services will be rendered. Another point made in our posting, “Why Placement Isn’t Where You Start: Understanding the IEP Process,“ was that placement comes at the end of the line for a very logical reason. You have to know what you’re trying to accomplish before you can determine where you can accomplish it. That means you need to know what services need to be delivered.  Once you know what the services are, you can figure out what placement is the least restrictive environment in which the services can be rendered relative to the unique needs of the individual child.

 

In our example above, we described some individual speech-language, some group speech-language, and some embedded speech-language programming in the classroom setting. But, what classroom setting is appropriate and how much of the services are to be pushed into the classroom rather than provided in individual and group services? What is the relative value of being surrounded by typical peers and their age-appropriate language skills versus a special day class with speech-language programming built into the curriculum by default? Can embedded speech-language services be successfully pushed into a regular education setting with 1:1 aide supports or can the services be more successfully delivered in a special education class?? Do the embedded speech-language services need to happen all day long or just part of the day?

 

You can see that making determinations regarding services require a lot of thought. An awful lot of variables have to be taken into consideration, not the least of which are the goals that the services are meant to accomplish. The tolerance levels of the child for various stress levels and sensory input have to be considered along with the LRE requirements. Special education students cannot be pulled out of the regular education setting unless there is absolutely no way to feasibly push the services they need into the regular education setting. 

 

Even in special education settings there is a continuum of placement that has to be made available with the least restrictive setting chosen relative to each child. This means that a blend of various settings may be necessary to offer the services in the LRE. For example, a child could receive some services pushed into the regular education setting for part of the day, other services in one special education setting for another part of the day, and yet another special education setting for the rest of the day.

 

Until the services are identified, placement decisions cannot be made, though it is perfectly fine to discuss services and placement at the same time so long as the team maintains proper perspective. Because they are so intertwined, it’s actually pretty hard to discuss services without also discussing placement.

 

The caution that has to be taken when discussing services and placement together is making sure the IEP team doesn’t limit services based on how resources have already been allocated within the education agency. When the team starts talking about the need for counseling services three times a week for a student and the school psychologist says, “But I’m only on this campus once per week,” you’ve got a problem to overcome. 

 

What goes into the IEP and what must be provided must be based on the needs of the child. If the way staff and resources have been allocated do not support what the student needs in order to meet his goals, the staffing and resource allocations have to change; the services offered to the child should never be short-changed on the basis of resource allocation issues.

 

This is not to discount the enormity of the responsibility of education agencies to deliver on these requirements. Education agencies that actually pull it off are accomplishing miracles on a daily basis and their teams of professionals are mostly unsung heroes that deserve at least as many accolades as the entertainment industry heaps upon itself through its various awards ceremonies.

 

Coordinating the services required by all of an education agencys special education students to be delivered in what represents the LRE for each individual child can seem to be the logistical equivalent to Santa delivering presents to every child on the planet in one night. This is why States’ education agencies are still on the hook for the provision of a Free and Appropriate Public Education (“FAPE”) to their constituent students and local education agencies should be hitting up their State education agencies for as much help as possible.

 

Our next posting will focus more specifically on placement. Please comment on today’s posting and let us know your thoughts.

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Writing Measurable Annual Goals – Part 2

In our posting, Writing Measurable Annual Goals?- Part 1, we talked about what goals are, the purpose they serve, and how they relate to present levels of performance. In today’s posting, we’re going to talk about the federal requirement that goals be measurable and how measurable goals can be written.

I cannot emphasize enough how critically important it is that goals are clearly and succinctly written in objective, quantifiable terms. In order for anything to be measurable, it must deal in absolutes and the language must mean the same thing to anyone who reads it.

First I’m going to give examples of unmeasurable goals and then I’m going to give you examples of measurable goals. I want you to contrast and compare them against each other.

Examples of Unmeasurable Goals:

[Student] will demonstrate understanding of language concepts by naming items within a given category with 80% accuracy.

Now pretend you have to implement this goal. First you’ll notice that this sentence contains two verbs: “demonstrate”  and “naming”. This is confusing. The piece that reads “will demonstrate understanding of language concepts” is superfluous and misleading. Including this language implies that something greater is going on here than that for which the language of the goal really provides.

There is another place on the goal page where the type of goal can be indicated without cluttering up the language of the goal itself. The language of the goal should describe what exact task the student is supposed to perform and nothing more.

If you eliminate this unnecessary bit to render the goal down to only what outcome the student needs to demonstrate, you’re left with “[Student] will name items within a given category with 80% accuracy.”  This is incredibly vague.

Does the student only have to do this once during the entire year that the IEP is in effect in order to have met the goal? If so, has he really mastered any new skill ? If not, how many trials must he perform at 80% accuracy in order to determine that the targeted skill has been mastered? How is the 80% calculated? How is any of this supposed to be measured? How many items must the student name within a given category? From how many categories will he have to name items? I’d also prefer to see the words “at least” immediately precede “80%” so that the student is expected to achieve “at least 80% accuracy,” which is different that saying flat-out the target is 80% and no more.

[Student] will write 15/26 letter sounds when dictated orally.

Again, this is vague. While we have some numbers in here, the goal overall is not measurable. How many trials must the student perform in order for it to be said that he mastered the targeted skill? And which 15 of the 26 letter sounds must he write? The way the goal is written, he’d only have to perform as described once during the entire year the IEP is in effect and the goal could be said to have been met. That doesn’t mean that knowledge was gained or a skill was acquired. It could be a totally random fluke.

I’d also like to see “at least” precede “15/26” for the same reasons indicated above under the previous example, along with clarification of which 15 letter sounds he’s supposed to learn. It shouldn’t include the ones he already knew when the baseline data was taken for the present levels statement.

In the classroom setting, [Student] will follow an individually designed visual schedule of his daily activities with minimal verbal prompts as measured by observation record achieving 80% accuracy.

Here, this sounds pretty okay except for the measurability. At least you have a decent idea of the spirit of the goal, but how many is “minimal”? Is the 80% accuracy meant to be averaged over the course of the year or just within the final stage of the goal? If it’s just the final stage, how long of a period of time is that? How is the 80% calculated? Is it a flat-out 80% or at least 80%?

In my many years as a special education advocate, I’ve come to realize that “achieving 80% accuracy” has become the arbitrary language that gets plugged in by default because it sounds measurable to parents, most of whom really don’t understand the measurability requirement or how it can actually be satisfied. It implies that some kind of calculation must be taking place or you wouldn’t be able to arrive at a percentage and 80% sounds like a high enough number that most parents will think the goal is reasonably ambitious.

But, when you start picking apart the language of the goal to turn it into a math word problem, you realize that there are too many unidentified variables to do any kind of calculation that can result in any kind of a percentage. Far too often, the percentage isn’t really the result of measurement; it’s a “guesstimation.”? Teaching staff will say, “Oh, I’d say he was about 75% accurate.”? There is no measurement in a situation like this at all.

To arrive at 80%, you need 4 out of 5, 8 out of 10, or 16 out of 20, etc. things done a certain way for the math to work out. This is where the number of trials and the number of presentations per trial becomes important.

When you get into reading and writing goals, this becomes even more complex. You need to specify the grade level of the passages to be read or written or use other terminology that describes the complexity of the language that the student is expected to read or write. You cannot use vague language like “at his instructional level” without identifying what the student’s instructional level is in the present levels of performance statement.

Really, that kind of language should be avoided altogether because the purpose of a goal is to move the student forward. If the goal is expecting the student to be performing at the same instructional level at the end of the goal as he was performing at the beginning, this generally means that he?isn’t actually expected?to progress.

The only real way to use this kind of language is to make sure there is also a goal in the IEP targeting the increase of the student’s instructional reading level and collecting data on progress towards that goal throughout the same annual IEP time frame so that the instructional reading level is known while any other goals that require presentation of text at the student’s instructional level can be appropriately adjusted as the year progresses.

Sometimes goals are poorly written because the school members of the IEP team really don’t know how to write them. Other times, they are deliberately keeping the language vague so that there is little that parents can actually hold them to. If the student fails to progress, it’s hard to point to the goal and say he didn’t meet it if it was vaguely written. Some school team members deliberately write weak goals so that they aren’t accountable to much.

Examples of Measurable Goals:

When presented with a worksheet containing 20 numbers, [Student] will correctly identify the place value of each number independently (tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands) in at least 4 of 5 trials over 2 consecutive weeks as measured by work samples.

This is nicely written. There is no way that two different people could pick this up and walk away with different understandings of what needs to be done.

Given a picture of interest, [Student] will be able to independently write 2 sentences (no dictation or adult prompting) using correct punctuation and capitalization in at least 3 out of 4 trials in a two week period as measured by work samples.

Again, this is really succinct clear language that describes an outcome that can be easily measured. It’s evident what the student has to do to demonstrate mastery of the targeted skill.

When given a reading passage at the end of first grade level about a topic of interest, [Student] will orally answer factual questions correctly by giving a sentence of at least 3 words in at least 3 out of 5 opportunities per trial for 4 trials within a 2 week period as measured by teacher made test.

This is a little convoluted, but you still arrive at the same place no matter how you look at it. Goal-writing isn’t meant to be Shakespeare. You could rearrange the words so they flow more smoothly, but the targeted outcome is still explained even as it is.

When you compare these last three examples against the first three, you can see the stark differences. The first three are vague and don’t really tell you what you’re supposed to do. The last three describe specific outcomes that can be measured.

The first two examples of the unmeasurable goals don’t even explain how they will be measured. The third unmeasurable goal example uses “observation record” as its method of measurement, but you have to be really careful with this.

Just like an arbitrary percentage without any indication of how it is actually supposed to be calculated is really just an estimate rather than a measurement, the term “observation” is often used as an arbitrary indication of how progress will be measured. In and of itself, “observation” isn’t any kind of measurement at all. “Observation” is simply looking at something.

An “observation record” is only as good as the kind of data it’s meant to collect and if that data isn’t described in the goal, whatever is recorded is likely to be unmeasurable.? I prefer that, instead of observation records or logs, there are data sheets and the method of measurement is indicated as “specific data collection,” but I’ll go along with “observation record” if the language of the goal is clear on what will be recorded or a copy of the observation record to be used is attached to the IEP as one of its pages, so there’s nothing left to anyone’s imagination as to what is supposed to happen.

If the goal is written in measurable terms, then the data sheets can be fairly simple check-off lists or tally sheets. Comments and anecdotal observations should supplement the data to provide context, but they shouldn’t replace the data.

We hope this makes goal writing make more sense. Please post your questions and comments. We realize this can be complicated and want to make sure you understand. As an added resource, you can visit http://www.calstat.org/iep/.

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Writing Measurable Annual Goals – Part 1

In our last posting, we talked about present levels of performance. If you haven’t read that yet, read it first before reading today’s posting because you have to understand present levels before you can understand goals. More to the point, you have to understand what a child’s present levels of performance are before you can start even thinking about writing goals.

As stated before, your present levels of performance are your stepping-off points. If an IEP were a race, your present levels would be the starting line and the annual goals would tell you where the finish line is. The annual goals of an IEP describe your desired outcomes- what it is the IEP team believes a child is capable of learning over the course of a year.

Goals are written every year but assessment is only required once every three years. This means that unless additional assessment is done in between triennial assessments, you’re only going to have fresh baseline data from standardized assessments once every three years. The other two years, you’re going to have to pull your present levels from informal assessments and the child’s progress towards the prior year’s IEP’s goals. I’m going to start out with the very beginning of the process, when a child gets an IEP for the first time and move forward from there.

Beginning with the initial assessment data, the IEP team has a fresh body of data to work with that, if the assessment was done properly, tells you pretty much everything that’s going on with a particular child. It will identify the child’s relative strengths and weaknesses, including the areas of deficit that need to be tackled by the IEP. The goals should tackle the areas of deficit for sure.

Some challenges a student faces may not warrant specialized instruction so much as they may simply require accommodation. For example, a child with a circadian rhythm disorder may receive as an accommodation an alternative schedule to the regular school day. That by itself has no bearing on the content of the child’s instruction. The curriculum doesn’t change on the basis of the child’s disrupted sleep/wake cycle. But,when instruction is provided is changed on that basis.

If the same child also happens to be severely autistic, then you’re looking at the content of the instructional component and not just when it’s being offered. Goals address what it is that you’re trying to teach the child. Accommodations help you get around obstacles that would otherwise interfere with pursuit of the goals.

For example, let’s say you have a 5th grade student with average to above-average intelligence who has an auditory processing disorder, a visual processing disorder, ADHD, and a physical anomaly of his hands – he’s missing the distal interphalangeal joints (top knuckles) of his index and middle fingers on both hands. Let’s say that this child also has a history of behavioral challenges in the classroom.

Comprehensive assessment reveals that the student has problems with visual tracking and saccadic eye movements This means that as he reads, his eyes do not smoothly jump from word to word. He has to visually re-orient every time he leaves one word and tries to fixate on the next. This also impacts his writing as he tracks what he’s trying to put down on paper.

However, his writing is further compounded by the physical anomaly of his hands. So, as he’s trying to watch his words go down on paper, his whole arm starts to hurt because he can’t do the fine finger manipulations necessary to achieve letter formation. He’s got to move his whole arm and upper body.

However, yet again, these combined processes are even further compounded by the fact that the child has an auditory processing disorder. Reading is an auditory process until the reader has memorized enough words on sight, thereby building a huge sight-word vocabulary. Children still learning to read or with relatively low reading skills will still have to think about how a relatively complex word sounds when they write it.

All of us do that to a point. We all can throw down “the” and “is” without any thought, but “sphygmomanometer” is another issue. Even after all these years following my 11th grade vocabulary class, I have to sound that one out.

So, imagine this child trying to receptively read the questions on a worksheet while his eyes are jumping everywhere but where he needs to look and process what the visual symbols sound like (which is an unnatural act in the first place) when he has a hard time processing sounds. It’s a gamble as to how much of what he read he’ll comprehend accurately.

Then have him write something about what he just read while trying to formulate his output based on the sounds of language in his head, which he has to translate into visual symbols that he writes backwards and upside-down because that’s how he saw them, while also trying to move his fingers, hand, wrist, and arm in a way that will produce legible handwriting.

Add in the distractibility, impulsivity, and inattentiveness inherent in ADHD, and then ask yourself why this child engages in behavioral outbursts every time he’s given a paper-pencil task. He’s attempting to avoid a tortuous experience. He’d rather get in trouble and get sent to the office than be put through that hell.

The goals you write for a child with needs like this are multifaceted. The problem a parent can face with a child with these kinds of needs is that you run up against a bias on the basis that he’s actually a pretty smart kid and?it may be?easier for the adults at school conclude that he’s just a poorly behaved little monster and nothing more. None of his multiple disabilities by themselves are all that severe. But, when you put them all together,?they create a recipe for disaster.

A child with these kinds of issues needs therapeutic intervention to address the underlying foundational skills that support academics. His goals need to include visual tracking, cross-Corpus Callosum communication of data presented through the auditory array, and exercises to build strength in his arm to withstand the additional work the arm has to do to support handwriting (taking into account that accommodations will also be provided to eliminate handwriting where it’s not necessary to the mastery of the curriculum). He also needs goals in reading, written expression, math (particularly for lining up problems properly so that calculations are accurate), keyboarding, organizational skills, self-advocacy, and behavior.

Because services are only provided to support IEP goals, it is imperative that all areas where services may be needed are discussed in terms of whether or not a student needs goals in those areas. If you’re thinking the student might need speech-language services, then you have to ask “What deficits does the child have in speech-language? What skills need to be taught in order to eliminate or reduce those deficits?” The answer to the second question gives you your material for your goals. If you can’t think of a skill in a particular domain that needs to be taught, then there isn’t a goal to propose. If there’s no goal to propose, there’s no service in that domain to provide.

Better yet, don’t go in thinking about what services a child needs. Figure out the goals first and then figure out what services are going to be necessary to see the goals met. That’s the proper format, anyway.

My point here is that not all goals are going to be rooted in academia and it’s not esoteric to write goals that tackle things like cross-Corpus Callosum communications. The brain is divided into two hemispheres?- the left and right. The two hemispheres are joined together by a neurological bridge of sorts called the Corpus Callosum. When both sides of the brain are involved in processing, the data between the two sides travels back and forth across the Corpus Callosum. This is also referred to as interhemispheric communications or interhemispheric processing.

If a child struggles with tasks that require cross-Corpus Callosum communications between the two hemispheres of the brain, as is often the case with auditory processing, then exercises that cause the brain to practice that kind of neurological activity are therapeutically warranted. This can include having the child bounce on a personal exercise-style trampoline while alternating between hands throwing balls up in the air and catching them. The child could also use a program such as Earobics, Fast Forword?, or Interactive Metronome.

But, if any programs are used, such as those mentioned above, goals need to be written describing what the desired outcome is for the use of each program. The goals will need to target the deficit areas for which the program is being provided based on the baselines that were measured during assessment.

Once you get a solid IEP written with sound, measurable goals, then it’s just a matter of providing the services that will see the goals met and collecting sufficient data along the way to measure how much progress the child is making. Once the year is up and it’s time to write a new IEP, the child’s present levels should be known in terms of the progress made towards the goals worked on for the last year. If you had a sufficient body of goals in all areas of unique educational need that were well-written and generated empirical data that tells you exactly where the child stands versus where he was a year ago, you’re in pretty good shape for writing the IEP for the year coming up.

If the child has made so much progress that it’s time to tackle a whole new skill set that’s the next level up from the goals he just finished, you may need to collect new baseline data in the area of the next skill set. When you’re scaffolding up from foundational skills such as letter-sound recognition, for example, to putting series of letters together to form sounds that are parts of words, you’re really jumping from one type of mental processing to another.

It is one thing to figure out the respective sounds made by “T” and “P” but it’s another thing to stick a vowel in there, string them all together, and come up with top, tip, and tap. Heaven help you when someone throws in an “S” or an “R” and you’ve got to do consonant blends like stop and trap. Because these next-level steps call upon the brain to do something more complex than what it did before, you’ve got to figure out exactly how well the brain can handle that kind of processing before embarking upon a goal so you know how much complexity is reasonable to expect at the end of a year’s worth of work.

Our next posting will actually focus on measurability, specifically. We already talked about this quite a bit when we covered Present Levels of Performance. In our next posting, though, we’ll focus on the formatting of properly written goals and share some resources with you for goal writing.

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Present Levels of Performance – Where They Come From and Why We Need Them

We’ve discussed and provided a basic definition of present levels of performance in previous postings, but I really want to focus in on them in today’s posting because they are so critically important and so often over-looked. I’ve encountered IEPs that didn’t have them at all. I’ve also encountered IEPs that had such vague and non-specific present levels statements that they served no useful purpose whatsoever.

34 CFR ? 300.320 requires statements of present levels of performance as well as measurable annual goals. This is one of those things about the law that requires some reverse engineering and common sense. While the federal regulations do not spell out what all the elements of properly written present levels statements are, because they describe what a child can and cannot do at the time an IEP is written and because the goals describe what the child should be able to do one year from the date the IEP is written after receiving services, you can deduce that the present levels statements and the goals have to directly relate to each other.

In essence, your present levels are your “befores” and the goals are the “afters” that you’re aiming for. Measurability is required of goals so that you can tell if the student has made any progress or not, but that also requires that you knew where he/she was as of the start-date of the IEP as a point of reference. The progress a child is making over the course of the annual period covered by the goals has to be compared back against the present levels that were written at the time the IEP was developed.

For example, let’s take something easily measured like reading fluency. Reading fluency is basically how fast someone can either recognize on sight or decode a word while reading?- in essence, how fast can the person read (which doesn’t necessarily imply that the person understood what was read). Fluency is purely a measure of how fast a person can read off the text on the page.

Let’s say a child starts out at the beginning of an IEP with a fluency of 80 words per minute with first grade level text. The present levels of performance statement would read something like, “When provided with five consecutive passages of 150-200 words at the first grade level within a two-week period, [Student] demonstrated a reading fluency rate of 80 words per minute.” That’s pretty straightforward. The goal might read something like, “[Student] will read a passage of 200-250 words at the second grade reading level per trial with a fluency rate of at least 120 words per minute in 3 out of 5 consecutive trials within a two-week period as measured by teacher-recorded data.”

I don’t want to delve too deeply into the science of goal-writing right now; that’s an upcoming posting. But, because goals directly relate to present levels statements, I have to give an example here simply to make the point that without solid present levels, you have no idea whether a student’s performance towards a particular goal represents growth or not.

If you didn’t already know that the child read first grade level text at 80 wpm, then you wouldn’t know that second grade material at 120 wpm was an improvement. Where would you be?- where would the child be?- if you wrote a goal targeting 120 wpm and it turned out the child could already read 120 wpm? That’s not progress. That’s stagnation. What if the child actually read at only 10 wpm at the time the goal was written? Is it realistic to expect a fluency rate of 120 wpm after one year’s worth of intervention in a situation like that?

Because goals must be measurable, and because they refer back to the present levels of performance, the present levels themselves must be measurable. This really shouldn’t be that hard to accomplish if the last body of assessments were properly conducted and reported and all the present levels and goals from the time the assessments were conducted forward were properly written. But those, unfortunately, are big “ifs.”

I took the following example from the IEP of a student whose case we helped take to due process?a few years ago: “[Student] can copy anything. She is writing her first and last name on her own with few errors. She voluntarily writes ‘Daddy.’ She loves to write on the white boards.”

This is one of my favorite examples of how not to write a present levels statement. It was written for a seven-year-old with Down’s Syndrome and very serious holes in her knowledge due to poorly designed programming over a period of years. When I first read this child’s IEP and came across this language, I said to her father (rather sarcastically, I’ll admit), “She can copy anything? Like, the Mona Lisa? Wow! That’s amazing!”

Here are the major failings of this present levels statement: the word “anything” is wholly inappropriate. Additionally, there is no way to know what the author of this present levels statement meant by “few” errors. How many is that? What kind of errors? Could she write her name with or without prompting? With or without a model? Plus, the language that she could write her first and last name with few errors was, verbatim, the same language in her present levels statement of her writing goal written one year prior, which suggests that she failed to make any progress over that one year’s time.

Her whole IEP was written like this. I can’t fathom why the District didn’t settle the case; if I’d been the District’s director of special education, I would have been mortified for this case to go before a Judge.

I distinctly recall sitting in the hearing and watching the Judge shake the IEP in the air at the Program Coordinator from the District who was testifying at the time, demanding, “You just testified that it’s your job to make sure IEPs are written properly by your staff.? How do you explain yourself?” She started to cry. He’d had a box of tissue brought in right before she began her testimony and shoved it in her direction as he threw the IEP back down on his table in disgust. The parent and I certainly felt vindicated. We’d made that same argument at the IEP level and it hadn’t gotten us anywhere.

Conversely, here is a properly written present levels statement from a real IEP: [Student] has difficulty recognizing and explaining how words are related, as demonstrated on the CELF-4. His responses tend to be vague and do not identify the most important elements. Word Classes Total: Percentile Rank 1, WC Receptive PR=2, WC Expressive Subtest PR=4. Verbal analogies and quantity vocabulary are areas of particular need for [Student]. He also confuses words that are phonologically similar (e.g., cricket, crooked). He needs to learn to hear the differences in the sounds of the words and recognize salient information.”

Granted, it took a lot to arrive at an IEP with great language like this in it, but once it was all said in done, this child’s IEP was truly a document worth enforcing and we were able to avoid litigation altogether. He’s being doing great ever since.

That was from a couple of years ago. Here’s another good example of sound present levels statements taken from a recent IEP for a student that I attended earlier this month: “[Student] has difficulty comprehending his own reading and that of others. He is often unable to answer surface questions about the story he or others are reading aloud. When a simple passage is read to [Student] and he is asked to answer 10 comprehension questions [Student] answers 4 out of 10 correct. When [Student] has read the passage and asked to answer 10 comprehension questions in writing [Student] correctly answered 6 out or 10 questions.?An SRA reading/comprehension assessment found [Student] answering 4 out of 40 comprehension questions.”

You will note that the present levels statements I’ve cited as being relatively good are much longer than the one I cited as being bad. But, just because a present levels statement has a lot of words in it, that doesn’t mean it really says anything of value. It’s easy to say a lot of nothing with a lot of words.

You will notice that these good present levels statements include numbers. It’s important to appreciate the logic of basing IEP goals on empirical data. Measurability, which is required of annual goals, means that you have to count something. IEPs have to be reasonably calculated to render educational benefit. You can’t count or calculate anything without numbers.

Imagine hiring a contractor to build a privacy wall along the side of your property. If the contractor came out to your house and “eyeballed it” rather than taking measurements and diagramming out his work in advance, and failed to mark out with stakes and string where to dig for the foundation of the wall according to his measurements and diagrams, what would be the likelihood of you actually letting this guy tear up your yard, pour concrete, and stack bricks along your property line? What do you think the finished wall would look like if the contractor were to just “eyeball it” along the way rather than have taken measurements and worked off of them throughout the project?

If you wouldn’t dream of letting a contractor “eyeball it” on a wall in your yard, why on Earth would you trust anything less empirical with your children’s or your students’ educations? There is no room for vague, wishy-washy language when it comes to describing what a child can and cannot do at the time an IEP is written. That is the foundation upon which everything else is built.

I hope this information helps you better understand present levels of performance. Please do comment and let us know if you have questions about anything discussed in today’s posting or have an example of your own to share.