How to Write an IEP Goal That Actually Holds Up

A goal you cannot collect data on is not a goal. It is a wish with a due date on it. And most of us have written a few, usually at 11pm in April with eleven annuals left to go.

I write these every week. I have also inherited caseloads full of goals that nobody could have measured, written by people who were not being lazy. They were being rushed. So this is not a lecture. It is the structure I use, and the three rewrites I do most often.

What the law actually asks for

IDEA requires measurable annual goals designed to meet the child's needs that result from the disability. That is 34 CFR 300.320(a)(2)(i). Short sentence, and it carries almost everything.

Measurable. Annual. Designed to meet the needs that result from the disability.

Then there is the part people skip. The IEP must state how progress toward annual goals will be measured and when periodic progress reports will be provided. That is 34 CFR 300.320(a)(3).

So the measurement method is not a nice extra you add if there is room in the box. It is part of the requirement. If your goal does not name how you will know, the goal is not done.

Condition, behavior, criterion

Every goal that holds up has three parts.

Condition. Given what? Given a fourth-grade passage. Given a graphic organizer. Given a verbal prompt. This is the setup, and it is the part that makes the goal replicable by somebody who is not you.

Behavior. The student will do what? It has to be observable. Somebody standing in the doorway should be able to see it happen. "Will understand" is not observable. "Will identify" is.

Criterion. To what standard, measured how, by when? This is where goals go to die, and I will spend the rest of this post there.

Given what, the student will do what, to what standard, measured how, by when. Say it out loud while you write. If any of the five is missing, you will feel the hole.

Three rewrites

These are the three I do most. Weak version first, then the rewrite, then what actually changed.

Weak: "Student will improve reading comprehension."

Rewrite: "Given a grade-level informational passage and a graphic organizer, Student will answer 4 of 5 literal and inferential comprehension questions correctly on 3 consecutive weekly probes by the end of the IEP year."

What changed: "improve" is a direction, not a standard. Improve from what, to what, by when? The rewrite names the material, names the support, names the number, and names how often I am checking. I can put that on a data sheet Monday.

Weak: "Student will demonstrate improved organizational skills with 80% accuracy."

Rewrite: "Given a weekly assignment planner and a Friday check-in, Student will record all assigned work and due dates for 4 of 5 class periods, in 3 of 4 consecutive weeks, as measured by planner review."

What changed: 80% accuracy of what? That was the tell. A percentage attached to a vague behavior is not a criterion, it is a decoration. The rewrite makes the unit countable. Class periods recorded, out of five. A sub could score it.

Weak: "Student will manage frustration appropriately in the classroom."

Rewrite: "When presented with a non-preferred task, Student will use one of three taught coping strategies (break card, movement break, or self-advocacy statement) within 2 minutes and return to the task, in 4 of 5 observed opportunities across 3 consecutive weeks, as measured by staff frequency count."

What changed: "appropriately" is a judgment word, and judgment words mean two staff members will score the same kid differently. The rewrite names the strategies, names the window, and names who counts. Now the goal is about behavior instead of about opinion.

Write a criterion you can actually collect in a real week

Here is the part nobody teaches in the goal-writing PD.

The criterion is a promise about your own calendar. When I write "3 consecutive weekly probes," I have just committed myself to running a probe every week, on a caseload of students who each have their own probe, in a building that will hand me a fire drill, a manifestation determination, and a sub-coverage period that same week.

So before I write a number, I ask one question. What day, and how long does it take?

Daily data on nine goals is a fantasy. Weekly data on nine goals, in a fifteen-minute block I have actually protected, is a system. Monthly data collected honestly beats weekly data invented on the last day of the quarter, and we have all seen the second one.

Watch out for criteria that quietly commit you to the impossible. "In 8 of 10 daily opportunities" means somebody is scoring ten opportunities a day. "Across all classroom settings" means somebody is collecting data in every setting. If that somebody is a general education teacher who has not agreed to it, your goal is already fiction.

And if you cannot collect the data, the goal was written wrong. That is a goal-writing problem, not a data problem. I go deeper on that in the post on progress monitoring that isn't busywork, because the two failures are really one failure.

The goal has to come from the present levels

A goal that does not trace back to the present levels of performance is a goal you invented.

This is the connection auditors look for, and it is the connection that makes the document make sense to a parent. The present levels say what the student can do right now, in numbers. The goal says where they are going, in the same numbers.

If the present levels say the student answers 1 of 5 comprehension questions correctly, the goal reads 4 of 5. Same unit, same measure, same passage type. A reader can put a finger on the baseline and a finger on the target and see the distance between them.

If your present levels are a paragraph of narrative with no numbers in it, you cannot write a measurable goal underneath. You will have to guess at a baseline, and the guess will show. Goals that do not match present levels are one of the errors that turn into a state complaint against the district, and they are also the reason a parent reads the goal page and feels like it was written about somebody else's kid.

Which it sometimes was. We all keep a goal bank. Just do not paste before you check the baseline.

What to do now

Pull one IEP off your caseload. Not your best one. Pick a goal at random and read the criterion out loud.

Ask three questions. Could a sub collect this data on Tuesday with no explanation from me? Does the number in the goal match the number in the present levels? And when the progress report comes due, do I have a place where that data already lives, or am I going to reconstruct it from memory?

If any answer is no, rewrite the criterion. You do not need a meeting to fix a goal you have not written yet, and you can amend one you have.

Parents notice this too, by the way. The families who walk in prepared for the meeting are asking exactly these questions about measurement, and they should be. A goal that survives that question is a goal that was going to work anyway.