How to Read Your Child's IEP

An IEP — an Individualized Education Program — is a legal document that looks like a form. That is what makes it hard. The formatting suggests you should skim it, and the content requires you to read it the way you would read a document somebody is going to be held to — because that is what it is. Every service written into it is one the district is obligated to deliver.

It is not quite a contract. The team can change it, and if they do they have to tell you in writing and you have somewhere to go with that. But what is in it is what your child gets, and what is not in it is not.

Here is how I read one, in the order I read it, and what I am looking for in each part.

Start at the back, not the front

Most parents start on page one and get worn down by the demographic information and the evaluation summaries. I start with the service page — the grid near the back that lists each service, how often, for how long, in what group size, and where.

That page is the plan. Everything before it is the argument for the plan. If the service page is thin, nothing in the first fifteen pages will save it.

For each line on that grid, I want four things to be unambiguous:

• What the service is — speech therapy, resource room, counseling, occupational therapy.
• How much and how often — "2 x 30 minutes weekly," not "weekly."
• Group size — 1:1, or a group of three, or a group of five. This is frequently the single biggest difference between a service that works and one that does not, and it is the easiest one to leave blank. In New York there is a hard ceiling: a related service group cannot exceed five students per provider. If the line is blank, ask what number they are actually planning for, and ask that the number go in the document.
• Direct or indirect — direct means someone works with your child. Indirect means someone advises the teacher. A New York IEP usually says "direct" or "indirect"; you will also hear people say "consultative" for the same idea. Both are legitimate. They are not interchangeable, and a service quietly converted from direct to indirect at an annual review is one of the most common downgrades I see.

Then check the start date and the end date. A service that begins in November when the meeting was in September is a service your child is not getting for two months. Services are supposed to start as soon as possible after the IEP is written, and New York bars delaying implementation outright — including while the district works out who is paying. A start date months out is worth a question.

Then read the present levels

The present levels section — sometimes called present levels of performance — is supposed to describe where your child is right now, with data. Everything else in the document is legally supposed to flow from it.

What I look for is whether it is specific and current. "Reads below grade level" is not a present level. "Reads at a mid-second-grade level as measured by [assessment] in May, with accuracy dropping sharply on multisyllabic words" is a present level. The second one produces a real goal. The first one produces a vague goal that nobody can fail.

Two questions to ask about this section:

• Is the data from this year? Present levels copied forward from two years ago happen more often than anyone would like.
• Does it include what you told them? Your description of homework, sleep, anxiety, and what happens on Sunday nights belongs here — that is parent input, and it is legitimate evidence.

Now the goals — and be strict about them

A goal should be a sentence you could hand to a stranger, who could then tell you whether it had been met. If two reasonable people can read the goal and disagree about whether your child achieved it, the goal is not written well enough.

A usable goal has four parts:

• The behavior or skill — stated in observable terms.
• The condition — given what support, in what setting, with what materials.
• The criterion — a number. 80% accuracy, four out of five trials, three consecutive sessions.
• How it is measured — work samples, data collection, a specific assessment. Not "teacher observation" alone.

Compare these two:

"Student will improve reading comprehension."

"Given a passage at his instructional level, the student will answer four out of five literal and inferential comprehension questions correctly, across three consecutive sessions, as measured by scored work samples collected weekly."

The second one tells the teacher what to teach, tells you what progress looks like, and gives you something concrete to point at next spring. The first one is a wish.

Also count the goals. In my experience a page of eighteen goals is not a rigorous plan — it is a plan nobody will be able to track, which functionally means no plan at all.

Accommodations: the section where the vague language lives

This is where I find the most damage, and it is almost never done maliciously. Someone is writing quickly at the end of a long meeting and reaches for a familiar phrase.

The three phrases I search for every single time:

• "As needed" — needed by whose judgment? Yours? The child's? A substitute teacher's, in March, who has not read the document?
• "When appropriate" — appropriate is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it is not defined anywhere.
• "As determined by staff" — this moves the decision out of the plan entirely.

None of these are forbidden, and occasionally one is genuinely the right call. But each one converts a commitment into a possibility. Where it matters, I ask for a trigger and a quantity instead:

Instead of: "Extended time as needed."
Ask for: "Time and a half on all classroom and standardized assessments, provided automatically without the student having to request it."

That last clause matters more than people expect. An accommodation a nine-year-old has to ask for in front of his classmates is an accommodation he will stop using by October.

The five questions I ask about any IEP

1. Could a brand-new teacher implement this document in September without calling anyone? If not, it is not specific enough.
2. Does every goal trace back to something in the present levels? If a goal appeared out of nowhere, ask why. If a documented need has no goal, ask why.
3. Does anything say less than it said last year? Put the two documents side by side. Minutes reduced, group sizes increased, services moved from direct to consultative — these should be deliberate decisions with reasons, not drift.
4. How and when will I hear about progress? The document itself is supposed to tell you — how progress on each goal will be measured, and when the reports come. If you cannot find those two things on the page, they are missing, and that is a fixable thing to ask for in the meeting.
5. What does it say about the least restrictive environment? The document should explain the extent to which your child participates with non-disabled peers, and justify any time they do not.

Read it before the meeting, not at it

Ask for the draft in advance, in writing, at least several days before the meeting. (I have laid out the full two-week run-up in how to prepare for a CSE meeting.) Districts are generally willing, and a draft you have read at your own kitchen table is a completely different document from one handed to you across a table while seven people wait.

Read it with a pen. Circle every number. Circle every place where a number should be and is not. Bring that marked-up copy with you. That is preparation, and it changes the entire tone of the meeting — not because it is confrontational, but because it is specific.

Read next: what to do when the district says no · All posts · Have me read the document with you