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Laura Kaloi: With today’s increased focus on state-wide academic content standards, many people incorrectly assume that a child’s IEP is automatically linked to his state’s academic standards. Why is it important for parents and educators to understand the difference between the traditional IEP and the need for a standards-based IEP?
Dr. McLaughlin: One of the major things parents need to understand is that at this time the IEP is evolving. The core importance of the IEP as a representation of faith for a given child still remains. And, of course, we know that there are specific components and pieces of an IEP that must be in place such as who has to be involved in developing the IEP.
But beyond that, the federal law — and often states — give very little guidance to local districts about exactly how the goal needs to be formulated and what the format of the IEP [should be]. But this is changing. It’s changing because of some of the IDEA changes that speak to access to the general education curriculum. And, more importantly, both IDEA and Title 1 speak to the need for all students to participate in the assessments and the accountability provisions, and the need to ensure that all students have a fair and real opportunity to learn grade-level curriculum.
Given that, we now need to look at states that are increasingly taking a larger role in looking at how the IEPs are developed, specifically how their goals are aligned with the state standards. State-level IEPs are beginning to emerge. This is still new and it’s evolving, but more states are designing and developing state-wide IEPs. This is to ensure greater consistency across districts in terms of how they are approaching the development of the IEP, particularly the relationship of the goals to the state standards.
I think it’s going to take awhile for special education teachers and other educators to go through the training to understand the intent of these new IEPs. During that transition process, parents are going to see some real changes, but not necessarily everywhere, because many districts have been trying standards-based IEPs for some time. But I think parents are going to start seeing a different perspective on the assessment. Hopefully they’re going to see broader, more meaningful goals that are clearly linked to grade-level, standards-based curriculum. And I hope they’ll see a greater focus and emphasis on the types of programs, supports, services, and accommodations that will be provided to enable children with disabilities to fully access grade-level curriculum.
So it’s important to understand that we’re in a transition phase. We’re not going to see total movements tomorrow. But I think parents are going to experience some different ways of talking about the educational goals for their children.
Laura Kaloi: How prevalent is the change you’re describing?
Dr. McLaughlin: At the local district level, some states have already moved forward with their standards, assessments and accountability [measures]. Starting in the ‘90s we saw a number of districts experimenting with this. Some are much further along than others.
As we moved from the 1997 IDEA amendments that spoke to access to curriculum, participation, and assessments in the No Child Left Behind era, we saw a lot more movement as schools recognized the need to ensure that, if children were going to be held accountable on assessments for performing at certain levels in this curriculum, they needed to have full access to it.
So I think it’s far more prevalent in local district implementation than it has been at the state level. But recently a number of states have started to move toward creating state-wide IEPs. This is a new development, but it is going to become more prevalent.
I think there are a number of reasons for this, not only IDEA and the 2001 NCLB, but also the fact that some states are now thinking about implementing modified achievement standards for the 2% group of students . They have to provide guidance to their IEP teams to ensure that students who maybe held to those [standards] are going to receive instruction in grade-level content. So there are a number of forces pushing states to develop more standardization in their standards-based IEPs.
Laura Kaloi: You have said that moving forward with this approach means addressing how to build a student’s basic skills and knowledge in grade-level content. In order to accomplish this, what do IEP teams need to know before they can develop standards-based IEPs?
Dr. McLaughlin: Historically, we looked at development of IEP goals through a very deficit-based process where we assessed what the child could not do, and developed very small goals. The goals were strongly behavioral in that they stated things like “Child will, given x, do 12 of these,” or “Will do 14 of those at 80% accuracy.” That kind of a goal really doesn’t make sense with a standards-based IEP. So one of the first things I think an IEP team needs to do is revisit their thinking about developing the goal. And they need to start from the premise that all students should be given this opportunity to learn this grade-level content, which includes skills and concepts (which can be very sophisticated).
