IEP Inverted!
What is the opposite of an Individualized Education Program? A “Typical Education Program”? This seems like a weird question to ask… but how can we build, implement, and evaluate an IEP if we don’t know what a plain vanilla Education Program looks like?
Standard Education Program
A public school education program consists of the state specified standards (in many places in the US, this is based on the Common Core criteria) for what material is supposed to be taught for each subject for each grade cohort. Here in California, the complete set of educational standards includes standards for:
Career Technical Education (for different career areas)
Arts Education (this includes standards for music, theater, studio art, dance etc.)
In addition, California has a preschool curriculum framework:
(I find the preschool framework useful as it includes some social skills topics that are not covered elsewhere but can be important for some disabled children).
If you look at each of these standards, you’ll find a specific set of learning objectives tied to each grade. Thus, in the delightful language of bureaucracy…
Reading Standards for Informational Text K–5, for Kindergartners, Standard 1 is:
K.RI.1. With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text.
NOTE – this coding scheme is actually embedded in the IEP as each goal typically references a common core standard. It is often worthwhile to look up the associated common core standard for each of your IEP goals… and I find it is much more powerful to propose IEP goals in terms of common core standards.
… and there are 10 “Reading Standards for Informational Text” for Kindergartners and a similar number for each grade through 5.
… There are 3 categories of Reading standards, each with around 10 specific objectives for each grade
… 10 areas of Writing standards
… 6 areas of Speaking standards
… and 4 areas of Language standards
(these change over time)
But, if you stood back, you would see probably close to 100 English Language Art standards being taught in each age cohort.
… and a similar structure for Math, Science, PE and other subjects.
Whew!
So, your typical, general education student has a “Vanilla Education Program” covering every year from Kindergarten through high school including most of the electives.
And each year for each subject they are likely to be expected to meet 80 to 100 “educational goals”…. So something like 600 to 100 educational goals per year.
(Maybe it is time to discuss a raise for our teachers?)
Back to the IEP
So, what is the IEP agreement?
It is an amendment to this Generic Education Plan (that you hadn’t looked at before).
Once upon a time, we were asked by our IEP team about what goals we wanted… my flip answer was “Do First Grade”… which was basically do what you have to do to do the “Generic Education Plan” for first graders…
… I kind of stand by that as a plan.
And, except for the weirdness of IEP goals, that is what you actually HAVE in **most** IEP agreements.
If you are getting a real report card with real grades.. that is what matters… right?
Not so SMART goals
I’m sure everyone who has suffered through standard business management practice in the last couple of decades (1981!) is beyond tired of “SMART Goals”.
“Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound”
Special Education is vulnerable to all of the abuse of any metrics or system… and it is.
The false precision of a lot of goals (the usage of ABA style goals should be discussed further) and their misalignment with the much simpler (and shared) objectives of the “Vanilla Education Program” create a distraction from the overall goal of public education… a meaningful high school diploma.
Curriculum Collapse
But it gets worse.
Most students with IEPs continue to be part of the Standard Education Program with a “cherry on top” with their IEP goals, supports, and services.
Nothing is lost (at least on paper).
BUT.
As the IEP Agreement is an “amendment to the (unwritten) general education contract”…. ANYTHING can be changed.
And for students who are more than one year away from their “typical” peers, this is what happens.
As I’ve noted before, the move to the state “Alternative Assessment” or change to promotion based on “IEP goals” … basically mean that the entire machinery of the Standard Education Program get thrown out with a checkbox or a form.
A student goes from having a 12+ year educational program with 80+ educational goals per year…
… between 900 and 1200 or so educational goals on a structured timeline.
To 5 to 20 goals or so. Specified by the school team with some level of comment, critique and line-item veto by the parents.
900+ goals down to 20…
…Total.
No time-based program beyond the current year.
No plan to get to graduation or anywhere else.
For a student with an IEP and access to the “Standard Education Program”… “stay put” on an IEP still means a meaningful education program.
For those without.
Crickets.
Not an Individualized Education Program at all.
Truly, education inverted.
An un-IEP.
