What is Effective Progress in Special Education?

You’re sitting in an IEP meeting and the team is discussing whether or not your child has made progress. The school team thinks your child has but you aren’t so sure. How do you know beyond what is reported in the progress report or report card? 

Most likely, your child has made some progress. But is it “effective”? According to the Massachusetts regulations, effective progress means “to make documented growth of knowledge and skills, including social and emotional development, within the general education program, with or without accommodations, according to the chronological age and developmental expectations, the individual educational potential of the child, and those standards set forth in the MA Curriculum Framework and the curriculum of the district”. In other words, determining effective progress is considering a combination of factors about the individual, developmental expectations, and the learning standards.

Collecting data about your child’s individual growth is an important part of determining effective progress. You can start by asking your child’s teacher(s) for baseline information about each of their IEP goal benchmarks. For example, if your daughter’s reading goal has a benchmark for improving her reading fluency measured by the number of words correct per minute (wcpm) she can read, it would make sense to understand where she is starting from and what the expectations are given her individual potential and compared to her grade-level peers. You can also ask for informal testing results that might be given on a regular basis such as the STAR, MAP, or iReady. If you don’t understand the results, ask your child’s teacher to explain it to you so you can better understand your child’s progress and advocate for them. 

Another consideration is your child’s current skills in relation to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks. If you’re not familiar, the Frameworks provide teachers, students and families with clear and shared expectations for what all students should know and be able to do at the end of each year. Before your next IEP meeting, look at your child’s grade-level expectations in the Frameworks, print them out, and ask each member of the team “how well can my child perform these standards in relation to their individual potential and developmental expectations?”. If your child isn’t meeting those standards, have a team discussion about why and how to close that gap.

Effective progress should also take into consideration the student’s non-academic performance. In fact, federal special education law prohibits teams from basing eligibility for special education solely on a student’s ability to move from grade to grade. So if you hear, “Amy is getting all A’s and B’s, she doesn’t need/qualify for an IEP” but you know she is becoming more and more withdrawn, is melting down at home over homework, or is avoiding school, ask the team, “if Amy were any general education student, does the information we have show that her participation in school represents effective progress?”.