IEP meetings are so weird

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I've been attending IEP meetings for 3 years now, and I still can't wrap my head around how they work (or mostly don't work!) in real life, as opposed to the ideal version you find in Wrightslaw.

I'm a software engineer (taking an extended or possibly permanent child-rearing sabbatical) and in theory the process looks like an engineering design spec: you do a bunch of testing to find out where the problems lie, you measure and write down a baseline for the child's current abilities in each domain (reading, math, speech, motor skills, etc), you write a goal for what the child should have learned one year from now and make sure it's stated in terms that are measurable, and then decide on how many hours of specialist time (speech, OT, resource teacher) is needed to meet that goal. Then every report card you measure where the child is at on each goal.

But therapists and teachers, even special ed teachers who should have years of doing this, are so sloppy compared to engineers! Either they don't write up proposed goals, saying "we'll develop the goals during the meeting", and then at the meeting there is no baseline measurement so you can't make a reasonable estimate for how much progress to expect. Or they write up a bunch of goals and then expect them to be accepted with little to no discussion about the details of what they are measuring, whether the goal is too easy or too hard, and whether everything is covered.

The teacher shows up with a goal that has a baseline of "no data taken" or "[Name] is working on learning money using an iPad app." The OT's progress report says, "30% some progress", rather than a measurement of how many letters he's learned to write.

Then there's all the brainstorming and touchy-feely talk during the meeting that meanders around and doesn't change anything as far as the actual written goals and accommodations are concerned. (There was one memorable one at a previous school where the OT spent several minutes telling us that children are really affected by the phases of the moon!)

We moved to a new district over the summer and spent the fall doing testing for DS8's tri-annual IEP. We had privately placed him at a non-public (ie special ed) school for kids with Aspergers, and hired a bulldog advocate to help us convince the district to pay for it. They did a very thorough evaluation and spent the first meeting discussing the reports. There was no discussion about placement or the goals (some were proposed and others were to be developed later) during the meeting, but afterward the director of special ed told us that the district was going to offer to keep DS at his current school. Fantastic!

Then we come to the second meeting, and none of the district's people involved in the first meeting (speech, OT, resource, neuropsychologist) are present. Instead, the speech therapist and OT affiliated with the non-public school were there -- they'd been given the reports but heard none of the discussion. Only the district administrator and DS's current teacher were at both meetings. There were no OT goals proposed, so the OT has to come up with goals and take new baseline data. DS's teacher ignored the academic goals proposed by the district's resource specialist, and just brought an update on informal goals we set last May. We spent most of the meeting going through the resource special's goal list and DS teacher's goal list and just saying whether there was duplication and if we should keep or toss each one. Our advocate only dug into the details of one goal, concerning whether the words to be read were sight words or "high-frequency" words, and whether the goal was decoding or fluency. There was one queestion, "oh yeah, does he have a behavior support plan?" And the teacher replied, "I only have this copy from last Feb, but I think we updated it in September. I'll forward it to you." The primary reason DS needs this school is that behaviorally he can't handle a general ed classroom!

I really think DS's teacher is just going to do what she's going to do, and filling in the details of an IEP baseline or progress report is just an afterthought.

Decisions about placement seem to get made behind the scenes and I have no idea how it actually happens or how I would influence it if we hadn't hired the well-connected bulldog advocate. The end result was great for us but I can easily see how it could have been otherwise.

I can tell you a software system developed by these people would crash, crash, crash! (Maybe that explains a few things about the state of disability education...)

People who go into teaching the lower grades tend to be people-oriented and not process-oriented. It is very frustrating. Our district never winged it; they had almost everything pre-decided. They knew I was a big PITA so I had "pre-IEP" meetings to hash things out but otherwise they just present it and expect you to accept it. We also had fuzzy goals that were not measurable and it was like pulling teeth to get anything you could measure.

If you can measure the goal, then you can tell if the school is doing a lousy job of working toward it. That is why the school would like everything to be as vague as possible.

^ This, and it takes more time to count things like meltdowns and track them properly than to just say something nebulous like, "respond in a socially appropriate manner 60% of the time." (Which they do not count and figure out a percentage for, either -- they just pull a number out of their heads,)

The number one use of my country funded psych and assistant: come to iep meetings, tell them what data to collect and how to collect it. Show up at the school and demand the data. Get it, chart it. Send it to everyone and go "see? Look, this is working/this isnt working" Kids spend so much time in school, I couldn't think of a better use for the tiny bit of funding that I got. It's working so far because my reply to any push back I get is to threaten litigation and threaten to take out a full page add in the newspaper regarding the IEP process and what laws have already been broken so far because I document EVERYTHING and can prove any claims I make.

Yeah, I'm a fun time person.

In fairness to the teachers/school professionals, measuring human behavior is much messier than measuring physical phenomena. Depending on the goals, there is often a need for child-specific measurement. This has to be individually designed for each child. for example, should we measure frequency of physical aggression? How does physical aggression get defined? Does severity matter, if so, how is that defined? Is there a replacement behavior being measured? After this, the measurement actually has to occur, which means that while the teacher is working on following a lesson plan and managing and measuring the behaviors of all the children in the class, s/he also has to attend to your child. It becomes very difficult to write anything down in the moment, and when recalling the behaviors of 10-15 kids, it may be impossible to remember important details of one specific child's behaviors. So the problem for measurement is that it requires an individualized approach to phenomena that are not always easily defined or reliable, and the measurements must be done while multi-tasking. Compare this to an engineer, who uses a constrained set of measurements on reliable phenomena, and is able to focus exclusively on the measurement and planning. If a specialist is tasked with collecting behavioral data, there are other issues, such as behaviors that happen at low frequencies. If a child only exhibits a behavior once a week (but it is a severe behavior), a specialist may come in to observe several times and never see the behavior.. This makes measurement very difficult.

ASDMommy's point is also important here - the teachers went into teaching because they like children. They spent the bulk of their training working on developing an organizational scheme to manage a class and a lesson plan, and developing skills for teaching. Behavioral assessment, such as that done in IEPs represents a small portion of that training.

Another important thing to consider is that an IEP is as much an educational guideline as it is a legal document. Teachers have to answer to principals who need to maintain low costs. So while teachers often want what is best for their students, they may also be stuck in a political game when it comes to recommending services for a child. Teachers are often encouraged (or ordered) to refrain from recommending anything that may be costly, such as excessive assessments, or one-on-one supports. Administrators who are present at such meetings, may also want to keep things informal in order to avoid making any formal and costly recommendations/promises.

So to summarize; between the messy phenomena being measured, the lack of specialization in those doing the measurement, and the politics occurring behind the scenes, it's a wonder anything gets done at all. I'm not implying that you should accept this state of affairs by any means. I think the more that you show your expectation for good data, and a well-thought out IEP (i.e. don't sign anything that isn't up to your standards), the more they will learn to take your concerns seriously. Just be aware that there's a line between the serious and concerned parent (in the eyes of the school) and the "nuisance" parent (who may be treated poorly, or adversarially, depending on the school).

But I'm not even talking about the behavioral issues! I get that that is very difficult to define and measure. DS is behind academically, so the goals we were going over were more measurable stuff like number of sight words recognized, spelling, handwriting speed, counting money, etc. The behavioral stuff was just mentioned in passing as an afterthought, and basically amounted to "do whatever your program does".

The teacher only has 8 kids in the class. She has credentials in mild/moderate and moderate/severe special ed. She really should know better than to walk into an IEP with a baseline of "no data taken" for a goal SHE is proposing!

They had baselines for us, but it was always those things worded like "ASDKID does x successfully 40% of the time." I asked them straight out if they actually counted instances, successes and failures, and calculated percents and of course they didn't. So all it ever measured was the improvement perceived by the observer; which depending on the skill, was easily doctored if they wanted to show they did a bang up job or especially if they wanted to lower services. Any time there was a different teacher/observer the baseline moved. The only way they way they could do it objectively is when they actually tested (for things like speech) with official tests.