A sad truth is that special education is failing to teach the majority of students with disabilities to read. In the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report, 74% of fourth grade students with disabilities did not meet the basic standard, compared to 33% of students without IEPs. And 70% of eighth graders with disabilities were still below basic level compared to 26% of students without disabilities. These statistics highlight a troubling reality: across the country, millions of students with IEPs likely have reading goals in their annual plans, yet many still struggle to read at even a basic level by the time they reach high school. And yet, reading is perhaps the most basic functional skill necessary to navigate our increasingly digital society. From fourth grade onward, when students are reading to learn, those who are still learning to read inevitably fall further behind.
In our article on phonics and the science of reading, we look at the core components of reading instruction, what kind of specially designed instruction might be needed, and how parents can advocate for targeted intervention in reading. Our focus in this article is to look at how reading is assessed and measured, and help parents design IEP reading goals that will be effective.
For expert insights, we spoke to Christopher J. Lemons, PhD, an associate professor of special education in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University; Kathleen Whitbread, PhD, from Whitbread Educational Consulting; and Cherie Dorreen, an education advocate.
The most common way schools assess reading is through curriculum-based measures linked to the structured literacy program’s “scope and sequence.” The scope refers to what students will learn — the specific reading skills covered — while the sequence is when those skills are taught and in what order. Curriculum-based measures are different from traditional assessments because they focus on ongoing formative evaluation and are directly aligned with curriculum content and instructional goals. When used regularly, they can be used to track your child’s progress toward their IEP goals, check whether they’re retaining skills they’ve already learned, and make sure their current instruction is meeting their needs. Often, goals can refer to resources contained within a reading program without mentioning the program’s name, for example:
Many schools may be reluctant to name a specific program in the IEP. It can be a personnel issue if they have only one individual in their district who is trained in implementing that program. Dr. Lemons shares that he doesn’t generally recommend putting a specific program in the IEP because it might limit the teacher’s flexibility to adapt or make changes if needed. However, he notes that it’s understandable that some parents want the program listed to ensure their child is actually receiving that specific support.
Dr. Whitbread, however, feels that using program names and clear language is actually helpful in progress monitoring and making sure everyone, including parents, is informed: “I’m a big fan of writing goals that are very specific, using normal language that everyone understands. I’m not a fan of ‘at his instructional level’ or big, long, drawn-out descriptions when you could just say what the program is. I understand all the reasons why we don’t want to put program names in IEPs, but all of that circling around makes for a difficult time when, years from now, you want to know, well, what did the child do? And when we use very complicated, clinical language in goals, then parents are completely left out of the understanding in terms of what’s happening and where kids are. So if the child’s using the Wilson program and they’re at step one and that equates with a first-grade reading level, I want all that information and I think it’s helpful to have it in the IEP so that nobody is going, ‘What does that mean?’ Everyone should know where we are and what we’re doing.”
Here are a few more tips from our experts on using curricula to create reading goals:
An IEP reading goal often begins with “after reading a passage at the student’s instructional level, independent level or grade level text…” A student’s “instructional reading level” is designed to match your child’s current learning abilities. Instead of focusing only on grade-level expectations, it targets skills your child is ready to learn next. When presented with a goal that refers to the student’s instructional level or a grade-level text, it’s important to ask the IEP team how they are determining the student’s reading level and how that level might move forward during the IEP year. If the goal says “grade-level text,” bear in mind that the assessment standards for the goal will increase in difficulty when the child goes up a grade level. If your progress report says the student is at 70% in June, it may fall to 50% in September because the readings became more complex when your child moved up through the grade levels. In order to prevent frustration, it is important that children practice reading texts they have a chance at being successful in reading. For example, Dr. Lemons explains that for most reading comprehension or fluency tests, we need the student to be reading texts in which they are familiar with 97% of the words. This is known as their “independent level.” If they are reading with support, such as a partner, that could drop to 90% — this is what is considered a text at the student’s “instructional level.”
While Dr. Whitbread thinks it’s important that reading goals match the level of the text, it should always be clear what skill and level you are referencing. As Dr. Whitbread explains, it’s not helpful to say a child is reading at, say, “a third-grade level” because there are many parts that go into reading that need to be separated, such as phonics, comprehension, vocabulary, and language comprehension. Many kids are at very different levels there. We have to look at these components in terms of how they work together but also how they develop separately.
You want your child to read texts that inspire and make reading enjoyable and meaningful. Remember that IEP goals are not the whole curriculum but should complement and utilize the overall curriculum. However, IEP goals are needed to measure progress, and will be accomplished effectively only if the types of texts your child is being expected to read are equivalent at the beginning and end of the goal. If you are ambitiously aiming for grade-level proficiency, the IEP goal should reference texts that are appropriate for the grade your child is in.
Parent tip: ask specific questions about how the teacher identifies the level of text and have that specific information included in the goal.
For example, if your child’s decoding skills are at a third grade level but their comprehension skills are first-grade level, what kind of texts does the teacher plan to use when working on this goal? It may be that they are using a program that includes ‘leveled’ texts and that’s what the goal is actually referring to.
Most structured literacy programs or curricula, including those used in general education classrooms and intervention programs (often described as Orton-Gillingham programs), include regular progress monitoring. This is important because we are testing the child on whether they have learned what was already taught and not on skills that we expect them to acquire naturally.
Dr. Whitbread highlights how important it is for parents to ensure there’s a clear plan for monitoring progress. She advises parents to go beyond just looking at graphs and data points to ask critical questions: “Be sure that there’s a plan to look at the progress. So many times, parents are sent to websites where there are graphs and red dots and blue lines, and no one is actually looking at the data and synthesizing it to say, ‘Well what does this mean? We can all see the line is just flat or the line is going down — we all understand that — but what’s happening and what are we changing in order to make that happen?’ So I think being ambitious, being sure there’s a trained person on the team in literacy, and making sure that somebody is analyzing the data, not just keeping the data — those would be my top three [tips for parents].”
Schools have to report on your child’s progress on their IEP goals in every annual review but also at agreed intervals during the year. An IEP team can agree to progress reporting at shorter intervals during the year, but on the whole, we expect progress on annual IEP goals to be reported every three months. Dr. Whitbread tells us that it is critically important to have progress monitoring measures that are reliable and where everybody's communicating about where they are. “And the parents need to be in that loop too,” she says.” There's nothing worse than getting to your annual IEP meeting and finding that the child made almost no progress.” In this clip, Dr. Whitbread recommends more frequent assessment while working on foundational skills, such as phonics and phonemic awareness.
When reviewing your child’s IEP (and creating reading goals), two key components to pay attention to are baselines and short-term objectives (STOs). Baselines establish where your child’s skills are at the start of the IEP year, providing a clear starting point for measuring progress while short-term objectives break big goals into smaller, manageable steps.
An important component of any annual IEP goal is the baseline, which measures the target skill at the start of the IEP year. Baselines are typically drawn from the present levels section of the IEP or, in the case of an initial or triennial IEP, from standardized assessments. Sometimes the previous year’s progress on goals becomes the baseline for the next year, especially if it’s appropriate to continue working on the same skill with a more ambitious target.
It is important to ensure that the baseline matches the goal with fidelity. For example, if the goal reads, “By (the next annual IEP), given a passage at a first-grade level, the student will increase their reading fluency to 80 correct words per minute in four out of five opportunities,” but the baseline reads, “In their most recent assessment, the student is able to decode CVC words with 65% accuracy and read four out of ten CVCe words (come, cake, bake, fine) correctly,” the baseline does not accurately measure the target skill of reading fluency because reading a passage aloud (as in the goal) is a more demanding skill than reading words in isolation (as in the baseline). In this situation, a parent should always ask for a baseline that matches the skill.
Short-term objectives (STOs), sometimes called benchmarks, can be added to goals to describe the student’s expected achievement on steps toward the annual goal. Often, these STOs are used only to note graduated expectations, but they can also be used to break up IEP goals to teach discrete skills. For example, an annual IEP goal could target single-syllable decodable words, with short-term objectives focused on CVC short vowel words, CVCe words (words with a silent e), and single-syllable words with consonant blends.
The goal could read:
Short-term objectives could read:
Dr. Whitbread and Dr. Lemons both note the importance of working with the speech therapist on reading goals, especially goals that rely heavily on language comprehension skills. Dr. Whitbread explains, “Very often, [speech therapists] are addressing those language issues that are going to impact reading comprehension. You don’t want to have separate goals, like a separate comprehension goal that the reading teacher addresses, then a speech-language goal that is also addressing that, but maybe in a different way. I think it’s so important that everybody sits down and talks about what the data is telling them about the child, where the child is, and then to collaborate on those goals so that they’re not all separate.”
For example, a goal could read:
One of the most common measures of reading is fluency, the ability to read text accurately, at a good pace, and with proper expression. Fluency is often measured by counting the number of correct words the child can read out loud per minute. A number of scales show the expectation per grade level, including the 2017 Hasbrouck & Tindal Oral Reading Fluency Data. Our experts all see fluency as a good general measure of reading ability because it is tied to several key elements, such as decoding and comprehension.
Many IEPs contain very general reading goals that focus on increasing fluency or increasing reading level according to a measure used by the school to show that kids are advancing throughout the school year. For example, the school might suggest a goal such as, “By (the next annual IEP), when given a passage at their instructional level, the student will increase their reading fluency to 70 correct words per minute in four out of five opportunities.”
Dorreen tells us we want a child to increase their reading fluency to the point where they can read at the same speed as they take in information aurally. If they are reading too slowly or too fast, they will not be reading for comprehension. In this clip she explains how to use progress monitoring and short-term objectives to ensure your child is making progress in reading.
Dr. Lemons tells us that the best way to develop a child’s fluency is to have them practice reading repeatedly, which can be built into the goal. He also explains that for independent reading, we want the child to be able to read with a very high degree of accuracy, so the level of the text should not be challenging. For example the school might suggest a goal such as, “By (the next annual IEP), when given a decodable passage containing familiar words related to recently reviewed content and two opportunities to practice the passage, the student will increase their reading fluency to 70 correct words per minute in four out of five opportunities as measured by teacher observation or student-created video.”
Note that a speech therapist should be included in the goal if the child’s fluency is also affected by oral motor or motor planning issues. Many students are not comfortable with reading aloud but might be allowed to video themselves reading a passage.
General reading goals, such as fluency or reading level, might also be useful for a student who is an emerging reader and working on all the skills contained in the Reading Rope. For more information on the Reading Rope, see our article Untangling the Reading Rope. An alternative approach to reading goals is to break up the skill of reading into its component parts and work on all the skills that the child is lacking. To do this, you first need to assess which skills in particular are lacking. Students in middle school or high school who are struggling readers might, for example, lack foundational reading skills typically not addressed in secondary schools, such as decoding or phonemic awareness.
Sometimes, parents with students with extensive support needs are told their children are not ready for reading. Dr. Whitbread rejects this unjustified standard of readiness, as all students can start somewhere and progress.
Reading starts with recognizing letters. Many students with moderate to profound intellectual disabilities focus on letter names and shapes, particularly the letters of their name, for many years. It’s important that the child has a sense of why this skill is important. The recently developed California Preschool/Transitional Kindergarten Learning Foundations (PTKLF) standards also focus on learning sounds, including beginning sounds of words, rhyming, and letter-sound correspondences. These are all areas that might be used to develop pre-reading goals.
Pre-reading skills also include listening to a story, looking at the pictures in a book, and understanding that the letters in the word make words with meaning. For Pre-K, a multilingual student could have a goal focused on isolating the beginning sounds of words in English and their home language (based on the new TK standards).
A sample goal could read, “By (the next annual IEP), when shown a familiar object in the classroom or a picture, told the name of the object in English or Spanish, and asked what the word begins with, the student will respond with the beginning sound for the corresponding noun with 70% accuracy as measured by teacher data in four out of five opportunities.”
For younger students who cannot yet read or are emerging readers, reading goals should be tied to the Common Core’s Reading: Foundational Skills (CCSS RF1-5). However, these standards are limited to early grades, making it difficult to tie reading foundation goals to grade-level standards for older students. For middle and high school students, grade-level standards such as reading and comprehending complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently can be tied to any particular reading goal. Parents and IEP teams can look at goals applicable to students in younger grades to see the scope and sequence that can be used to develop appropriate goals for older students who are emerging readers.
For example, assuming that the child knows all the letter sounds, the next step would be reading CVC words. The goal could read: “By (the next annual IEP), the student will read 10 CVC words with 90% accuracy as measured by teacher data in four out of five opportunities.”
Be sure to consider the baseline, which should reference the accuracy with which the student can read 10 CVC goals presently, to determine whether this goal is ambitious enough for a whole year of working. For example: “Baseline: The student can match all the letters to their sounds. Currently, given 10 CVC words, the student reads 1 word (cat) accurately in all five opportunities.”
The term ‘sight words’ is confusing. Some teachers use it to refer only to non-decodable words. For others, ‘sight words’ means words that you learn by sight as whole words, for example by using flash cards.
Goals for sight words should indicate the kind of words to be targeted, for example Dolch or Fry’s high-frequency words, which appear frequently in children’s literature. Many children will be motivated by learning high-interest words (favorite people, characters, toys, etc.), which is another type of words a goal can target. Whole-word reading strategies can be used for a variety of reasons and are sometimes associated with ‘functional reading’ as explained in our article on reading. To facilitate an emerging writer, it’s particularly useful to include words like “see” and “like” that can create easy sentences such as, “I like _” and “I see _.”
A sample goal might say, “By (the next annual IEP), when presented with flash cards, the student will read 30 sight words from the Fry’s first-grade list, using total communication (verbal, ASL, or their AAC device) with 95% accuracy as measured by teacher data in four out of five opportunities.”
Since children learn sight words as just one part of word recognition, having a sight word goal does not preclude also having a decoding goal.
Teachers often target reading comprehension with goals that require students to answer who, what, where, and when questions. These goals work well with higher grade-level goals that focus on identifying key characters or details in a text. This might be a good goal for practicing answering questions, but if the child is still working on understanding who, what, where, and when or using their working memory to answer the questions, it’s not really targeted at their reading ability.
Dr. Whitbread suggests that it’s important to look at the way questions are being asked and whether the child understands the question — to determine whether they understand the reading passage — “because a lot of times it’s how you’re asking the question and what language you’re using as an instructor. I always think back to a student I worked with where I kept talking about uppercase letters. I knew they understood the concept because I could see that in their work, but then I realized they called them capital letters.” When writing goals, we need to ensure that we are using strategies that measure reading comprehension and not general comprehension.
Dr. Lemons suggests an exercise called “get the gist.” The student might read a passage twice and then identify key details using a graphic organizer. The student then puts those details into two or three sentences to create a paragraph summary of the passage.
Graphic organizers can help support these goals by providing a visual framework for answering who, what, where, and when. A key question to ask when presented with goals focused on comprehending a passage is, “What kind of passage will the student be answering questions about?” Many separate special education classrooms use short passages designed for this exercise that are part of a program or curriculum package and have little interest for the children. It might be more engaging to have the student answer the questions about a story they heard read aloud during library time and then reread with an opportunity to look at the pictures and text by themselves.
Non-speaking students can have many accommodations that increase their success on reading comprehension goals. For example, they might have access to alternative means of answering the question, such as choosing picture cards from a field of three or using a premade page on their AAC service.
Sample goals might include:
For many students, informational text is challenging because many words are unfamiliar, even when sounded out. Most elementary classes have social studies or science vocabulary words included in each unit of study that can be turned into picture match cards. Personal books also help students become familiar with academic words. It might be helpful to preteach these vocabulary words in the weeks before a new unit is introduced in class. As the words used in class become increasingly abstract, icons can still be used to represent abstract ideas. While the words might be taught using pictures, they can be tested by putting them in the context of subject-matter definitions.
A sample goal might be: “By (the next annual IEP), when given a list of five science or social studies vocabulary words, the student will match the word to the definition with 70% accuracy as measured by teacher data over three opportunities.”
Assistive technology (AT) providers do not usually write goals but consult with teachers and other related service providers to ensure that the student has access to the curriculum through the AT provided. However, AT can be written into a reading goal. This goal could be met by a student who can neither read nor write but is still able to utilize technology to study literature to a fifth grade standard.
A sample goal might be: “By (the next annual IEP), when given a grade-level text accessible through text to speech, the student will independently access the text (either by reading or by independently operating the AT to listen to the passage); quote accurately from the text by providing the answer either handwritten, typed, or by copy and paste; explain what the text says explicitly; with 70% accuracy as measured by teacher data over three opportunities.”
Here are a few more takeaways:
Prioritize progress monitoring. Ensure that progress on reading is monitored and reported regularly so that goals and strategies can be adjusted if they’re not working, especially for foundational skills. Use curriculum-based monitoring or short-term objectives to check on progress during the year and adjust strategies if needed.
Use curriculum scope and sequence. While most IEP teams will not include a specific program in the IEP, you can use the scope and sequence of the program to tie IEP goals to your student’s progression through the sequence.
Tie goals to Common Core. In the absence of a program, the Reading Foundations Common Core Standards for K to 3 provide a pretty good scope and sequence to tie your goals to. Dr. Whitbread shares that while they’re not perfect, they do provide a clear progression of skills across grade levels that align with research. The Common Core comprehension standards, in particular, can be helpful. You can use their wording in your child’s goals to show how your child’s current skills compare to grade-level expectations and outline what your child is working toward.
Fluency is key. Measuring reading fluency is a good way to measure general progress in reading.
Accommodate for kids with communication and other challenges. For students with communication challenges, be creative in the way you measure their progress. It’s important to focus on what skill is being tested. When we are testing reading, for example, we often have to think outside of the box to ensure that the student’s reading ability — rather than their communication ability (speaking or writing) — isn’t getting in the way of the test. For students with speech challenges, it isn't always necessary for the student to speak the word to demonstrate that they are reading. They might use non-spoken communication, such as an AAC device or ASL signs, or they can match words to cards to demonstrate comprehension. Another way to test the student’s ability to read is for an adult to speak the word and the student to choose a flash card from a field of cards by picking it up or pointing.
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