How do I ask my team to write more ambitious IEP goals? I know my child is capable of more.

In order to make the goal ambitious, it’s important to have an appropriate baseline. You want to know at the end of the year: did my kid make progress or not? If you don't have a good baseline, then your team has no way of knowing that.

For example, the goal is that by the end of the year, a child will identify 15 letter sounds, and there has to be some measure, such as 80% of the time, or 4 out of 5 times. Then the baseline should say that the child can identify 3 letter sounds, 1 out of 5 times, with 25% accuracy. The structure should be the same so they're exactly correlated. Say it was 25; we want to get to 80. If it was 1 out of 4, we want to get to 4 out of 5. It’s how the team measures progress.

Use the baseline as a guide to write an ambitious goal. For example, if the baseline shows your child can read 4 words and the IEP goal aims for them to read 15 by the end of the year, reaching 10 out of the 15 by the end of the year would reflect meaningful progress. But if your child already knows 10 at the beginning of the year and the goal written is still 15, then it's not appropriately ambitious.