All special education students must have academic goals written into their IEP that are aligned with the state standards associated with their grade. But if you’ve ever sat in an IEP meeting and heard something like, “Well… your child isn’t working at grade level,” you’re not alone.
Dr. Caitlin Solone, education advocate, teacher educator, and faculty at UCLA, explains how to develop standards-based goals that actually work for our kids. She gives us tips on how to include functional goals that are aligned with the Common Core State Standards and explains why parent advocacy for curriculum inclusion is important for all students.
Check out the clips below for highlights or watch the full recording here (with transcript available). You can also read more from Dr. Solone in our article about how to write IEP goals.
At its core, standards-based goals are exactly what they sound like: IEP goals that connect directly to the academic standards for your child’s grade level. As Dr. Solone puts it, “When we're talking about standards-based goals, we're talking about IEP goals that directly align with the standards that are aligned with the grade level that your child is in.” So if your child is in second grade, the goals should be aligned to second grade standards, not a totally separate set of expectations.
Dr. Caitlin Solone explains how parents can identify academic goals for their kids that are inclusive, aligned to state standards, and help them thrive in the general education classroom.
One of the biggest misunderstandings is thinking standards-based IEP goals mean your child’s goals must be identical to the standards. Dr. Solone explains that standards-based goals are about alignment, not copying and pasting the standard into the IEP: “It does not matter where a child is at in order for them to have standards-based IEP goals. And it doesn't mean that we're talking about IEP goals that are the same as the state standards, necessarily. What we're talking about is goals that are aligned, that they connect to and are working towards those standards.”
In her words, “I like to think about it as a roadmap going to the overarching standard. And so your goal should be somewhere along that roadmap, getting you to that ultimate destination.”
Dr. Solone explains that standards-based goals don’t mean expecting your child to demonstrate skills in the exact same way as their peers. Using reading comprehension as an example, she encourages teams to break down what the standard is really asking a student to learn.
“If we're taking reading comprehension, for example,” she explains, “and we want to make sure that your child is working towards a goal that is going to be aligned with a fifth grade reading comprehension goal… maybe we're not working towards reading the text and comprehending it, but maybe we're working towards listening to that higher level text and comprehending it.” This kind of thinking requires teams to look closely at the essential skill behind the standard. “It's really thinking critically about how we’re breaking down these goals,” she says. At the same time, foundational skills shouldn’t disappear. If a child is still developing phonics, those goals should remain in place so the student continues receiving strong reading instruction: “You still want to make sure your child's getting really meaningful reading instruction.”
The bigger takeaway for parents is that reading level does not automatically define comprehension ability. As Dr. Solone puts it, “Just because a child is not reading at fifth grade level doesn't mean actually that they can't comprehend a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh grade level… It just simply means that they're not reading it in a standard way that we're typically used to.” Instead of lowering expectations, standards-based goals invite teams to rethink access, allowing students to engage with grade-level ideas in ways that match how they learn best.
If standards language feels intimidating, Dr. Solone points families to tools that can make it much more doable: the Common Core Connectors and Essential Understandings. She calls them “crucial” for building standards-based IEP goals, especially when schools aren’t modeling this well. “If your school is not using it yet, show them… share resources with your teachers, your IEP team,” she says, because “many schools, many teachers don't have access to these resources that are really super valuable and meaningful in terms of developing these standards-based IEP goals.”
Common Core Connectors, Essential Understandings, and Dynamic Learning Maps are valuable resources both for teachers designing curriculum and for parents helping develop IEP goals. Listen to this clip for Dr. Solone's explanation of what CCCs/EUs are and how to use them.
Another common worry is that standards-based IEPs mean you need a goal for every standard, which would be overwhelming for everyone (including your child). Dr. Solone is clear that this is not the expectation: “It's not the expectation that you have a goal for every single standard at a grade level. That would be impossible to measure.” Instead, she encourages teams to collaborate and prioritize. The real question is, “What are the most meaningful standards that we want to work towards? What is actually going to help my child thrive in life, and help them obtain the skills that they need to be a successful, happy, engaged member of the community and society?”
She also adds a practical lens parents can use right away: choose goals that can be reinforced throughout the year, not a standard that’s only touched briefly. “You want to think about what are the things that are going to carry over across this entire school year?” she says.
Parents also ask whether “functional” goals — especially executive functioning — can be aligned with standards. Dr. Solone’s answer is a big yes. “When you think about functional academic goals, you're thinking, ‘What is actually going to be meaningful in my child's life? What is going to give them the skills, the self help skills, the daily living skills that they need to thrive?’ Many of the standards have components of them that are just that.
So you might not have a cooking goal, but you might have a ‘following directions school,’ ‘following multi step directions,’ ‘reading the instructions,’ ‘being able to follow a checklist,’ and things like that. So you're thinking: what are the skills that are going to build towards these goals? And yes, they can be aligned with the standards.”
Standards-based goals aren't limited to reading, writing, and math. They also include skills that are a bit harder to measure, like listening and communicating. Check out this clip for examples of functional skills to work into IEP goals.
When standards-based goals come up, another predictable pushback is placement: “GenEd moves too fast.” Dr. Solone acknowledges the reality that general education curriculum often moves quickly, but she doesn’t accept that as a reason students can’t belong or learn meaningfully. “Yeah, the curriculum might be moving quickly,” she says, but “that doesn't mean that every child, no matter how significant their support needs, can’t be engaging meaningfully in the curriculum,” because IEP goals can be written to support engagement through a child’s unique needs and access points.
She gives the example of a fast-moving middle school math class: even when concepts are flying by, students can still work on functional math skills, foundational concepts, and executive functioning goals “through the context of different types of lessons,” whether it’s fractions, multi-digit multiplication, or positive and negative integers. The curriculum topic may shift, but the child’s skill-building can stay consistent and meaningful.
Of course, parents often think: okay, but who is actually going to modify materials and plan for access? Dr. Solone says the system only works when there is dedicated pre-planning time for teachers and teams, and she pushes for a shift away from trying to modify every tiny assignment on the fly. “The biggest thing in making that type of system work is pre-planning and having that dedicated time for planning for teachers,” she explains. She reassures parents that full-time, constant modification of every worksheet isn’t realistic: “You don't even have to modify every single worksheet for every single, tiny little lesson, because truly, that's not feasible all the time.”
Instead, she recommends unit planning: stepping back, looking at the six-week unit (fractions, persuasive writing, etc.), and building a plan for how your child can work toward their IEP goals across that unit. She tells us that the better approach is to plan around “the big picture… the big ideas, the big goals that we are working towards,” rather than trying to force every tiny lesson into the goal.
Many families find themselves in a difficult cycle: their child is placed in a special education classroom that doesn’t use general education curriculum or recognizable grade-level standards, and over time the child falls further behind. That gap is then used as the reason the student cannot move into a more inclusive setting. So how can parents ensure their child is still making meaningful progress, especially when it’s not realistic to write goals for every single standard?
Dr. Solone explains that situations like this are, sadly, very common, and many families find themselves stuck in the same cycle: low expectations lead to limited access to curriculum, which then becomes the justification for continued separation.
Dr. Solone encourages parents to keep coming back to one key idea: your child’s IEP goals should still be aligned with the standards for their chronological grade level — the grade they would be in based on their age, regardless of placement.
She also encourages a lot of parent advocacy. “Continue to expect and support your IEP team in ensuring that all of your child's IEP goals do align with the standards. And oftentimes, it's parent advocacy that then trickles down and impacts way more students because through one parent's advocacy and efforts in fighting for this, then the teacher starts to realize, ‘Oh, this is actually really good, this is meaningful, this is important.’ And this is a really powerful way to go about developing IEP goals.”
She explains that once the IEP goals are developed and in place, the IEP team and teachers should then develop a curriculum that's going to allow for a student to reach those goals, which can be complicated in and of itself. But she encourages parents to “build a strong allyship with your teacher and ask if there's support that the teacher needs, and maybe any advocacy that you can do on behalf of the teacher with the administration, either on your school site or at the district level. Because it's through efforts like that that then we start to see the districts and administration start to make these things more of a priority.”
If you just got your IEP draft and are wondering, ‘How can I review the district's written goals and assess if they're appropriate or not?’ Dr. Solone can help.
Dr. Solone describes a simple, grounded way to review goals at home: sit down with the goals, your child’s present levels, and the standards (plus Connectors and Essential Understandings, if available). “I would have the Common Core standards with the connectors and the central understandings printed out next to me,” she says, and “also have the present levels of performance right there with me.” Then she recommends cross-referencing: does this goal align with your child’s grade level? Does it connect to the standards? Is it reasonable based on present levels — what they can do now and what progress is realistic over a year? She acknowledges that there’s judgment involved, but she also reminds parents of something that often gets overlooked in meetings: “A lot of the expertise around that will also come from you as parents because you know your child best.”
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