What 45 Years in Special Education Has Taught Me About Building Better IEPs

I recently talked with Kara Baskin of The Boston Globe for her article, “One in Five Mass. Students Needs an IEP. Here’s How to Handle It If You’re a Parent.”

It’s a topic I’ve spent more than 45 years on: how we write IEPs that actually help kids.

Kara wrote the piece for parents, and it’s a solid guide. But I hope educators and school leaders read it too. A good IEP isn’t written by one person. A team builds it, it starts with real data, and everyone at the table has to agree on who the student is.

Here’s what I told the Globe:

I believe that more every year. We know instruction, assessment, and how a student performs in the classroom. Parents know everything else: how their child handles a bad day, what they love, what they struggle with at home, and what worked or didn’t work last year.

I’ve sat in more IEP meetings than I can count. The people around the table don’t always see the same child. That isn’t a problem. It’s the point. Parents see things we don’t, and we see things they don’t. Our job is to put those pieces together.

You can’t plan where a student is going until you know where they’re starting.

That means getting past “he’s struggling with reading” or “she has trouble focusing.” What can the student do right now? How often? Under what conditions? That’s your baseline, and parents should help build it.

Once the baseline is clear, writing observable, measurable goals gets much easier. A good goal tells everyone what the student is working toward, how we’ll measure it, and what success looks like.

Without a solid baseline, even well-meaning teams end up with goals nobody can measure and instruction that misses what the student needs.

An IEP isn’t paperwork for compliance. It should guide what happens in the classroom every day.

That means the data we collect during instruction has to tie back to the goals the team wrote. Is the student making progress? Are they responding to instruction? Do we need to change our approach?

Teachers should be able to answer those questions with confidence. When progress monitoring is consistent, they can make better decisions, adjust instruction sooner, and talk with families using real information instead of impressions.

And when parents understand the goals and how progress is measured, they stop being spectators. They become partners.

The IEP process can feel overwhelming for families. It’s hard on educators too, who juggle complex student needs, paperwork, and too little time.

But we all want the same thing: for the student to make real progress.

After four decades, I keep coming back to a few key things. Know the whole student. Build a real baseline. Write goals you can observe and measure. Use the data to guide instruction.

Above all, parents aren’t guests at the IEP meeting. They’re members of the team. When educators and families work from the same understanding of a child, that child has a much better chance of making progress.

Thank you to Kara Baskin and The Boston Globe for covering this topic and helping families understand the process.

Read the original article: “One in Five Mass. Students Needs an IEP. Here’s How to Handle It If You’re a Parent,” Kara Baskin, The Boston Globe, September 30, 2026. Read it in The Boston Globe (subscription may be required).

Allan Blume founded The Blume Method, an education technology company that makes individualized education easier, more consistent, and more effective for educators and the students they serve.