Parent and child building counting blocks together while planning IEP goals

By Law, You’re an Equal Member of Your Child’s IEP Team. Most Parents Are Never Told.

Last updated: June 24, 2026

You have sat at that table before. The team talks in acronyms, a stack of goals slides across to you already written, and you nod along because everyone else seems to know the plan. You leave unsure what your child is actually working toward, or whether the plan fits the kid you tuck in at night. That feeling is not a sign you are out of your depth. It is a sign the room was built to move fast around you, and nobody handed you the one thing that lets you slow it down.

TL;DR

Under IDEA, you are an equal member of your child's IEP team, with the right to shape, question, and revise every goal.
A strong goal passes the SMARTT test: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Ask for the draft goals before the meeting so you read them with time to respond, not on the spot.
A goal your child already meets is set too low and costs a year of real progress.
For any support or goal, ask whether it builds the skill or replaces the expectation that it gets built.

FROM THE VIDEO

Key moments from Crafting SMARTT IEP Goals with Koli Aziza of Marama Learning:

The five-part test every IEP goal should pass. Watch at 00:26
Why you are a member of the team, not an observer. Watch at 01:03
Ask for the draft goals before the meeting, so you have time to respond. Watch at 09:29

Common questions from parents

What does SMARTT stand for in an IEP goal?

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. A goal that meets all five names exactly what success looks like and how the team will measure it, so “improve counting” becomes “given six items, counts each with one-to-one correspondence four out of five times each session.”

Am I allowed to change the goals the school proposes?

Yes. Under IDEA you are an equal member of the IEP team, and the school must consider your concerns. Ask for the draft goals before the meeting so you have time to agree, suggest changes, or propose a goal of your own.

How do I know if a goal is set too low?

Ask whether your child already meets it. A goal they already do today spends the year looking active while nothing stretches. The better question for any goal is whether it builds the skill or replaces the expectation that it gets built.

Is an IEP goal a diagnosis of my child?

No. A goal describes a skill your child is working on right now, not a fixed label. A screener or a goal is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations such as an IEP or 504 plan, or you suspect a vision, hearing, or medical cause, a professional evaluation is the route to those supports.

By law you are an equal member of your child's IEP team, not a guest. Ask for the draft goals before the meeting, so you read a year of your child's plan with time to push back. Tweet Now Follow Learning Success

Your seat at that table is a legal one

Here is what almost no one says out loud at an IEP meeting: under the law, you are an equal member of the team. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act names parents as required members of the group that writes, reviews, and revises the plan, and it obligates the school to consider your concerns about your child’s education. You are not a guest being briefed. You are a co-author the process depends on, and those protections sit inside a wider set of rights worth knowing.

The trouble is that the meeting rarely feels that way. Goals arrive finished, the language is dense, and a single afternoon is not enough time to read a year of your child’s life and respond with more than a nod. So ask for the one thing that shifts the balance: the draft goals, sent home before the meeting. A parent who reads them at the kitchen table a week early walks in able to agree, push back, or propose a goal of their own. A parent who sees them for the first time across the table is processing while everyone else is voting. The earlier you see the goals, the more of the meeting you spend deciding the plan instead of decoding it.

Author Quote "

A target your child already meets is not a kindness. It is twelve months where the plan looks active and nothing actually stretches.

Laura Lurns Learning Success Expert

"In the absence of conclusive data, educational decisions should rest on the assumption that, if wrong, does the least harm to a child’s chance at an independent adult life." - Anne Donnellan, 1984

Child counting colorful blocks one at a time beside an encouraging parent

What a real goal looks like: the SMARTT test

A goal worth signing passes five tests, and a teacher named Koli Aziza lays them out cleanly with the acronym SMARTT: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. “Improve counting” fails every one of them. Watch what happens when the same goal gets built properly for a young child who struggles to count while touching each item, one at a time.

Specific: not “gets better at math” but “given six items, counts each one with one-to-one correspondence.”
Measurable: “four out of five times each session,” not “100 percent of the time,” because a real child miscounts when the table gets bumped, and the goal should survive that.
Achievable: reachable inside the year, and here is the part to underline, neither too hard nor too easy.
Relevant: tied to a skill the child actually needs, like counting objects in daily life.
Time-bound: mastered within the year, with data gathered the whole way, not guessed at the end.

Under that year-long goal sit two or three smaller objectives, a staircase the child climbs. Count to three before counting to six. Those steps let you see movement in the fall instead of waiting until spring to find out whether anything worked. A struggle with early number sense is a starting point, not a verdict about who your child is.

Key Takeaways:

You are an equal team member by law: IDEA names parents as required authors of the IEP, not guests being briefed.

A real goal passes five tests: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound turns vague wishes into something trackable.

Too easy is also a failure: a goal your child already meets spends a year looking active while nothing stretches.

The one question that sets the bar

Aziza says something easy to miss: a goal worth keeping is neither too hard nor too easy. The too-hard goal we all watch for. The too-easy goal is the quiet one, and it costs a whole year. A target your child already meets is not a kindness. It is twelve months where the plan looks active and nothing actually stretches.

Here is how that plays out in the room. When a goal lands in front of you, read it back as a question: would I notice if my child reached this, or have they reached it already? If the honest answer is that they already do it, the goal belongs higher, and you are within your rights to say so. Aiming higher is not pushing your child harder. It is refusing to spend a year confirming what everyone already knows.

Special-education research has a name for the failure mode. A support handed over because it is simpler than addressing the real gap removes the reason to build the underlying skill, and dependence sets in. So the question to bring to every goal is not “is this pleasant for my child.” It is sharper: is this goal building the skill, or replacing the expectation that it gets built? Decades ago the researcher Anne Donnellan handed educators a rule for exactly this moment. When you do not have proof of what a child is unable to do, choose the assumption that, if you are wrong, does the least harm to their future. In plain terms, aim higher. A diagnosis describes where your child is today. It does not predict where they land after a year of the right kind of practice, because a developing brain is built to change with effort.

Author Quote "

You are not a guest being briefed at the IEP table. You are a co-author the process depends on.

You want your child to walk out of school believing they are capable, with the skills to prove it. What stands in the way is rarely your child and rarely you. It is a process that hands parents a finished plan and hopes they sign quietly. You are the one person in that room who watches your child every single day, and that makes you the closest thing the team has to an expert. Nobody will ever advocate for your child the way you will, and the IEP is where that advocacy gets written down.

When you want the skills behind the goals, the ones that build counting, focus, reading, and confidence at home, the Learning Success All Access membership gives you the tools to work the plan between meetings.

A single struggle rarely travels alone. A child working on early number sense often shows signs of challenges with working memory, attention, or processing speed too. All Access covers the whole picture, so you are building the child, not chasing one goal at a time.