IEP goals for autism: the five things the rule requires on the goals page, and which one changes meetings
A parent reads the goals page for the first time at the annual review. Two lines, near the top:
Student will improve social skills.
Student will improve behavior.
Nothing in those sentences sounds wrong. The team moves on to services, everyone signs, and the goals stay as written for the next twelve months.
In March the progress report says the goal is being met, yet nothing at home looks any different, and there's no way to tell which of those two accounts is true.
Neither one can be checked, and that's the actual problem. A goal written that way can't be scored by anyone, including the people who wrote it, so there's nothing to settle the question against.
That gap is one of the most common failures in the IEP process, and it isn't a reading problem on the parent's side. Nothing in the process flags a goal like this, and most teams won't rewrite one unless somebody asks.
There's a name for what's missing from that page.
It's called a measurable annual goal.
Here's the encouraging part. This is one of the more fixable things on an IEP, because what's missing is wording, and the wording is already required. You're not asking the team for a favor. You're asking for a component the document is supposed to carry.
What the rule requires, and the one that changes meetings
Five things have to appear on the goals page. They're listed in 34 CFR 300.320, and the IEP Team owns all five.
| # | What the IEP has to include | Where it's written |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The child's present levels of academic achievement and functional performance | 34 CFR 300.320(a)(1) |
| 2 | Measurable annual goals, academic and functional, designed to meet the needs that result from the child's disability | 34 CFR 300.320(a)(2)(i) |
| 3 | Benchmarks or short-term objectives, required only for children who take alternate assessments | 34 CFR 300.320(a)(2)(ii) |
| 4 | A description of how progress toward the annual goals will be measured | 34 CFR 300.320(a)(3)(i) |
| 5 | A description of when periodic progress reports will be provided | 34 CFR 300.320(a)(3)(ii) |
Requirement two carries the qualifiers that do most of the work. Goals have to be measurable, which rules out anything that needs an opinion to score. They have to be annual, reached inside a school year rather than left open. And they have to meet needs that result from the child's disability, which is the phrase that rules out reusing the same language across a caseload.
Requirement one is where a goal starts. Present levels is the baseline, meaning the child's current levels of skill or behavior, and should be the point that future progress is measured against. If the goal has a number and the present levels page doesn't, there's nothing to compare against in May.
Requirement four is the one that changes meetings. The regulation asks for a description of how progress toward the annual goals will be measured. Not whether it will be measured, but how.
A goal can be beautifully specific and still arrive with no method attached. The goal says three conversations a day, and nobody has said who watches, what they write down, or what counts as a conversation. Twelve months later a number appears in a progress report and there's no way to reconstruct where it came from. Requirement five sits right beside it, so the IEP should also say when you'll be told, quarterly or alongside report cards.
Asking how a goal will be measured isn't a request for extra work, and it isn't a challenge to anyone's professionalism.
A vague goal and a measurable one, side by side
Take a goal that turns up in real documents: student will improve social skills.
It comes apart in a few places. There's no way to tell which social skill is meant, and in the September 1 webinar session Juliet King, BCBA, made the point that a behavior analyst would treat asking questions, taking turns and managing personal space as three separate skills with three separate teaching plans. There's no number in it, so there's nothing to count. It doesn't say where the skill applies, and it doesn't say when anyone checks.
Here's the same underlying skill, written so it can be scored:
Student will remain two feet from their discussion partner during three different conversations per day.
The skill is one specific thing now. It's relevant, because discussion partners are the peers this child sits beside every day. It's countable, because three conversations a day is a number a person can record. And it's bounded, because the year has an end date.
The difference isn't the tone of the sentence or how ambitious it sounds. It's whether a person who wasn't in the room could pick up the goal, watch the child for a day, and say yes or no.
There's a second test, separate from measurability, and Juliet raised it in the same session: whether the goal is appropriate for the child's age and grade. A goal that a preschooler will sit still and attend for thirty minutes is perfectly measurable and still may not be the right goal.
What the team says, and what the rule says back
Some pushback is legitimate. A team can decline a request and be correct, and a goal that looks vague on the page sometimes has a real data system behind it that the document doesn't show.
“This is the language we use for all of our goals.”
Standard language isn't disallowed. It also doesn't satisfy the requirement on its own, because the rule asks for goals designed around the needs that result from this child's disability.
Ask where in the present levels this goal comes from. If the answer points to a real baseline, only the wording needs work. If there's no answer, the gap is in the baseline rather than the goal, which is more useful to know.
Families of children who mask at school hear a harder version of this, which is that the school doesn't see the difficulty at all. That gap has been studied and it has a name, and it's worth knowing before a meeting where “we do not see that here” is likely to come up.
“We measure it through teacher observation.”
Observation is a legitimate method and this answer isn't wrong. It's incomplete, because the word on its own doesn't describe anything a second person could repeat.
Three follow-ups turn it into a description. What gets recorded, what counts as the goal being met, and how often. If those answers exist, ask for them in the IEP, which is where the regulation already expects them.
“It is too early in the year to be that specific.”
Often true. A team that met your child three weeks ago may genuinely not have data yet.
It doesn't remove the requirement. Under 34 CFR 300.324(b)(1) the team reviews the IEP periodically and not less than annually, and revises it as appropriate. So ask when the data will exist, ask for a meeting shortly after, and put both in one email. The annual review is the floor, not the schedule. If the reason you want that meeting is skills lost over the summer, Texas keys that sequence to the first eight weeks of the school year, so the window is shorter than it looks.
“The goal is appropriate for where he is.”
This sounds like a clinical judgment and it's a legal standard, and the case that set it was brought on behalf of a child with autism. In Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1 (2017), the Supreme Court held that “to meet its substantive obligation under the IDEA, a school must offer an IEP reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child's circumstances.” The lower court had accepted merely more than de minimis progress. The Supreme Court did not.
So the question isn't whether the goal is achievable, which almost any goal is if it's set low enough. It's what makes it appropriately ambitious for this child.
Sentences to say in the meeting
Each one ties the request to the standard rather than to a favor, which is what keeps a room working.
“I would like the goal to state how progress will be measured and how often it will be reported, as required in 34 CFR 300.320(a)(3).”
“What is the baseline for this goal, and where does it appear in the present levels?”
“Who is responsible for collecting the data on this goal?”
“Can the accommodation be written into the goal itself?”
“I am requesting that this goal be revised. If the team decides not to, I am requesting prior written notice for that decision.”
The third one is worth its own line. In the September session, Juliet described the pattern she sees most often: a goal that names a skill, a number and a schedule, with nobody assigned to the recording. The goal is written well and it still produces no data.
The evidence file
Ask to see the data before you sit down. Under 34 CFR 300.613, the district must comply with a request to inspect and review education records without unnecessary delay, before any meeting regarding an IEP, and in no case more than 45 days after the request. Some states set a shorter clock, so check yours too.
The item that matters here is the data collected on the goals, including any baseline used to write them. If you want to know whether the measurement is real, don't ask in the meeting. Ask in writing, several weeks beforehand. Records that exist will arrive, and records that don't exist produce a different kind of answer. Either way you learn it before you sit down.
Then collect your side of it. The goals page, the present levels page, the last two progress reports, dated work samples, and anything sent home about behavior. Keep it in whatever form you'll actually maintain. A labeled box works. A folder of dated phone photos works.
And then the part that matters more than the rest of it put together. On the work sample, write down who helped and how long it took. Homework that comes back finished reads to a school as a child who's coping, and it reads the same way whether it took fifteen minutes alone or three hours with an adult prompting every step. The mirror image happens too: everything comes home done, then a goal appears about working independently, because somebody at school was prompting the whole time and nobody wrote that down either.
A note fixes it. “Completed with hand-over-hand help, about ninety minutes, two breaks.” That's the difference between a request with evidence behind it and one that sounds like an opinion about your own child.
The same logic covers early pickups. If the school asks you to collect your child, send a short email the same day with the date, the time, and the reason you were given. Removals nobody records are invisible exactly where they would matter.
If it wasn't written down, it didn't happen.
What to ask your child's BCBA
Send them the goals page before the meeting and ask one question: which of these could you take data on tomorrow, and what would you need in order to do it?
Somebody who takes data for a living will read that page differently than you can, and you'll walk in knowing which two goals to raise instead of reading the page cold at the table.
Two things are worth being clear about, because they protect the relationship with the school. As Juliet King, BCBA, explained in Forta's July 28 session on preparing for IEP meetings, a BCBA's role in the IEP process is separate from an advocate's, and neither is an education lawyer. What a BCBA can do is read a goal and say whether it can be measured.
The thing nobody tells you about accommodations
Accommodations live in their own section of the IEP, a list further down that gets read once and forgotten. If you aren't sure what belongs on it, there's a fuller set of options worth reading through before the meeting.
What families are rarely told is that an accommodation can be written into the goal itself. Instead of a goal that says the child will follow multi-step directions, the goal says the child will follow multi-step directions in the presence of a visual prompt, for a stated number of opportunities.
That does two things at once. It makes the goal honest about the conditions the child is actually learning under, and it makes the support part of what's being measured rather than an optional item a substitute teacher may never see. If a visual is what makes the skill possible, a goal written without it is measuring something the child was never asked to do.
It's a small piece of wording, and it's the kind of thing most families have never been told they can ask for.
Reading a goals page before a meeting
Forta's BCBAs work with families on what a goal has to contain and what to ask for, because the skills have to hold at school too.
Forta provides Online ABA therapy in 47 states and Washington, D.C., and In-Home ABA therapy in Houston, TX.
Sources
- 34 CFR 300.320, Definition of individualized education program. Link
- 34 CFR 300.324, Development, review, and revision of IEP. Link
- 34 CFR 300.613, Access rights. Link
- Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1, 580 U.S. 386 (2017), No. 15-827, decided March 22, 2017. Link
- Forta Health parent webinar, IEP refresher course, September 1, 2026. Presented by Juliet King, BCBA. Session page · Recording
About this article
Written by Will Africano, VP of Marketing · Clinically reviewed by Kimberly Sadovich, BCBA · 2026-10-01
What this is. General information, reviewed by a BCBA. It is not legal advice and it is not clinical advice about your child. A BCBA is not an education lawyer, which is why every rule above is carried by the regulation it comes from rather than by a professional opinion. What works for one child often does not work for another, and your child's BCBA is the person who can tell you which of this applies.
