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Tool 32: The Copy-Paste Scandal: Catching Last Year’s Goals Wearing This Year’s Dates

THE RULE

The IEP team must review the IEP at least once a year “to determine whether the annual goals for the child are being achieved” (34 C.F.R. § 300.324(b)(1)(i)). That is the whole point of the annual meeting. It is a check on last year’s promises before this year’s are written.

If the answer is that the goals are not being achieved, the team must revise the IEP as appropriate to address “[a]ny lack of expected progress toward the annual goals ... and in the general education curriculum” (34 C.F.R. § 300.324(b)(1)(ii)(A)). The duty is triggered by the lack of progress itself. It does not wait for a parent to complain.

Each goal must be measurable, and the IEP must state current levels of academic achievement and functional performance (34 C.F.R. § 300.320(a)(1), (a)(2)(i)). The regulation does not require a separately labeled baseline for every goal. Comparing a repeated goal with current present levels and prior progress data is still a sound way to test whether the team used current information.

And the goals must follow your child’s individual needs, not the category on the eligibility line (34 C.F.R. §§ 300.320(a)(2)(i)(B), 300.304(c)(6)). Goals pulled from a bank because of a label are the copy-paste problem in its purest form (Tool 34).

Nothing in the IDEA forbids repeating a goal. A child who has not mastered a skill may properly keep working on it. The team must review whether goals were achieved and revise the IEP as appropriate for a lack of expected progress (34 C.F.R. § 300.324(b)(1)). Ask the team to connect any repeated goal to current present levels, prior progress data, and the instructional changes it proposes.

The Supreme Court’s framing is the sentence to keep in mind. An IEP must be “reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances,” and a child’s program must be “appropriately ambitious” (Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1, 580 U.S. 386 (2017); Tool 33). That is not a standard of maximum potential, and it does not promise the best program available. The facts of the case are worth knowing. The Court recounted that “Endrew’s IEPs largely carried over the same basic goals and objectives from one year to the next,” which his parents read as a sign he was not making meaningful progress. The copy-paste problem is not a hypothetical. It sits in the facts of the leading case.

WHY IT MATTERS

An unchanged goal is usually one of 2 things, and both of them matter.

Either the goal was never met. In that case the repetition is data. Your child spent a year working toward a target and did not reach it, and the district’s own document says so by asking for the same thing again. That fact triggers the district’s duty to revise the IEP to address the lack of expected progress (34 C.F.R. § 300.324(b)(1)(ii)(A)). It is also a strong argument that whatever the district did last year did not work, and that doing it again, unchanged, is not a plan.

Or nobody wrote a new one. Someone opened last year’s file, changed the dates, and saved it. That happens, and it does not mean anyone is a villain. It means your child’s program was not actually reviewed, and the annual-review duty in 34 C.F.R. § 300.324(b)(1) was performed on paper only.

There is a third possibility, and the data settles it. The goal was met, and the team chose to keep building on the same skill in a harder setting or at a higher level. If that is the answer, the baseline moved and the target moved with it. When both sit still for a year, that is not building. That is repetition.

A goal repeated with no supporting progress data is a reason to ask how the team determined whether the goal was achieved and what information supports its next decision. The absence of produced data does not by itself prove that no measurement occurred.

The whole check takes 15 minutes at a kitchen table.