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Tool 70: The Records Request That Gets the Raw Data Behind the Report Card

THE RULE

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), your child’s IEP must describe how progress toward each annual goal will be measured, and when you will get periodic reports on that progress (34 C.F.R. § 300.320(a)(3)(i)-(ii)). Read that rule twice. The IEP does not just promise a report. It names the instrument that produces the report.

One honest correction before you go further. The IDEA does not order 4 progress reports a year. The regulation says the IEP must state when periodic reports will be provided, and it offers an example: “such as through the use of quarterly or other periodic reports, concurrent with the issuance of report cards” (34 C.F.R. § 300.320(a)(3)(ii)). Quarterly is an example, not a federal rule. The schedule that binds your district is the one written into your child’s IEP. Find it on the goals page and hold the district to it.

If a goal was measured the way the IEP says, then something exists on paper or on a screen. A probe. A data sheet. A scored worksheet. A running record. A tally of how many times the behavior happened on Tuesday. Those are the raw data, and the progress report is a summary of them.

Raw data of that kind are generally education records. The IDEA borrows the definition from the federal privacy law: education records are records directly related to the student and maintained by the school (34 C.F.R. § 300.611(b); 34 C.F.R. § 99.3). The district must let you inspect and review any education record it collects, maintains, or uses about your child (34 C.F.R. § 300.613(a)). It must do that without unnecessary delay, before any meeting regarding an IEP, before any due process hearing or resolution session, and in no case more than 45 days after you ask (34 C.F.R. § 300.613(a)). Under the IDEA, “day” means calendar day unless the rule says otherwise (34 C.F.R. § 300.11(a)).

Three companion rights matter here more than anywhere else in the book.

• Explanations. The district must respond to reasonable requests for explanations and interpretations of the records (34 C.F.R. § 300.613(b)(1)). A stack of coded data sheets you cannot read is not access. You may ask what the columns mean.

• Copies. You may ask for copies, and the district must provide them if not providing them would effectively prevent you from inspecting and reviewing the records (34 C.F.R. § 300.613(b)(2)).

• A representative. You may have a representative of your choosing inspect and review the records with you (34 C.F.R. § 300.613(b)(3)).

Two more rules keep the district honest. On request, it must give you a list of the types and locations of the education records it collects, maintains, or uses (34 C.F.R. § 300.616). And it may charge a fee for copies only if that fee does not effectively prevent you from exercising the right to inspect and review - and it may not charge you any fee to search for or to retrieve records (34 C.F.R. § 300.617(a)-(b)). Staff time spent hunting through a file is not billable to you.

Letter 25 in Appendix A is this request. Tool 84 is the general records tool and the 45-day clock; send Letter 2 first if you have never asked for the whole file.

WHY IT MATTERS

A progress report is an adjective. The raw data are a number.

“Progressing gradually” cannot be checked. It cannot be graphed. It cannot be compared to last quarter, because last quarter also said “progressing gradually.” Tool 68 shows you how to read what those phrases are hiding. This tool gets you the thing they were written about.

The gap between the summary and the data is where a year gets lost. The report says your child is making progress toward the reading goal. The probe scores say 42 words per minute in October, 44 in January, 41 in April. That is not progress. That is a flat line with a friendly sentence on top of it.

There is a second possibility, and it is common. The data do not exist. Nobody ran the probe. Nobody kept the sheet. The progress report was written from an impression at the end of a long week. That is also an answer, and it is one you want in writing, because a goal nobody measured is a goal nobody had to meet.