Creating Stronger Individualized Education Programs to Help Students Succeed

When Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) are low quality, students are less likely to achieve expected academic or functional outcomes. They may also experience social or behavioral challenges and are at greater risk of falling behind their peers. 

IEPs are foundational to ensuring students with disabilities receive a free appropriate public education and make meaningful progress. In Connecticut, education leaders recognized that even if an IEP were legally compliant, it still could fall short of meeting students’ unique needs and supporting meaningful progress. These leaders wanted to focus on improving IEP quality to help students achieve desired outcomes. 

High quality IEPs include: 

• Clear and measurable goals; 
• Appropriate services and supports for students’ identified needs; and/or 
• Consistent progress monitoring.

Over six years, AIR partnered with the Connecticut State Department of Education’s Bureau of Special Education to strengthen how IEPs are developed, implemented, and monitored statewide.

AIR worked to:

• Focus on quality, not just compliance. AIR collaborated with state leaders to design training materials and quality rubrics to ensure educators had the tools to create high quality IEPs;
   
• Build educator expertise. AIR designed and supported comprehensive statewide professional learning opportunities—both self-paced and live—to help educators develop high quality IEPs aligned to state standards. Grounded in research and refined through educator feedback, these trainings promote clear, measurable goals; 
   
• Improve progress monitoring. AIR developed additional training modules focused on helping educators track student progress toward IEP goals and use data to inform instruction and adjust supports; 
   
• Inform ongoing improvement efforts. Findings from the IEP quality initiative led to additional AIR studies of educator workload, as well as the structure and effectiveness of special education programs; and
   
• Use national expertise. The partnership drew on a wide range of evidence and information from AIR and other sources. AIR also helped the state leverage federal funding to scale and sustain these improvements.

As a result of AIR’s partnership with Connecticut:

• Educators statewide have access to consistent, high quality training, and are better equipped to write clear, measurable IEPs tailored to student needs;
   
• The state has built internal capacity—with materials and talking points—to sustain and scale the training independently;
   
• Schools are implementing more structured, data-driven approaches to monitoring student progress; and
   
• Connecticut has a stronger foundation for addressing system-level conditions, such as workload and program design, that influence effective IEP implementation.

With these more coherent, effective IEP practices, students with disabilities in Connecticut can make stronger progress toward their goals.

Related Centers

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Special Educator Workforce: A Research Collaborative (SPARC Center)

Special education teacher staffing challenges have existed for decades, making it difficult for schools to provide a free, appropriate public education to students with disabilities. The SPARC Center is working to address these challenges by studying the composition, distribution, stability, and effectiveness of the special educator workforce.

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PROGRESS Center

The PROGRESS Center supports educators and leaders responsible for the development and implementation of high-quality individualized education programs (IEPs) and instructional programming for kindergarten through transition age students with disabilities.

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National Center on Intensive Intervention

The National Center on Intensive Intervention's mission is to build district and school capacity to support implementation of intensive intervention, or data-based individualization, in reading, mathematics, and behavior for students with severe and persistent learning and/or behavioral needs.