Following the Law Isn't the Same as Doing Right by Your Kid

By: Brett Kraftson, Advocate

For almost 20 years, I’ve been attending IEP meetings on a near daily basis, sometimes attending multiple meetings in a single day! You walk into enough of these meetings and you start to notice some things.

Some teams show up with a plan that's clearly been worked on — notes from a specialist who's been in the classroom, a new strategy already tried and adjusted, and real thought behind why something isn't working yet.

And then there are other teams that show up with a plan that's technically fine, but nothing more: the paperwork's in order, the boxes are checked, and that's about the extent of it.

Both types of teams are following the law. Only one of them is doing right by the kid.

Compliant and good are not the same thing

Special education law sets a floor. It tells schools the minimum they have to do: identify kids who need services, write an IEP, provide it, review it on a schedule. If a district does all of that, they've followed the law. And that’s great. And it matters.

But the floor was never supposed to be the ceiling.

The Supreme Court actually weighed in on this directly. In Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District (2017), the Court said an IEP has to be "reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child's circumstances." Progress has to be more than what the Court called "de minimis" — more than trivial, more than just barely moving the needle. The word the Court kept coming back to was meaningful.

That's not a technicality. For a parent (and a good educator), that's the whole ballgame.

Schools with a problem solving culture

This is the part I want to spend the most time on, because "meaningful progress" can sound abstract until you see what it looks like in practice. Here's what I mean when I say a school has a problem-solving culture:

As a parent, you can often tell the difference by listening for evidence that the team is actively adjusting, checking, and problem-solving between meetings.

A specialist working behind the scenes, not just at the table. Some of the best support I've seen doesn't happen in the case conference room at all — it's a district-level specialist (reading specialist, behavior consultant, OT, whatever the need calls for) quietly coaching the classroom teacher between IEP meetings. Modeling a strategy, watching a lesson, tweaking something, checking back in a few weeks later. Nobody had to ask for it. It just happened because someone noticed the plan wasn't landing.

Specialists showing up to talk strategy, not placement. When a kid isn't progressing, a school with the right culture brings in extra expertise to ask "what else can we try in the setting he's already in" — not "where else should he go." A new reading approach, a different way of structuring the day, a change in how a behavior plan is being reinforced. Placement changes are sometimes the right call eventually, but a good school treats them as a later step, after they've genuinely tried to make the current placement work — not a first move when things get hard.

Data reviewed on its own schedule, not just the IEP's. A lot of teams only really look hard at how a kid is doing once a year, at the annual review. Good ones check in on progress monitoring data every few weeks and are willing to say "this isn't working" in October instead of waiting until next May because the calendar said so.

Someone on staff whose job is partly to notice when things are stuck. Whether it's a coordinator, a coach, or just a principal who pays attention, good schools tend to have someone whose role includes watching for kids who are technically "being served" but not actually moving — and flagging it before a parent has to.

None of that is required by law. All of it is what the law is actually pointing toward.

Why this matters for parents

If you're a parent sitting across the table from a team that keeps pointing to the IEP document as proof everything's fine, it's worth asking a different question: not "did you follow the plan," but "who else is involved in helping my child, and what have we tried lately that isn't just doing more of the same?"

You're allowed to ask that. The law backs you up on it — meaningful progress isn't a nice-to-have, it's the actual legal standard. But more than that, it's just what good schools want to hear you ask, because it's the same question they're already asking themselves.

The schools that get it

The best schools I've worked with treat the law as a starting point, not a shield. Their culture is built around "whatever it takes" long before anyone's raised their voice about it. If you're on a team like that, hold onto it. If you're not sure whether you are, that's usually the first thing worth figuring out.

If you're not sure whether your child's plan is actually working, it may help to have an advocate walk through it with you — not just to check whether the boxes are filled out, but to make sure the team is aiming high enough.

At the end of the day, the goal is not just a legally sufficient plan. The goal is a child who is being understood, supported, and given a real chance to grow.

That is the difference between following the law and doing right by your kid.