How Much Progress Are Students With Special Needs Supposed To Make?
Updated: December 15, 2025. Reviewer: Dr. Rose Sebastian, Ed.D.
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Some Educational Benefit
This is a hot button topic in special education. Parents want their children to grow as much as humanly possible. Schools often want the same thing– but they often don’t want to pay for expensive extras that confer smaller benefits. As a result, this issue has come up to the Supreme Court over and over again.
The biggest ruling on this was in 1981 in the Board of Education v. Rowley. The court’s ruling was that special education exists to insure that students receive some educational benefit from education, not maximum benefit. That means that districts have to serve students and meet their needs, but they are not required to pay for all of the lower benefit extras that parents might want (458 U.S. 176, 1982).
For a long time that was the final word on the matter. Then in 2017 in Endrew v. Douglas County School District, the Supreme Court clarified the earlier ruling saying that the IEP needed to be “reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances.” Basically, it isn’t okay for students to stagnate and be given low-bar goals that don’t push them to grow (580 U.S. 386, 2017).
So students are expected, per the Supreme Court, to make progress and be challenged but school districts do not have to give students every single support that lead to even a tiny bit of growth. Somewhere in that grey area is your answer to how much progress students should make.
Figuring out progress for students with IEPs
How often are parents told if their child is making progress?
In addition to yearly IEPs, special educators are required to provide progress reports to parents on their child’s progress towards their IEP goals. In almost all school districts, these progress reports are sent home at report card intervals– typically with or right after report cards are sent out.
Do students grow a lot in special education?
This is the million dollar question. The ultimate goal of special education is for students not to need it anymore. Most students exit special education when they graduate (52% in 2022 per OSERS). Only 8.2% exit special education because they no longer need services. That number is supposed to be the goal of special education– helping students grow until they no long need your supports.
In terms of other metrics, the answers are mixed. Researchers spend a lot of time trying to understand if special education helps and it is pretty challenging to figure out.
How do schools monitor progress?
There are a lot of ways that schools monitor progress. Special educators have to write IEP goals that are measurable with benchmarks between annual meetings that let families and the student know if they are on track to meet their goals. Often, this means quarterly reading, writing, and/or mathematics assessments. In addition, IEP teams will often look at students’ grades and behaviors. If they are failing classes and getting suspended a lot, the student is probably not making a lot of progress. Then for each annual IEP, the special educator and any related service providers need to do informal assessments to understand the students’ present levels of performance and whether the student met their goals from the previous year.
