SMART Goals, Silent Systems: How IEPs Reduce Students to Data

Every meeting starts the same way: “Let’s review the goals.” Academic goals. Behaviour goals. Social goals. Communication goals. Self-regulation goals. Life skills goals. Goals for goals. Sub-goals. Strategies to track progress. Charts to manage them. Data to ensure accountability.

If a student is disabled, neurodivergent, or otherwise “outside the norm,” the system responds with measurement. More goals. More tracking. More rubrics. More charts. And somehow, we’re trained to believe that this is support.

We’re trained to monitor. To write SMART goals. To measure, assess, and evaluate. But we rarely ask: Why does this student have so many goals in the first place? Why do we demand constant proof of progress from disabled students while neurotypical peers are simply allowed to grow? Why do we treat disabled children like a series of deficits to be remediated rather than humans with rights, preferences, and the desire to belong?

And more importantly: Where is the student in this process? Why are they often absent when their futures are being broken down into measurable steps?

These goals are rarely created with the student. They’re done to them. As if their worth is determined by their ability to meet benchmarks others have chosen.

The IEP is supposed to be a tool for support. But more often, it’s used as a tool for compliance. A way to document effort without making the actual changes that matter. Goals become a distraction from what’s truly needed: accommodations. Structural changes. Shifts in environment, expectations, and adult behavior.

Goals are something created to keep us accountable to the system and busy enough not to recognize that writing goals isn’t really providing support.

What if we paused long enough to stop asking how to get the student to meet the goal and started asking how to get the system to meet the student? What if we stopped measuring disabled students against normative benchmarks and started measuring our systems against the principles of equity, access, and dignity? What if we wrote neuroaffirming goals that held the environment accountable instead of pathologizing the child?

The real work of inclusion isn’t found in goal tracking. Inclusion isn’t a list of goals. It’s a fundamental reimagining of who we value, how we define success, and who gets to decide what growth looks like.

It’s about naming barriers and refusing to confuse documentation with dignity.

Let’s stop making disabled students prove their worth through endless goals. Let’s start holding systems accountable for the barriers they refuse to name.

Because the real work of inclusion can’t be found on an IEP.