What Should an IEP for a Student With Dyslexia Include?
When a child with dyslexia qualifies for special education, parents may feel relieved to finally have an Individualized Education Program (IEP)—but also unsure about what that IEP should actually look like.
Dyslexia can affect much more than whether a child can read a passage accurately. Students may have difficulty with phonological awareness, decoding unfamiliar words, recognizing words automatically, spelling, and reading fluency. When so much effort is devoted to decoding and word recognition, it can also affect reading comprehension, even when a student has strong oral language skills and understands the same material when it is presented aloud. As students get older and academic reading becomes increasingly complex, these difficulties can affect written expression and make it harder to independently access the general education curriculum, including English language arts (ELA), science, history, and even math.
A well-designed IEP should therefore do more than identify dyslexia. It should describe the student's individual pattern of strengths and needs and create a clear plan for instruction, goals, progress monitoring, and access to the curriculum.
1. Start With a Clear Picture of the Student's Current Skills
Before developing appropriate goals, the IEP team needs to understand exactly what the student can and cannot yet do independently.
For a student with dyslexia, relevant areas may include:
phonological and phonemic awareness
decoding and word recognition
spelling and encoding
reading accuracy
reading fluency
reading comprehension
written expression
handwriting
oral language and vocabulary
Assessment should help identify the underlying skills that are interfering with reading rather than relying only on an overall reading score.
2. Goals Should Address the Student's Actual Reading Needs
IEP goals should be individualized and measurable.
For a student with dyslexia, separate goals may be appropriate for areas such as:
Phonological and phonemic awareness: identifying, segmenting, blending, and manipulating the sounds in spoken words.
Decoding: accurately reading unfamiliar words containing increasingly complex sound-symbol patterns, syllable types, and morphological structures.
Word recognition: developing accurate and automatic recognition of words so that reading becomes less effortful.
Spelling: applying taught sound-symbol correspondences, syllable patterns, spelling conventions, and morphological patterns when encoding words.
Fluency: developing accurate, automatic reading with an appropriate rate and prosody in connected text.
Handwriting: developing accurate and automatic letter formation, legibility, spacing, and writing fluency when handwriting difficulties affect written output.
Written expression: developing sentence construction, organization, grammar, and other written-language skills when these are affected.
Reading comprehension: developing the ability to understand, recall, and analyze written text when reading comprehension is an identified area of need.
Not every child needs a goal in every area. At the same time, there is no predetermined limit on the number of goals an IEP may contain. If a student has needs in multiple distinct areas, the IEP should address those needs rather than limiting goals simply to keep the IEP short. The goals should follow from the student's assessment data and identified educational needs.
3. Goals Should Measure the Skill You Actually Want to Improve
This is an important detail that can easily be overlooked.
If the primary concern is decoding, for example, a goal that measures only reading comprehension may not tell the team whether the student's decoding skills are improving.
Similarly, a fluency goal should not focus exclusively on speed. Fluent reading involves accurate and increasingly automatic word recognition as well as appropriate phrasing and expression.
Parents can ask:
What specific skill does this goal measure?
How will we know whether my child has mastered it?
What assessment or progress-monitoring measure will be used?
How often will progress be measured and reported?
The answers should make it possible for the IEP team to determine objectively whether instruction is working.
4. Goals Should Enable Meaningful Progress
IEP goals should not be written merely so that a student can demonstrate some improvement from year to year.
For a student with dyslexia who is performing below grade level, this means the IEP team should consider not only whether the student is making progress, but also the rate of that progress. This distinction can be particularly important when there is a significant achievement gap. A student can technically make progress while continuing to fall farther behind grade-level expectations. For example, if a student's reading skills improve by several months over the course of a school year while grade-level expectations advance by a full year, the achievement gap may continue to widen.
IDEA does not guarantee that every student will reach grade level or require an achievement gap to close within a particular period of time. However, IEP goals should be individualized and appropriately ambitious, taking into account the student's present levels, previous rate of progress, individual circumstances, and potential for growth. The goal is not simply to document improvement, but to design an educational program reasonably calculated to enable appropriate academic and functional progress.
4. Dyslexia Requires Appropriate Instruction, Not Just Accommodations
Accommodations are extremely important, but accommodations and remediation serve different purposes.
An accommodation provides access.
Specialized reading instruction develops skills.
A student with dyslexia may need both.
For example, text-to-speech can allow a student with dyslexia to learn grade-level science content even when the student's independent reading level is substantially lower. But listening to the science textbook does not, by itself, remediate the underlying decoding difficulty.
California's Dyslexia Guidelines describe Structured Literacy instruction as systematic and cumulative, explicit, and diagnostic. Instruction progresses in a logical sequence, directly teaches concepts rather than expecting students to infer them, and is adjusted based on ongoing assessment of the student's performance.
Depending on the student's needs, instruction may address areas including phonological awareness, sound-symbol relationships, syllable patterns, morphology, spelling, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
5. The IEP Should Specify the Services the Student Will Receive
Goals describe what a student is expected to accomplish. Services describe how the school will support the student in getting there.
Parents should be able to understand:
what specialized instruction will be provided
how frequently it will occur
how long sessions will last
whether instruction will be individual or small-group
where services will take place
who will provide them
how progress will be monitored
The appropriate frequency, duration, and group size will vary from student to student. A child with significant foundational reading deficits may require more intensive instruction than a student with comparatively mild difficulties.
6. Accommodations Should Provide Access Without Replacing Instruction
Dyslexia can make reading and writing significantly more time-consuming. Appropriate accommodations can allow students to demonstrate what they know while they continue developing their literacy skills.
Depending on the individual student, accommodations might include:
extended time
audiobooks or text-to-speech
speech-to-text
reduced copying demands
access to teacher notes
digital versions of instructional materials
breaking lengthy assignments into smaller sections
reduced reading aloud in front of peers
graphic organizers
spelling support
alternative ways to demonstrate knowledge when decoding or handwriting is not the skill being assessed
Accommodations should be individualized. A long generic list is less useful than a carefully selected set of supports that teachers understand when and how to implement.
7. Progress Monitoring Is Essential
An IEP should not require waiting until the next annual meeting to discover that a student has made limited progress.
Progress monitoring allows the team to ask a much more important question:
Is the student responding adequately to the instruction being provided?
For reading intervention, progress can be monitored using measures appropriate to the targeted skill—for example, phonemic awareness, decoding, word-reading accuracy, spelling, or oral reading fluency.
If the data show that a student is not progressing as expected, the team can consider whether instruction needs to change in intensity, frequency, group size, instructional approach, or another component.
8. Access and Remediation Can Happen at the Same Time
One of the most important concepts for parents to understand is that a student does not have to wait until reading skills "catch up" before having access to grade-level learning.
A student can receive explicit reading intervention while also using audiobooks, assistive technology, extended time, and other accommodations to participate in grade-level instruction.
These supports serve different purposes.
Remediation builds the student's reading and writing skills.
Accommodations provide access while those skills are developing.
For many students with dyslexia, an effective IEP needs to address both.
Questions Parents Can Bring to an IEP Meeting
Parents do not need to become reading specialists to participate meaningfully in the IEP process. A few specific questions can help clarify whether the plan addresses the child's needs:
What does the assessment tell us about my child's specific reading difficulties?
Which skills will receive direct instruction?
What are the measurable reading and spelling goals?
What intervention will be used to work toward those goals?
How often and for how long will instruction occur?
How large will the instructional group be?
How will progress be measured?
How frequently will I receive progress data?
What accommodations will allow my child to access grade-level material?
What will the team consider changing if progress is insufficient?
The Bottom Line
There is no single "dyslexia IEP" that is appropriate for every student.
A strong IEP begins with the individual child's assessment data. It identifies the specific skills that need intervention, establishes measurable goals, provides appropriately targeted instruction, monitors progress, and includes accommodations that allow the student to participate meaningfully in the broader curriculum.
For students with dyslexia, the distinction between access and remediation is particularly important. Children need opportunities to build the foundational reading and spelling skills that are difficult for them while also having access to the knowledge, vocabulary, ideas, and academic experiences appropriate for their age.
This article is intended for general educational information and is not legal advice. Special education eligibility, goals, services, and accommodations are determined individually through the IEP process.
