System Improvement Leads (SIL) Innovating for Student Excellence Network, California

Services: Network design and coaching | Improvement Science training | Data routines
Focus Areas: Education (Special Education Systems)

Building systems that make student goals visible—and achievable.

  • Across California, students with disabilities experienced uneven progress toward their Individualized Education Program (IEP) goals—often not because of a lack of effort, but because systems lacked dependable mechanisms for developing high-quality goals, monitor progress, and learn from data across sites.

  • Commission & Launch

    • Six Special Education Local Plan Areas (SELPAs) formed a statewide Networked Improvement Community, Innovating for Student Excellence, committing to a shared aim: redesign the system so IEP goals were consistently high quality, monitored, and achieved.


    Understand the System

    • Teams conducted a systematic audit of 863 IEP goals across multiple years, revealing widespread gaps in goal quality, progress documentation, and completion—making system weaknesses visible for the first time.


    Focus the Work

    • Using shared data and process maps, the network prioritized improving the IEP development and progress-monitoring process, anchoring the work in a common theory of improvement.


    Generate Ideas for Change

    • Drawing on practitioner expertise, student and family perspectives, and examples from across the network, teams identified concrete changes to test—such as standardized goal-writing protocols, clearer progress-monitoring routines, and shared review tools that reduced ambiguity and supported better instructional decisions.


    Learn in Practice

    • With ongoing coaching, teams ran rapid Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles to test standardized goal-writing protocols, data audits, and routines for reviewing progress—sharing what worked across diverse local contexts.


    Sustain and Spread

    • Teams established monthly data routines and visual tools that allowed leaders to distinguish real improvement from noise, laying the groundwork for continued learning beyond the initial network phase.

  • Over 18 months, participating systems strengthened the infrastructure required to support meaningful learning for students with disabilities—improving consistency, reducing variation across sites, and increasing confidence that goals reflected real progress.

    • IEP goals with documented progress increased from 74.5% to 93.9%

    • IEP goals marked as met rose from 38.5% to 55.7%

    • Average IEP goal quality improved by 22.9% on a standardized rubric

  • Documentation Up

    We increased IEP goal documentation from 74% to 94%.

  • Goals Met

    Even more importantly, more goals were documented as met—38% to 54%. An increase of 42% over baseline.

  • Goal Quality Up

    The quality of IEP goals written by case managers increased by 22.9%.

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