After more than three decades supporting educators, school psychologists, and evaluation teams across Texas and other states, I can tell you with confidence: identifying a Specific Learning Disability (SLD) is one of the most consequential and most complicated decisions a multidisciplinary team will ever make. The stakes are real. Get it right, and a child gets the targeted instruction and supports they need to thrive. Get it wrong, in either direction, and we either miss a student who is struggling or pull a student into special education who didn't need to be there.
That is precisely why I'm so encouraged by the Texas Education Agency's August 2025 release, Guidance for the Comprehensive Evaluation of Specific Learning Disabilities. It is, in my view, one of the clearest and most practitioner-friendly state guidance documents I've read on this topic. It honors the complexity of SLD identification while giving teams a structured way to think about it.
It also aligns closely with the framework we've built into Bosco K12.
In this first post in our Bosco Bytes series, I want to walk through the six key elements TEA outlines for identifying the criteria for an SLD and share how Bosco K12 was intentionally designed to support multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) at each step. This isn't a feature tour. It's a look at how thoughtful tool design can help teams do the deeper, more defensible work that TEA and good practice call for.
The Six Key Elements at a Glance
TEA identifies six required elements for identifying the criteria for the condition of SLD, drawn from 19 TAC §89.1040(c)(9):
- Determination by a Multidisciplinary Team (MDT)
- Observation in the student's learning environment in the areas of difficulty
- Documentation of inadequate achievement based on multiple sources of data
- Verification of appropriate instruction in reading and math
- Examination of exclusionary factors
- Confirmation of insufficient progress based on response to scientific, research-based intervention OR a pattern of strengths and weaknesses
1. Determination by a Multidisciplinary Team
TEA is unambiguous on this point: "A single professional does not conduct evaluations" (TEA, 2025, p. 15). The determination of whether a student has an SLD must be made by the student's parents, a team of qualified professionals, and the student's general education teacher.
What I appreciate about TEA's framing is the reminder that an evaluation should not be "a combined report of separate sections" (TEA, 2025, p. 18). Every member of the team brings unique expertise, and the value of the MDT comes from actual collaboration, not from each member quietly writing their piece in isolation and stapling it together at the end.
This is exactly the problem Bosco K12 was built to solve.
Bosco brings the entire MDT into one shared digital workspace. Evaluators, general education teachers, special education teachers, interventionists, school nurses, related service providers, and yes, parents and guardians, can all contribute to the data collection process in a coordinated way. The platform allows the team lead to request specific information from specific members, track who has and hasn't responded, and ensure that no piece of the picture is missing before the team moves to interpretation.
That last point is easy to miss. When a diagnostician is waiting on three teacher input forms and isn't sure which ones are outstanding, the evaluation slows down or, worse, moves forward incomplete. Bosco surfaces that information so MDTs can hold themselves and each other accountable.
2. Observation in the Student's Learning Environment
TEA requires that the student be "observed in the student's learning environment, including the general education classroom setting, to document the student's academic performance and behavior in the areas of difficulty" (TEA, 2025, p. 18).
The best-practice guidance TEA provides on this point goes further than the basic requirement. Teams should complete multiple observations of different tasks and activities related to the area of difficulty, observe the student in learning environments where they exhibit both strengths and needs, and use the observation data to inform both the analysis and the recommendations (TEA, 2025, p. 19).
Bosco K12 includes a thorough observation form designed to capture this kind of comparative information. Not just what the referred student is doing, but how their participation compares to peers in the classroom, what the instructional context looks like, and what the learning environment supports or hinders. The form can be duplicated across multiple observations, which encourages teams to do what TEA recommends: gather more than a single snapshot. Because all observations live inside the same student profile, MDT members can review them alongside the rest of the evaluation data rather than in isolation.
3. Documentation of Inadequate Achievement Based on Multiple Sources of Data
This is the element I find myself discussing most often when I work with teams in the field. TEA states it plainly: identifying inadequate achievement is based on "the preponderance of data rather than a single score or piece of information" (TEA, 2025, p. 11).
That word, preponderance, is doing real work in the TEA document. It's a deliberate move away from the cut-score thinking that has plagued SLD identification for decades. As TEA puts it, "The MDT should not rely on interpretative models or processes that exclude evidence of a disability based on predetermined score profiles or cut-off scores" (TEA, 2025, p. 11).
What does the preponderance of evidence look like in practice? It means weighing informal data (observations, interviews, work samples), curriculum-based data (CBMs, progress monitoring, district benchmarks), criterion-referenced data (universal screeners, STAAR results), and norm-referenced data (standardized achievement measures), then looking for convergence across them. No single source supersedes the others.
Bosco K12 was designed with this directly in mind. The platform organizes evaluation data into Core Subject Areas (orbits, as we call them) that map directly to TEA's eight areas of inadequate achievement: oral expression, listening comprehension, written expression, basic reading, reading fluency, reading comprehension, math calculation, and math problem solving. For each area, Bosco pulls data from multiple sources and displays it in an integrated, color-coded view (green, yellow, red) that lets the team see at a glance where the preponderance of evidence is pointing.
The goal isn't to replace clinical judgment. It's to give the team a clear visual of converging or diverging data so the conversation in the team meeting is grounded in what the data actually says, not what any one member happens to remember about it.
4. Verification of Appropriate Instruction in Reading and Math
TEA reminds us that before we can conclude a student has an SLD, we have to rule out the simplest alternative explanation: that the student hasn't yet received appropriate, evidence-based instruction delivered by qualified personnel, with progress measured at reasonable intervals (TEA, 2025, p. 33).
This is harder than it sounds. Verifying appropriate instruction requires data from multiple sources: attendance records, classroom observations, intervention documentation, district benchmark trends, and information from home about outside tutoring or learning disruptions. It also requires asking whether the quality of instruction in the classroom is actually sufficient.
Bosco K12 supports this verification in two ways. First, our observation form prompts the observer to evaluate the quality of instruction in the classroom, not just the student's behavior in it. Is the instruction explicit? Systematic? Differentiated? Does it match the student's documented needs? Second, Bosco pulls in attendance, intervention history, and recurring assessment data so the team has the longitudinal picture TEA describes: was the student present, was the instruction appropriate to their needs, and was progress being measured along the way?
When this information is gathered up front, the team can answer the appropriate-instruction question confidently rather than treating it as a checkbox at the end of the evaluation.
5. Examination of Exclusionary Factors
TEA identifies five exclusionary factors that must be considered: a visual, hearing, or motor disability; intellectual disability; emotional disability; environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage; and language proficiency (TEA, 2025, p. 34).
The critical word in this section of the TEA guidance is primary. I find myself underlining it every time I read the document. The question isn't whether one of these factors is present. Many of our students live with one or more of them. The question is whether that factor is the primary cause of the academic underachievement. As TEA notes, "a sensory or motor impairment can coexist with an SLD" (TEA, 2025, p. 35), and "a student can be both emergent bilingual and have an SLD" (TEA, 2025, p. 36).
Bosco K12's Exclusionary Factors page is built around exactly this nuance. It draws data from across the evaluation: vision and hearing screenings from the nurse, parent and teacher reports, language proficiency data, attendance and mobility information. All of it comes together in a visual overview that helps the team weigh each factor. The goal is to document how each exclusionary factor was considered and ruled out (or not) based on the data, rather than treating it as a quick checklist near the end of the report.
6. Insufficient Progress: RTI or Pattern of Strengths and Weaknesses
The final key element gives Texas teams two valid paths: documenting an insufficient response to scientific, research-based intervention (RTI), or documenting a pattern of strengths and weaknesses (PSW) relevant to the identification of an SLD (TEA, 2025, p. 37).
One point from the TEA guidance deserves direct attention: "the presence of a significant variance among specific areas of cognitive function or between specific areas of cognitive function and academic achievement is NOT required when determining whether a student has an SLD" (TEA, 2025, p. 41, emphasis in original). PSW is not a search for a particular score discrepancy. It never was. As TEA defines it, PSW is "a set of characteristics displayed repeatedly" (TEA, 2025, p. 40) across data sources and over time.
Bosco handles this directly. The platform organizes information into domains (Reading, Language, Cognitive, and Behavior, each with their own subsections) and pulls from multiple data sources within each domain, so patterns become visible. The team can see whether the student's profile shows strengths in some areas and consistent weaknesses in others, and whether those patterns are relevant to the suspected disability. Triangulating informal, curriculum-based, criterion-referenced, and norm-referenced data within a single view is what makes pattern recognition possible. For teams using an RTI method, Bosco supports the same approach by integrating intervention progress monitoring data with the broader achievement picture.
In either method, the goal is the one TEA articulates: look at the preponderance of evidence and ask whether the pattern is more attributable to a disability than to any other explanation.
More Than a Data Source
What I want practitioners to take away from this post: Bosco K12 is not a data warehouse. A data warehouse stores information. What MDTs actually need, and what the TEA guidance is asking of them, is something harder. They need to integrate information across people, across data types, and across time, and then interpret it together in a way that leads to defensible, child-centered decisions.
That kind of work doesn't happen because you collected enough data. It happens because you organized your thinking well enough to see what the data was telling you.
That is the problem Bosco K12 was built to solve. The alignment between TEA's six key elements and the way Bosco supports MDT work isn't coincidental. It reflects a shared belief about what thorough, appropriate SLD evaluation should look like.
In future posts in this series, we'll dig into specific aspects of SLD evaluation: how to think about multiple measures in practice, what high-quality observation looks like, how to navigate evaluations with emergent bilingual learners, and how the principles in the TEA guidance translate to evaluation practice in other states. Share your experience and questions as we go.