Beginning with an emphasis on students’ strengths will benefit not just twice-exceptional students, but all students with disabilities.

Several years ago, our research team conducted a study in which we interviewed parents of gifted students on the autism spectrum (Rubenstein et al., 2015). Many of these parents told us that when they tried to arrange educational supports for their children, they were confronted with heartbreaking news: Once a child is placed in a special education program, they become ineligible for gifted services. In effect, they discovered that their children’s educational needs would be partially or completely neglected by the local schools.

Some parents said they needed to fight for their child to be given an individualized education program (IEP), while others needed to advocate for accelerated and enriched curriculum opportunities. A near-constant refrain was that parents felt pressured to make an impossible choice between special education services and gifted services when their children needed both. As one parent explained, “I realized . . . we’re only addressing the autism side of things. We are not addressing [my son’s] gifted side of things. My goal next year is to address the gifted side of things” (Rubenstein et al., 2015, p. 292).

In some cases, parents were able to find resources outside their school system. For example, when one set of parents discovered that their 9th-grade son was eligible for special education but not gifted services, they enrolled him in summer university classes in geology and astrophysics. (Even after earning an A in both classes, he was still considered ineligible to participate in his school’s gifted program, where his strengths could have been further developed.)

However, other parents were unable to access such opportunities, and their children — denied the chance to flourish academically — often struggled emotionally as a result. For example, one parent told us that her 4-year-old son became depressed in a regular kindergarten classroom. “He was in public school for about three weeks, and he kept saying, ‘I want to go into the leaves, and I want to bury myself’” (Rubenstein et al., 2015, p. 291). He was ready to read books to his classmates, but, to his intense frustration, he had to participate in lessons that focused on letter recognition.

When school districts do not recognize and support the needs of kindergartners who are reading at a 3rd-grade level, or 9th graders who are ready for college-level astrophysics, they demonstrate a value system that prioritizes addressing students’ weaknesses while assuming they can maintain or develop their strengths on their own. Moreover, the emphasis on weaknesses affects all students assigned to special education, not just those who are twice exceptional (i.e., students who are both gifted and eligible for an IEP because of a disability). Influenced, perhaps, by the conceptual framework that informs the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which defines students mainly in terms of their deficits, teachers and school staff tend to assume that the purpose of an IEP is to account for and respond to students’ disabilities, not to devise a plan to support the whole child, including their strengths.

IDEA’s stated purpose is to ensure that all children with disabilities have access to a free, appropriate education, and its requirements emphasize the provision of special education services, not an education that recognizes and addresses both their strengths and weaknesses. And while IDEA does require IEPs to acknowledge student strengths, the centerpiece of the IEP is a careful presentation of assessment data and targeted goals, benchmarks, and specialized services, all meant to address deficits.

We argue that IDEA’s conceptual framework can and should be redesigned to emphasize students’ strengths. Specifically, we propose that future iterations of IDEA be grounded in the axiom of brilliance, a framework that would cause a shift in assessment practices and student learning experiences toward supporting the whole student.

Anchoring IDEA in the axiom of brilliance

The axiom of brilliance was first proposed as a foundation for researching and promoting Black students’ excellence in mathematics (Gholson, Bullock, & Alexander, 2012). In mathematics, a conjecture is an unproven statement believed to be true but consistently under threat of being disproven by counterexamples; whereas an axiom is a logical statement assumed to be true, or self-evident. Thus, under the axiom of brilliance, teachers and scholars start from the assumption that students are highly capable, rather than beginning with low expectations and forcing students to prove that they can meet higher standards. Their job, then, is to (a) eliminate harmful environmental factors preventing students’ brilliance from manifesting and (b) support students in developing protective assets to ensure success.

Adopting the axiom of brilliance as a guiding conceptual framework for IDEA would affect assessment practices, educational program designs, and the ways school personnel perceive and support students. It would require more than just adding a robust section on student strengths to the IEP; rather, it would require a comprehensive shift in thinking about students’ needs and abilities, such that educators would integrate students’ strengths into every part of the IEP. While this conceptual shift would improve the support provided to all students served under IDEA, we expect that it would be particularly valuable for students from marginalized communities, whose individual and cultural strengths are often overlooked.

Under the axiom of brilliance, teachers and scholars start from the assumption that students are highly capable, rather than beginning with low expectations and forcing students to prove that they can meet higher standards.

Disproportional representation has plagued gifted education programs for years, as Black and Latinx students are proportionally under-identified for gifted education, whereas European American and Asian American students are over-identified (Peters et al., 2019). At the same time, non-Asian American students of color are overrepresented in special education programs (National Center for Learning Disabilities, 2020). Thus, students from marginalized backgrounds tend to receive services that only address their weakness, without also recognizing and developing their strengths. This may manifest in educational settings when school personnel assume weaknesses in some students and strengths in others. By aligning the goals of special education and gifted services, IDEA could promote student growth by identifying strengths, providing rich environmental supports when needed, and offering an appropriately challenging and enriching curriculum.

Using assessments to identify brilliance

Currently, assessments serve two purposes within IDEA: (a) to determine if a child has a disability and (b) to provide guidance for developing an appropriate educational placement. IDEA mandates the child be assessed in all areas of suspected disability, and the assessment tools must provide relevant information to determine the child’s educational needs. Under this IDEA framing, local educational agencies are only searching for disabilities, so they only identify disabilities. Employing assessments solely to identify weaknesses shapes not only the subsequent program recommendations but also the way parents and teachers view the student. Even worse, students may see themselves in terms of their weaknesses, which affects their motivation, self-concept, and feelings of belonging (Laursen, 2003).

To integrate strengths into the IEP process, we need a formal assessment system to identify not only suspected disabilities but also areas of strength. IDEA currently recommends the use of a variety of assessments, including observations, standardized assessments, and parent/teacher rating scales. The same systems could easily be adapted to identify strengths. A variety of individual-level assessments that provide essential data are already in use. These include, for example, reading comprehension tests that would reveal the strengths of kindergartners like the one in our study. Other students’ strengths, however, may not be illuminated in the traditional battery of assessments, so other assessments — such as the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (LeBuffe, Shapiro, & Naglieri, 2009) and Social Emotional Assets and Resilience Scales (Merrell, 2011) — might be needed to create a more well-rounded, positive representation of the whole student (Climie & Henley, 2016). The field of gifted education has also developed several approaches to identifying strengths and interests, such as the Interest-A-Lyzer (Renzulli, 1997b) or the Scales for Identifying Gifted Students (Ryser et al., 2021). When integrating strengths into the IEP, school psychologists and IEP team members should use assessment data to identify relative strengths and opportunities. These scores can then be used to identify enrichment opportunities and adjust instruction to build upon these strengths.

It is important to remember, however, that the axiom of brilliance suggests environmental factors may prevent students’ brilliance from manifesting, so assessments should consider not just individual abilities but also contextual variables. For example, the Strengths Assessment Inventory (Brazeau et al., 2012) includes items that measure students’ relationships with peers, family, and teachers as well as measures of culture, faith, and priorities. Additional data could be collected through classroom observations and student interviews to understand their environmental challenges and supports. Such practices acknowledge that the student is a part of a larger environmental context that influences their ability to flourish. Scholars have documented how students from marginalized communities experience trauma in school environments, such as teachers who display deficit thinking (i.e., the belief that certain students cannot succeed due to a deficit) as well as racial erasure (i.e., the idea that racism would cease if all humans were seen as the same; McKenzie & Phillips, 2016). These school environmental factors may influence not only who is identified for special education, but also how they are treated in those programs.

Despite these environmental threats in school, many students also have environmental assets in their communities, such as church families or extracurricular clubs, that enable them to display their strengths in ways they do not in school. For example, a Black student named Iris described how she had to censor herself in school: “I take on a whole different character ’cause I feel like a lot of the things that I say when I write won’t always be received with good intentions. It goes back to the whole censorship thing” (Muhammad, 2012, p. 209). However, Iris participated a writing institute outside of school, Sister Authors, in which she was able to write freely: “My truest self came out when I wrote. I didn’t have to fear political correctness or judgment. I didn’t have to worry about stuff like that [here], so [it was] liberating” (Muhammad, 2012, p. 209). Iris and students like her might struggle to write in school and even be provided an IEP to improve their writing, while their brilliance is evident outside the school environment. In a strength-based assessment procedure, data about such experiences would be collected and considered.

Enhancing brilliance within educational programs

Once educators have identified students’ strengths, they should use what they’ve learned to plan students’ educational goals and develop support systems to help students achieve those goals. Here, it’s helpful to look to the field of gifted education, which offers two overarching approaches to enhance and build strengths: acceleration and enrichment.

Acceleration allows students to progress through curriculum at a faster rate. Many forms of acceleration exist, from subject-based acceleration (e.g., taking a college science course in high school or compacting material from multiple courses into one course) to grade-based acceleration (e.g., early admission to kindergarten or grade skipping). In general, research examining acceleration practices is overwhelmingly positive, despite the lack of buy-in from many districts (Assouline, Colangelo, & Gross, 2015; Bernstein, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2021). And while acceleration may strike some readers as a strange thing for special education programs to emphasize, consider the 9th grader taking a university astrophysics course while also needing an IEP. A strength-based approach to IDEA services would have provided federal support and guidance for meeting all of this student’s complex needs. Given his specific social, emotional, and academic needs, being enrolled in a university science course may have been just as important as addressing his deficits. However, strength-based services, even for identified twice-exceptional students, are not federally mandated. Therefore, all districts should review their policies and practices to ensure students with IEPs are not precluded from gifted services.

Acceleration may support a variety of student strengths, such as by allowing students talented in art, music, and theater to take more advanced classes in these areas or enabling an English learner to enroll in an online accelerated language course in their primary language. For at least part of their day, these students would be given opportunities to grow in their area of strength. Acceleration also encompasses the practice of compacting, in which the goals of the instruction are identified and students are pre-assessed to determine what they already know and are able to do. Students only spend time on objectives they haven’t mastered and are “compacted” out of the others. This allows students to move through the curriculum at a faster rate. This strategy could be used for all students with an initial pre-assessment that examines objectives two grade levels below or above. The advantage of this strategy is that it not only streamlines curriculum, but also fosters the mindset that any student might have already mastered some content, increasing self-efficacy.

The other option advocated in gifted education, enrichment, generally involves having students explore curricular content in more depth and/or be exposed to new domains tangentially connected to the traditional core curriculum. Such opportunities are intended to motivate and excite students as they see the bigger picture within the subject, make connections, and explore areas that align with their interests. One structured approach is the use of enrichment clusters in which students select from a list of topics (e.g., roller coaster design, theater, the study of lizards) and then, in school, meet with an adult leader and other interested students to learn about their interests and engage in solving authentic problems (Renzulli, 1997a). Many schools that have piloted these programs for all students have witnessed positive outcomes, including the increase of student agency, communication skills, attendance rates, and cultural connections (Fiddyment, 2014; Morgan, 2007). For example, teachers in one study observed that students were engaged and willing to support one another in these enrichment clusters, and students looked forward to their clusters all week, with one student declaring, “You can never schedule [a doctor’s appointment] on a Wednesday morning because I have to be there for my enrichment cluster!” (Fiddyment, 2014, p. 291).

These interest-based groups have also been used as an intervention for adolescents with autism spectrum disorder, whose academic performance ranged from on grade level to more than two grade levels below (Koegel et al., 2013). Schools offered several clusters during the lunch hour, including movie, computer graphics, cooking, and video game clubs. These clubs not only improved students’ social skills and engagement, but also developed their creativity, knowledge of technology, and communication skills. Other studies have also discussed the benefits when students with significant disabilities participate in high-interest programming, such as 3D design programming (Diener et al., 2015) and STEM clubs (Fisher et al., 2021). Integrating enrichment into the IEP provides opportunities for both social and academic development in a positive environment, focused on interests.

It is already standard practice to review and adjust IEP program goals throughout students’ educational career (O’Brien, 2018), and it shouldn’t be difficult for school personnel to make regular efforts to identify acceleration and enrichment opportunities that can be integrated into students’ IEPs. In 2017, Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that school districts have a responsibility to ensure that, as the IEP evolves, it must be appropriately ambitious. Within an axiom of brilliance framework, this means that students’ strengths must be monitored and supported in developmentally appropriate ways across time. For example, initially, students may need enrichment in science, but then over time, their needs may be better met by being accelerated into a college biology course.

A new vision for IDEA

Currently, teachers and school personnel who serve on IEP teams often report that they do not feel prepared to meet the needs of twice-exceptional students or to identify students’ specific interests and abilities (Assouline & Foley-Nicpon, 2007; Foley-Nicpon, Assouline, & Colangelo, 2013; Rowan & Townend, 2016). Further, while the U.S. Department of Education offers discretionary grants to support professional development, research, and parent support related to special education, none of these funds have, in the last two years, gone to programs that explicitly emphasize the cultivation of student strengths.

If IDEA were to adopt the axiom of brilliance as its conceptual foundation, then that would prompt important changes in the law’s language, procedures, and requirements. Perhaps most important, IEP assessments would come to serve three purposes: determining whether a child has a disability, identifying that student’s strengths, and providing guidance for appropriate educational services to address both their weaknesses and their strengths (and to monitor both over time). Further, revising IDEA in this way would open the door to more federal funding for research, program development, and professional development in strength-based approaches in special education. It is time to make this shift toward a more optimistic and supportive approach, one that serves the whole student by recognizing every student for who they are . . . brilliant.

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This article appears in the March 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 6, pp. 21-26.