Where Did PBIS Come From — And How Did It Become What It Is Today?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses Neetu Arnold's investigation into the origins and evolution of PBIS, from a research-based framework to a reward-heavy system.
Key Takeaways
- PBIS started differently - The original framework was evidence-based and included clear consequences alongside positive reinforcement
- The reward emphasis was added later - Schools transformed PBIS into a token economy that the researchers never intended
- Understanding the history helps fix the problem - Knowing how PBIS went wrong points the way to implementing it correctly
Transcript
Where did PBIS come from?
If you're like a lot of people, you may be wondering where this set of ideas that goes by the name PBIS comes from, because it's really doing a lot of damage in a lot of schools.
Well, a new article by Neetu Arnold in City Journal entitled The High Costs of Classroom Disorder explores the history of PBIS and explains how it started in special education.
And that makes a lot of sense to me, where your goal is to teach desired behaviors, teach appropriate behavior in a school context, And don't treat that as an issue primarily of punishment or anything negative.
You want to teach the acceptable behaviors.
And I think there's a really good equity argument for doing that in the sense that when students don't come in behaving appropriately, our first line of defense should be teaching the acceptable behaviors.
I think it's totally appropriate to do as a school, as an educational organization, and it's what we did when I was a principal.
We taught the expected behaviors.
But in recent years, PBIS has become a whole bunch of other things, and it's become kind of an empty container for a whole bunch of ideas many of which are bad and Arnold's article explains how that happened and now there is a For the last couple of decades, it's been a taxpayer-funded center run by the US Department of Education that's provided training.
There are also private sector trainers who promote things that sound good and maybe on their face are good, like collecting data and meeting regularly to talk about behavior.
There are some process things that make a lot of sense, but we have to be careful that we're not endorsing a framework that's too flexible in incorporating bad ideas.
One of the biggest bad ideas popularized under the banner of PBIS, even though it wasn't originally part of it, is the idea that there can never be consequences or boundaries for behavior, that there can only ever be rewards.
That's just not how human beings work.
If there are no consequences, then the behavior itself can be inherently rewarding, and there's no limit on it.
And that's why I think we have all these practices, like kids getting sent back to class, you know, after they're sent out to the office for some extreme behavior, they come back with a snack.
Like, what's going on there?
If we have this empty container where all we have to do is collect data and getting good looking data is our only priority and we're not actually thinking about how do we create a safe and orderly school environment?
Well, that's kind of how we ended up where we are today.
So I would highly encourage you to check out Neetu Arnold's article, The High Costs of Classroom Disorder, because she goes in-depth on the history.
She goes in-depth on the kind of origins and talks to the trainers and talks to a lot of teachers.
She talked to me, and we really got into some detail here about how things have gotten to where they are.
One piece that I was not familiar with that I'm really glad she touched on is what's called the tiered fidelity inventory.
And that's basically a rubric that the school can use to score itself on how well it's implementing PBIS.
And this is crazy to me, but consequences give you zero points.
All right, I'm gonna read this here.
Responses to contextually inappropriate behavior, schools get a zero if their responses rely solely on reactive and punitive consequences.
In other words, if the consequence occurs after the behavior, you get a zero.
If the consequence is not a reward, you get a zero.
Like, how do you win at this as a school and still do things that make any sense at all?
A top score of four, by contrast, gets awarded when schools emphasize functionally relevant instructional and restorative responses.
And I get that we don't want students to just feel bad when they get in trouble.
We want something positive to happen so that they can move forward.
But at the same time, there have to be consequences.
There have to be boundaries.
So read the article.
I'll put a link in the comments and let me know what you think about PBIS.