I am watching the US education system not very subtly invite punishment back into the mainstream classroom. This appears to be driven by the field of Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA). Recently their governing body started to loosen the reins on the therapeutic application of aversive stimuli and intervention plans have since started including everything from “exaggerating sadness to correct misbehavior,” “misting the face with water,” to “basket holds.”

To compound this, many school districts are allowing ABA therapists working with autistic students into the classroom. They follow the plan approved by parents – which often does include “applications of aversives” (positive punishment) or “removing preferred/motivating items from the environment” (negative punishment) contingent to student behavior.

Source: Defining Reinforcement and Punishment for Educators – Why Haven’t They Done That Yet?

No. This is abusive and unethical. Listen to disabled and autistic people. Resist this.

Mindset Marketing, Behaviorism, and Deficit Ideology

Equity Literacy and Psychological Safety

Equity literacy and psychological safety, not behaviorism and mindset marketing.

On Twitter, that’s one line standing alone. On a blog, a reductionist aphorism can show its work.

Equity Literacy and Structural Ideology

Psychological Safety

Behaviorism and Mindset Marketing

I updated “Mindset Marketing, Behaviorism, and Deficit Ideology” with selections from “Palo Alto, Day 2 – Teaching Machines”.

despite the popular notion that “Skinnerism” has been excised from education, it certainly has not; indeed, behaviorism is a core feature of almost all ed-tech.

Source: Palo Alto, Day 2 – Teaching Machines

I updated “The Double Empathy Problem: Developing Empathy and Reciprocity in Neurotypical Adults” with selections from “Too high a price: why I don’t do behaviour charts — Miss Night’s Marbles”.

How do you feel right now, as an employee? How do you feel about your boss, your colleagues, yourself? How do you feel about having to come back to the same place, the same people, the same chart, tomorrow? What are the chances you will turn things around tomorrow, or ever? What are the chances you will just figure out how to hang at “orange” and deal with the consequences and find ways to enjoy your 20 minute lunch with your orange friends? (I know you are smart enough to stay away from red, but orange is really not so bad, right…?)

If my boss were to hang a chart in the staff lounge, showing which teachers were doing an exceptional job each day, as well as those who were having exceptional-in-a-bad-way days, I would be furious. I would be raging about my privacy, my dignity, my right to be respected by my colleagues for the person I am, and to not be publicly labelled based on any given day. My personal growth is between me and my boss. It has no business being a public display. I don’t know any teacher who would disagree with this. My boss and I have private conversations, plans, and systems to foster my progress.

Source: Too high a price: why I don’t do behaviour charts — Miss Night’s Marbles

I updated “Mindset Marketing, Behaviorism, and Deficit Ideology” with selections from “PBIS is Broken: How Do We Fix It? – Why Haven’t They Done That Yet?”.

PBIS is Coercion

This is an argument usually used for Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), but it applies to PBIS as well. Because PBIS emphasizes the use of tangible rewards and teacher praise to motivate “appropriate” behavior, it often escapes this description.

The overall focus of PBIS is obedience or compliance with rules leading to a reward. The flip side of that coin is there is a lack of rewards or outright punishment administered for noncompliance. The pressure of complying with this system turns kids into ticking time bombs. Having to focus on compliance with school-wide and classroom rules stresses kids out and causes them to enter a state of anxiety when they come to school. In fact, I have seen this escalate to the point the school building itself was a trigger for panic attacks.

And, take my word on this, no one can identify and rebel against an unfair system as efficiently as a kid or adult with ID, except perhaps an autistic person. They know the system is unfair!

Source: PBIS is Broken: How Do We Fix It? – Why Haven’t They Done That Yet?

The rock pigeon was domesticated some 5000 years ago. Today’s city-dwelling pigeons are the feral ancestors of these domesticated birds. They are the ancestors of the pigeons that escaped. They are neither domesticated nor wild. They are – with apologies to Donna Haraway here – a companion species gone awry, a border creature that might mark its own and our own trainability, a reminder of what happens when our cyborg fantasies, despite their subversive theoretical promise, turn out to be quite submissive to the technologies of command and control.

Source: Losing Our Pigeons

But, someone realised there was a way to say that there is Big Money in ‘fixing’ us so we’re not autistic any more. And Big Business likes Big Money.

So, the myths started. About cost, about danger, about tragedy. Who wouldn’t pay a fortune to fix a tragedy? Also, about disability. It’s a fault, a deficit, something’s gone ‘wrong’, you’ll be told. Except it isn’t, any more than being gay is a fault and a deficit and an opportunity to cure. Groups tried that, too. Remember that being gay was in the mental health books, and people made a fortune out of ‘gay cure therapies’. Now those are being banned after the gay people said how much damage those therapies did. Guess what some autism ‘therapies’ are based on? Same techniques. But now used on people who can’t say that it hurts, or aren’t believed when they say it hurts.

Meantime, we have made society so bad for autistic people and the scaremongering so effective that our quality of life is often really awful. That’s not ‘autism’ that did that.

Instead, if you must hand over money, ensure that actual autistic specialists receive it. Or our allies. People who understand how to actually help your child, because we were once pretty much the same as your child. And we have spent decades in this trade, learning things that help.

Autistic people are not lab rats who exist so that shareholders can make money.

Source: Ann’s Autism Blog: Let’s look at why “Autism is the most expensive disability” is untrue.

PBIS also ignores human nature by demanding everyone maintain a positive mood and hide any frustration with a student’s naughty behavior.

My more in-depth interpretation is a reiteration of my earlier post on PBIS as well as my posts on classroom management. The PBIS method is far too easy to get wrong. It is far too easy to use consequences or the threat of consequences to motivate behavior (e.g., threatening a kid that they will not get a reward unless they comply). For individuals with ID, reinforcement has to be 100% correlated with good behavior and if there is punishment it has to be 100% correlated with the inappropriate behavior. No deviation and no gap between behavior and consequence. Otherwise, the system falls apart.

Importantly, if a system is based on using external rewards/stimuli to motivate behavior, falling apart takes the form of behavioral outbursts and frustration from the student or client.

Unfortunately, this type of asymmetrical reward is a feature, not a bug, of PBIS. PBIS uses asymmetrical reward as a motivational tool, to the detriment of the students that struggle with their comportment. And, take my word on this, no one can identify and rebel against an unfair system as efficiently as a kid or adult with ID, except perhaps an autistic person. They know the system is unfair!

PBIS is Coercion

This is an argument usually used for Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), but it applies to PBIS as well. Because PBIS emphasizes the use of tangible rewards and teacher praise to motivate “appropriate” behavior, it often escapes this description.

The overall focus of PBIS is obedience or compliance with rules leading to a reward. The flip side of that coin is there is a lack of rewards or outright punishment administered for noncompliance. The pressure of complying with this system turns kids into ticking time bombs. Having to focus on compliance with school-wide and classroom rules stresses kids out and causes them to enter a state of anxiety when they come to school. In fact, I have seen this escalate to the point the school building itself was a trigger for panic attacks.

Source: PBIS is Broken: How Do We Fix It? – Why Haven’t They Done That Yet?

When we dangle rewards in kids faces, we encourage them to ask, “What do they want me to do, and what do I _get _for doing it?” And when we threaten them with punishments or consequences, we encourage them to ask, “What do they want me to do, and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Neither question encourages kids to contemplate life in a way we would like to promote, and neither question has anything to do with creating a collaborative community built on caring.

Nolan’s inability to think about others, combined with his obvious self-interest certainly exemplify a primitive level of moral development… but, if the adults in his life subscribe to an equally primitive kind of character development, how can we come to expect anything more? How can we expect kids like Nolan to progress to a higher level of ethical behavior when our dependence on rewards and punishment is precisely what condemns kids to such primitive self-interest.

Source: for the love of learning: Primitive Moral Development: PBIS