r/ABA • u/Kind-Ad4622 • 4d ago

Advice Needed ABA in Schools

Hey everyone! I just wanted your opinion on ABA being used in schools, especially for our special needs learners or children with social-emotional challenges. I have been working with a SPED teacher since the beginning of the school year and every opportunity she gets, she always mentions that, "ABA isn't the solution" and that "I need to go back to a clinic" as well as not allowing me to practice my ABA interventions (even though that's why I was hired by the principal) and actively discouraging me. Is this just a bad teacher? Should I stay in the school district? Go back to a clinic? Any advice on the matter would be appreciated. 😌

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u/pantsforfatties 3d ago

The majority of publications in ABA from 1968-1978 were education-based rather than AUT/conceptual/OBM, whathaveyou. Just in JABA, I think it was 50%. The year after Science and Human Behavior was published (1953), Skinner published The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching (1954). ABA has always been about learning, and early behaviorists were focused on changing the learning experiences of all students (see: Lindsley, Skinner, Keller, Schoenfeld, etc). Also look into Project Follow Through. The idea that ABA doesn't belong in schools is offensive, ahistorical, and ignorant.

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u/AlphaBravo-4567 2d ago

True, of course, but if OP is uncomfortable with the pushback they’re receiving regarding ABA in the form of behavioral intervention, I would not recommend to them the route that you’re suggesting. Og Lindsley himself gave up in extreme frustration and just about the entirety of contemporary PT practitioners work in private schools like Morningside or private learning centers like FIT Learning.

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u/pantsforfatties 2d ago

I wasn't advising anything. Just putting the fact that ABA has been demonstrated to be an astoundingly effective education methodology out there. I mean, of course it has, but I think it surprises people who think ABA is sticker charts and M&Ms and behavior reduction. And that is from inside the house.

The fact that only about 1/100 BCBAs think of ABA's role in the world as other than a clinical "autism intervention" is enraging to me. I get BCBAs telling me that "our" role precludes us from interfering with "educational" targets outside of the features of an ASD diagnosis or whatever. When I give data on ABA publications as having been overwhelmingly focused on education/classrooms around the time of the founding of journals like JABA, I get blank stares from a lot of BCBAs who don't know that massive body of literature. And I get told that education is outside of the "scope of competence" of BCBAs. Even worse, I get told that people implementing ABA shouldn't call themselves "teachers."

I wouldn't say that Ogden gave up, but he was demoralized about a lot of what you talk about. He did see massive, public-school level PT implementations. It's just that nothing in public ed lasts for very long. He didn't think that child outcomes were the outcome measure, so effective systems couldn't outlast personnel changes, politics, and egos.