Understanding and Teaching Students With Emotional Behavioral Disorders

How did you get into the field of the educating students with emotional and behavioral disorders?

By happenstance. My undergrad degree was in elementary education. I was married, so I wouldn’t have been drafted. But I wanted to serve the country in some way. I was a conscientious objector to military service, so I went before my local draft board and got a 1-O classification, which exempted me from military service. Under the law at the time, you could volunteer for alternative service, but you had to find a job that the government approved as an alternative.

I could have been a hospital orderly or done lab work or a number of things. But I had a degree in education, and I thought it would be good to use that degree. So I looked for various teaching jobs. I could have taught on an Indian reservation, and I found opportunities to teach special education. I didn’t have a degree in special ed., but one of the jobs I applied for was teaching at the Southard School of the Menninger Clinic. Dick Whelan was the principal of the Southard School when I was hired there. And I was really excited about teaching EBD kids there for 2 years. Dick gave me what was then a very new book, hot off the press, Haring and Phillips’s Educating Emotionally Disturbed Children. That’s the first special ed. book I read, and it made a lot of sense to me. At the time, Dick was implementing a behavioral approach to teaching kids with EBD, so I got to apply what I had read in that book. So that’s really how I got into the field.

Then I completed a master’s degree in teaching in the elementary school, not special education, at Washburn University of Topeka. I taught kids with EBD in the public schools for a year and then went back to regular elementary teaching for a couple of years.

Then I had an opportunity to get a PhD in philosophy of education at NYU, and I almost went there. In fact, I accepted an Anderson fellowship in philosophy of education and planned to move to New York City, but Dick encouraged me to come to Kansas City and talk to him and Og Lindsley about the program in special education at KU [University of Kansas]. I did, and I liked it, so I wrote to the people at NYU and told them, “Sorry, I’m not coming after all.” I’ve never regretted deciding on KU and special education. It was a good decision.

How would you describe your career—the beginning, the middle, and where you are now?

The beginning was getting started in education and then teaching kids with EBD and general education. The middle part? I spent 1 year at Illinois State and then went to the University of Virginia, and I guess that was the middle of my career. I was 28 years old when I finished my degree at KU, 29 when I went to Virginia, which seems like eons ago. My middle years, I guess, were teaching at the UVA, where I worked with master’s level teachers and undergrads as well as doctoral students. In my later years I also directed the doctoral program at UVA.

How has the way you’ve trained your students changed over the course of your career?

That’s difficult to say. At first, I was going to say that it had something to do with my basic orientation toward behaviorism, but I don’t think so. I think it’s mainly working more with doctoral students in the later years of my career.

What events, policies, innovations, and people do you think have had the most influence on your professional life?

The people on my doctoral committee, especially my advisor Dick Whelan, had a profound influence on me.

How so?

They were basically very good people who had confidence in me and helped me learn about the field. They were extraordinary teachers and mentors. Besides Dick, I’m thinking of other people on my doctoral committee at KU: Roger Kroth, Gary Holtke, Joe Weaver, Gene Ensminger. Those guys had a profound influence on me, teaching me about the field and helping me learn things. Gary Holtke taught statistics, and I had several courses from him, and I had great admiration for him.

What other people, policies, events and innovations influenced your professional life?

Besides my committee, who would not be influenced by Ogden Lindsley? He was an extraordinary person. And Jim Smith was a huge positive influence on me. Lots of people at the KU were important to me, not just faculty but fellow doctoral students. And my colleagues at UVA and my own doctoral students have all been very important in my development.

Certainly Public Law 94-142 was a huge change in the way people viewed things. That federal law made a big, big difference in the way people thought about special education.

Also, science and behaviorism have been constants in my career since my training at KU. I found them very helpful in thinking about what you do with kids with EBD and their families. How do you help them? I think behaviorism has offered more practical ideas about what to do than any other perspective. Other perspectives may have been helpful in some ways, but weren’t as directly applicable to working with kids.

You mentioned P.L. 94-142. Have other policy issues influenced what you have done?

I think 94-142—now IDEA or IDIEA—is pretty much the basic thing that’s influenced the way we go about our business as special educators.

What would you say has had the greatest positive impact on the field of educating children with EBD?

I think the behavioral approach, in my lifetime, has had the biggest impact on the way people think and what they do. The scientific approach—asking what evidence we have—is probably the most important development that I see in our field.

How do teachers go about finding out what is best practice?

I think all of us have to ask about the nature of the evidence supporting a particular practice or point of view. Is it just what somebody, some authority, says? Or can we look for empirical data that support a particular practice? I think far too often we just say, “Well, so and so says it, so it must be true” or “I read it in a book, so it must be true.” I think we’d be much better off as a field if we looked for evidence supporting things rather than just took some authority’s opinion. Of course, sometimes an authority’s opinion is based on evidence, but the opinion of an authority doesn’t make something true.

How can we get our practitioners to do that, to go beyond that? Is there some mechanism we should put into place, or is that their responsibility?

Well, I don’t know that I have the answer. I do think that more of us in higher education need to ask questions about the evidence ourselves, become more grounded in evidence-based practices, be more scientific in our approach to things. You can always find crackpots, even in physics, which we think of as a hard science, or biology or any field you name. There will be some rogue who suggests that his or her opinion should be taken seriously even though the data don’t support whatever it is that person is saying. Bob Park, a physicist who has written quite a bit about pseudoscience or rogue science, has said there is no proposition so preposterous that you can’t find somebody to support it, if you give them enough money. The scientific community, for example, finds that the globe is warming. If we look at all the data, they indicate pretty clearly that the earth’s climate is getting warmer. But you will find a fringe group who say, “Oh, no, no, that’s not so.” You will find the same thing for evolution. Most scientists believe that evolution is the most important scientific theory that we have in biology and many other sciences, but you can always find some creationist scientist who will say, “Oh, that’s just not biblical” or “There’s a real controversy about that.” It’s tantamount to saying that there’s a real controversy about whether the earth revolves around the sun or vice versa. Of course, many hundreds of years ago, there was a controversy about that, but that controversy has been pretty well settled. People who wanted to disbelieve Galileo did, and the religious people found it absolutely appalling that anyone would think that the earth was not the center of the universe. Likewise, you can find today, in 2011, people who will argue, “Oh, no, no we can’t believe in evolution because that would undermine our religious faith.” This is very much the same sort of rogue science that has led to the denial of all sorts of scientific truths.

I want to go back to the question about training teachers. Would there be an ideal way that we in special education should be thinking about training teachers that would improve the quality, let them be more flexible, and allow them to become better teachers?

This is sort of a sore point with me, because I think that what we need to do, if we’re serious, is train teachers to use the best tools we have for teaching. Those best tools, I think, are direct instruction. But it takes a lot of guts for people in our profession to say, “I don’t think we should be giving teachers just lots of different alternatives. No, let’s train them to use the best thing we have.”

There’s still a lot of antiscientific sentiment in education. I have a new book coming out, Toward a Science of Education: The Battle Between Rogue and Real Science. What I suggest is that we start with special education in trying to make education a science. Special educators are more open to the idea of education being a science and more open to using direct instruction. It’s not that direct instruction is perfect or unassailable; it’s only the best instructional tool we have. It’s sort of like science: you can argue against science, but it beats the alternatives. It’s sort of like you can argue against a democratic form of government because it has its weaknesses, it has its flaws. But it’s the best form of government we have. We know better than to discard democracy or abandon it because it’s not perfect.

I think we need similar thinking about training teachers. Let’s train teachers to use the best thing we have, and if that doesn’t work then they can go to the next best thing. What’s the next best thing? I’m not sure, but I think Project Follow Through ¹ and all of the evidence we have to date suggests that if you want to teach kids to read, here’s the best way to do it. It’s nice to think that you can change the whole world all at once. But, I hope we in special education will really get our act together so that if a kid is placed in special education, that kid will get good, effective direct instruction. I would like to see that before I die. I might die in 5 years, and what I’m hoping for isn’t likely to happen in the next 5 years, but if we could do it in the next 20 to 30 years we would have accomplished a lot. If we could just get every special educator trained as an instructional scientist then we’d have something to tell general education that would be more convincing than what we tell general education now. I guess a lot of people have said, “Well, you know, you can work on special education ‘till the cows come home, but until you get general education reformed, special education can never succeed.” Personally, I’ve come to see that as an excuse or a diversion.

That’s really good advice. You have hit on the positive influence of good instructional techniques. What would you consider has had the greatest negative impact on our field?

Some people are not going to want to hear this, but I think the greatest negative impact in my career has been the idea that you can’t believe objective evidence, that the very idea of objectivity is unbelievable, that the scientific approach is just another story or narrative. So it really comes down to this idea of postmodernism. Postmodernists have various terms: constructivism, deconstructivism, post structuralism. . . . Whatever you want to call it, it is basically the notion that we can’t establish any reality other than our own personal one. What that does is undermine all attempts to bring our talents to bear on solving kids’ problems or on helping them solve their problems. I think it makes people feel good; it makes them think they have something to offer. But I think postmodernism is basically just a very silly parlor game. It does have wonderful personal appeal. It makes people feel good that they’re thinking about things in a different way, but, from my perspective, it’s not a productive or helpful way of thinking. In my opinion, postmodernism doesn’t help us figure out how to do a better job of teaching kids.

What do you see in the future for education of children with EBD?

That’s a very dangerous question to try to answer because your ideas can look so silly down the road 30 years. You can say, “Well, I think this is going to happen,” and it’s not going to. So . . . I don’t know. But I’ll guess. I think we are going to have to decide as a field whether we buy into this notion that you can’t know anything, that you can’t prove anything, that you actually can’t establish evidence-based practices because we all have different perspectives on things and every perspective is equally true. You can’t have apposing views, both of which are right.

I hope we’ll make progress in establishing, through what’s known as Enlightenment science, what works and what doesn’t. I think we’re at a crossroads about how we’re going to decide what works and what doesn’t. Nobody wants to say, “You know, that’s really a silly idea, and I think there’s a lot of danger in what you’re suggesting.” But, maybe we need to say something like that. I suppose we could say, “You’re a really nice person, but what you’re suggesting doesn’t help us.”

Sometimes a leader leads people into danger. Take General Custer, for example. He was a real leader, but he didn’t lead his followers to a brilliant ending. You can be very attractive, and you can be very nice, but you can still lead people into something undesirable. But refusing to follow a leader would require us to be strong in some ways and be perceived as abrasive or hubristic to some people.

Are you saying to us as a field that we need to have a little more of a backbone?

Yes. I think we do. I think that’s true for special ed. in general, and I think it’s true of EBD in particular that we have to be willing to say, “You know, what you’re saying doesn’t make good sense. It’s not logical.” And to the people who say logic is just some fabrication or a Western cultural artifact. . . . Well, would we rather people just make things up?

Is this what you call pseudo-science?

We have to be willing to say we want things to make logical sense even though someone may perceive that as being Western or somehow anti-postmodern. We have to be willing to say, “I want this to add up. I want to be able to do linear thinking about this. I want to be able to look at the empirical evidence underlying this suggestion.” We have to be willing to say, “That may be interesting to you, but it’s not helpful to the field.” That’s hard to do.

What advice would you offer to persons entering this field?

I think the field in many ways is different from the way it was 40 or 50 years ago. I would encourage people to demand the data, look for the evidence. Don’t give up on that. Be concerned about helping kids and what today may seem old-fashioned—that government can make an important positive difference in people’s lives. By government, I mean publicly funded entities. If you’re a teacher in a public school, you’re a government employee. I know that there is a lot of badmouthing of government agencies, including schools, but government entities can be really helpful to people. Just because something is private doesn’t make it better. There are a lot of private agencies that throw kids to the wolves to save their own behinds. Sure, government agencies can do that, too, but they can also be very helpful. There is no magic to privatization. As my wife is so fond of saying, “You can’t make money on kids.”

You can’t balance the budget on the backs of children. And you shouldn’t try to make money on kids. The idea that you can have an education agency that would turn a profit is, to my mind, more than a little ludicrous. The public schools are not in the profit-making business, and if they are in the profit-making business, they are not going to want to deal with the kids who are the hardest to teach.

I recently read an anonymous reviewer’s comment that some kids in special education are not particularly hard to teach and some kids not in general education are really hard to teach. I’m thinking, “Oh my! What planet is that person from, or what are they talking about?” Kids with disabilities are certainly among the most difficult kids to teach, and a lot of kids with EBD are in general education. Whether they’re in special education or not, the ones with EBD are going to be the hardest to turn a profit on. So if you want to have a school that looks really good, here’s what you do: get yourself some kids that are easy to teach. Then you’ll look good, as a teacher, and your school will look good. The harder kids are to teach, the harder it is to turn a profit on them, unless you’re going to charge a lot more money than most people are willing to pay.

What would you say about serving kids with the most challenging behaviors in an era of dwindling budgets and increased standards. How will we pay for this?

Well, we don’t have a lot of good cost-benefit studies in education, but you can compare the cost of educating the child with the cost of prison. I think it was Mark Twain who talked about this and said if you don’t help kids be successful in school, there is a much greater chance that they are going to go to prison, and jail costs more than school. I’m afraid that the long-term costs of not treating kids well in school, not teaching them effectively, is going to be enormous and particularly costly for those kids who don’t learn very well with sloppy instruction. A lot of kids will learn OK with sloppy instruction, but kids with EBD need particularly careful instruction. So you can’t be really sloppy in your teaching if they’re going to learn a lot. You can’t just turn them loose and say, “Hey, kids, just teach yourselves.” That’s not going to work well with a lot of the kids we deal with.

Do you see a future for virtual schools or virtual kinds of learning opportunities for kids with more challenging behaviors?

It’s going to be very tempting for schools to say, “Well, this kid doesn’t get along well with people so let him get along with the computer.” I suppose it’s possible for technological advances to help us do better in teaching a lot of kids, but the problem of getting along with other people isn’t solved very well by having kids get along with inanimate objects. So I’m afraid that’s another way to just get kids of out of what we consider schools or congregations of other people.

Who knows, maybe in 30 years there will be no schools. It’s hard to say how technology may change. My wife said to me today, “Ten years ago, did you see people out in the lobby talking on cell phones?” Well, no. Part of the problem is trying to predict what is going to happen, and with the development of new technology, I don’t know. And we have, of course, people in general ed. essentially calling for the abandonment of public schools for entrepreneurial schools or some sort of radical school reform that won’t require taxes.

What do you consider the purpose of education?

That’s a question science can’t answer. It’s a values question. Do we value human interaction? Do we value congregating children in schools, as we have for the past hundred years? Maybe we . . . I don’t know . . . maybe we don’t or won’t.

We’ll have to come back in another 10 years and find out what’s happened. Dr. Kauffman do you have any last words?

I have no words of wisdom.

Thank you for allowing us this opportunity to spend some time with you.