The Importance of What You Leave Behind: A Conversation With Carl Smith

Dr. Smith, tell us how you got into the field of emotional/behavioral disorders.

It was an accident. I was an undergraduate major in psychology. I thought I was going into experimental psychology as a career and planned to pursue a master’s degree. While traveling the summer before beginning my graduate program, I decided that I really didn’t see myself as an experimental psychologist. I talked to a person who was influential in the special education program at the university and ended up getting an assistantship in the area of emotional disturbance. Originally, I had asked to do a fellowship in the area of mental retardation, but in the time that it took to get information and make up my mind, the last fellowship in mental retardation was gone. So, it was by accident, but also somewhat by inclination, that I ended up there and just kind of moved on from there. As a psychology major I very much enjoyed experimental psychology, but also abnormal psychology and clinically related practice, so I felt that special education was an opportunity to blend a lot of that together.

How would you describe your career in the field?

Again, I would say that maybe “accident” is a way to describe it. I don’t think I’ve had a planned-out career. What I mean is that I’ve had some work at residential treatment programs in Virginia and, when I moved to Iowa, I originally was going to go straight through a doctoral program. However, I decided that I needed more experience and took a teaching job in rural Iowa.

You went to graduate school at the University of Iowa?

Yes, I went there by virtue of asking my advisor in Virginia where she had gone to school. She said, “University of Iowa,” and I said, “That sounds fine.” So again, that’s part of my accidental traveler phase. I taught in rural Iowa, thus postponing my PhD program. One day, I got a call from the Iowa State Department of Education, where they were going to hire the very first consultant in behavior disorders. I interviewed and was hired to do that.

That’s quite a different trajectory.

Absolutely, I think it was a real advantage from the standpoint that many of my colleagues went directly into teaching and then to graduate school and then to higher education. I think I was really fortunate to have a job in the state department of education at a time when a lot of people weren’t seeking those jobs because they were looked at as being kind of bureaucratic. I happened upon a really great opportunity to be in a state department very interested in innovation, in building programs in behavioral disorders, and there were a lot of resources for staff development and program development. I spent 11 years at the Iowa Department of Education and I attribute a lot of my success to that experience. It was a real luxury to call up anybody whose work in behavioral disorders I had read or knew about and say, “Would you be willing to come to Iowa and help out with this particular type of staff development activity?” I think that was a luxury, an opportunity that I wouldn’t have had if I had gone anywhere else.

Who is someone you called during that time?

Well, the first person I called was Bruce Balow at the University of Minnesota. I had known of Bruce, read his work, and had cited some of his work in my master’s thesis. In one of my first in-services, I planned a statewide conference where Bruce gave the keynote speech. I had so much admiration for him. I got in touch with him and told him, “I want to plan long-term training in the area of emotional/behavioral disorders.” He came down to Iowa to help me plan what could be done in the area of behavioral disorders. I recall so vividly how gracious he was with his time. Here I was, a young person with absolutely no credentials in the field, and he was a person of substantial stature. One time I was asking, “Should I do this or should I do that or what about this?” and our conversation rolled around to what’s most important in our work. Bruce said, “Carl, you need to remember that it’s probably more important what you leave behind than what you make while you’re there”—that whole notion of sustainability. Bruce was a wise person. Whether it was Bruce Balow or Frank Wood (Zabel, Kaff, & Teagarden, 2011), also from the University of Minnesota, or Bill Morse or Bill Rhodes from the University of Michigan, I have been fortunate to have wise counsel.

I envy you those experiences.

They were all kind of connected to discussions or publications. I had a newsletter called Iowa Perspective that I edited for a number of years, so I had an excuse to say, “Will you write a paper on this or can I quote you regarding this topic?” It was an opportunity that many people don’t have.

How has that state department of education, policy position influenced what you do in higher education?

Well, it helped quite a bit. As I suggested earlier, I was a little older going into higher education. My first job was at a fairly small college in Iowa, but I had the experience where I could say, “This is what I see in schools, this is what I learned when I was at the state department, this is what I heard from teachers.” I found that to be a real positive as far as teaching in higher education and being able to connect with students. It was very interesting in my higher education positions going to a relatively small liberal arts college, where you teach four classes a semester and where publishing isn’t necessarily very important. By virtue of the state department role, I had fairly reasonable success publishing prior to going in to higher education, but it wasn’t necessarily expected. Then I moved to a medium-sized university, with a little less teaching—three classes a semester—but had some momentum as far as the people I was working with and collaborating on projects. From there, I moved to a research-intensive university and saw the dynamics of how much time should be devoted to teaching and how much to writing. It’s been a unique kind of trajectory. I couldn’t have planned my career that way. I’m not smart enough to plan those steps.

It’s interesting how those roles complemented each other.

Exactly, I’ve been fortunate from the standpoint of the people that I’ve known and been able to talk to about the important issues and what I’ve learned from those people. Whether it was Bill Morse, who was a tremendous leader in EBD, or the other leaders I mentioned, they were very humble and courteous. I think they have a reverence for and a humility about our work at the same time. So, it’s been a real blessing to do this work and to work with these people. That’s probably the best term I can come up with: it’s been a real blessing.

Let me use a couple of examples, one from outside the field and one in the field. The first was the junior high principal who I worked for in a rural Iowa. When I was working in rural Iowa, my confidence level was very low and I was really searching for my niche. Earlier, I had worked in residential treatment, where I had all these support systems, but now, all of a sudden, I’m in a junior high without a room to go to, traveling around with a cart, and with a lot of people trying to figure out, “What does this guy do and why is he here?” That question was being asked by both students and faculty, because this was the very first program like it.

Because of my lack of confidence, I clearly remember after 2 or 3 weeks going in to the assistant principal and saying, “This is just not working out. I really appreciate you folks giving me a chance, but I just don’t think I’m earning the money, so I’m going to quit.” I then gave the same spiel to the principal, Ray, who said, “No you’re not. We hired you and it’s going to take some time to develop this program.” At a time when my confidence level was rock bottom, here was a principal who said, “I’m not going to let you quit.” By the time I left after 2 years, I had such a different degree of confidence, and I think that’s one of the reasons the state department hired me. If he had let me quit, it would have made a huge difference where I ended up. That’s an example of someone working with me, supporting me, that really had an impact on my career.

Then, when I worked for the state department of education, the director of special education, Frank Vance, was also very much a leader. He let us take risks, let us appear foolish at times, and let us get local districts mad at us. He always kind of had our backs and never threatened to fire us for insubordination, which he could have done.

There were other people in the field of behavioral disorders who have had an influence. I think about Nick Long (Kaff, Teagarden, & Zabel, 2011b). There were several occasions where I brought Nick to Iowa to do workshops. I spent a week at a time with him. We’d do something in Des Moines, then travel across the state. You know, from your conversations with Nick, what a dynamic person he is. So those experiences were real gifts. Dick Whelan (Kaff, Teagarden, & Zabel, 2011a) from the University of Kansas. Dick was a member of the advisory committee for a large grant I had. Judy Grosenick and Sharon Huntze from the University of Missouri had the National Needs Analysis Project that I was a part of. Also, about that time, I was able to meet Tom Marrone, who was a child psychiatrist out east. We were able to talk about what we were doing on a small scale in Iowa and the national implications and big issues coming up. My involvement with Judy and others led to my involvement with the Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders. I owe a lot to a lot of different people through different times.

What innovations and practices have had influence on your career?

Some of the major influences have been older ideas and practices, including those of Nicholas Hobbs. I brought Hobbs to Iowa to talk about Project Re-ED and the power of the ecological approach. Project Re-ED is an example of an innovation that’s been around since the 1960s and is still being adapted in different ways. I think it offers a richer view of what is taking place, about the power in what we do with behavior, and the challenges of trying to understand the context of what’s going on in the life of a youngster.

Several years ago, I was intrigued when Frank Hewett was at the Midwest Symposium to receive the Leadership Award. Obviously, everybody knew of Frank’s work at UCLA [University of California–Los Angeles] and his identification as a behaviorist, because of his engineered classroom. He had moved to the point where he was very much implementing the notions of Project Re-ED, which was an interesting evolution. That also reminds me of an interview with Abraham Maslow in one of the early editions of Psychology Today. He was asked how he became so interested in humanistic psychology and self-actualization that seemed alien to his traditional academic behavioral psychology training. He said, “Well, I became that way because I became a parent.” I’m intrigued by the notion of how we pursue our learning, realizing that we need rigor and methodology, while also staying open to other ways of viewing children, schools, and one another.

What do you think has had the greatest positive impact on the field?

Maybe the positive impact is yet to be determined to some extent, but I think the realization of how serious behavior issues are and the scope of our situation. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) says that up to 20% of youngsters have significant mental health issues every year. I think there’s some optimism from the standpoint that people realize that resources need to be put into children’s mental health. We have to be determined because we seem to be driven so much by temporary grant opportunities and Band-Aids. We’ve had priorities at the federal level. CDC led to the development of centers at various universities addressing different aspects of behavioral disorders, but unfortunately, too often those have come and gone. So, there’s the issue of sustainability at the federal level and the state level.

That happens at the local level as well.

Exactly—many programs seem to be temporary fixes that are driven in many cases by external funding rather than the notion of what will truly stick in the long run.

I’m also optimistic in regard to the Midwest Symposium for Leadership in Behavioral Disorders. For more than 30 years, a group of people has come together to engage in catharsis, support each other, ask questions about what’s really important, and why do we do what we do. I think of my long-term professional friend Reece Peterson, who along with Rich Simpson, Sharon Huntze, and Bob and Mary Kay Zabel brought the planning for this organization into a reality. I think that having a support structure like that is so important. I think that the people whom I’ve been fortunate enough to work with in the field of behavior disorders have really supported each other. I contrast that with stories I’ve heard from other areas in special education and also some history in the field of behavior disorders. I think that’s a real positive our field, but whether that type of energy can be sustained in a new generation of educators is a question.

What would you say has had the biggest negative effect on the field?

Two things I think of immediately. One is the public’s association of violence with mental illness that results in a stigma associated with children, adolescents, and adults who have mental health needs. I think that’s a real challenge. If a youngster is experiencing mental health needs, what’s the likelihood that youngster or his or her family will admit that when there could be extreme stigmatization? School shootings are very, very rare, and frankly, they have disproportionally underinvolved kids with disabilities.

A real concern is the total generalization of special education training to basically say we will train special educators to teach youngsters with any disabilities and we don’t need to have specific training in the field of behavioral disorders. I may be a dinosaur, because I think that’s a really bad direction to go. As we think about the power of recognizing relationships, looking beyond a behavior and trying to understand it in context, in addition to the skills for dealing with crisis issues or teaching social skills, I believe that it’s very difficult to develop those understandings and skills in a generic program. If we had a serious medical problem tomorrow that required surgery, would we want a general surgeon to do the procedure? I think we would demand someone who has specific expertise.

If a state department of education doesn’t require those kinds of certifications anymore, how do you address that?

I think it’s going to boil down to a lot of things. At the federal level, they basically just say teachers need to be “highly qualified” on the state standards. Unfortunately, I think it’s probably going to take some major litigation like the class action lawsuits prior to P. L. 94-142.

Do you think that’s likely?

I think it’s going to take a perfect storm. The biggest hooks that we have are the professional advocacy groups and professional practitioners lining up and talking about supporting each other’s advocacy agenda. That might occur in areas like autism, where those groups have lined up well. I’ve been involved with the advocacy group for ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder] which aligns researchers, policy people, and advocates. It’s going to be slowest to emerge for those kids we consider oppositional or conduct disordered and whose family support systems are less equipped to challenge authority. I’m most concerned about how we advocate for those kids.

A couple years ago, with the CHADD [Children and Adults With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder] group, we pulled together 20 to 25 parent organizations and others to talk about an agenda for reauthorization of IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act]. I think that did impact the original 1997-to-2004 amendments. It was a process of bringing together people representing Tourette’s syndrome, OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder], autism, and CCBD [CEC Council for Children With Behavioral Disorders], and getting them to talk about what we have in common and what we are hoping will happen with the discipline requirements of IDEA. Peter Jensen and I led some of that effort and it was an interesting experience from the standpoint of his expertise in child psychiatry and some of my work on issues of educational advocacy.

It’s been 10 years since the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA, yet Congress has not yet dealt with that.

Unfortunately people such as senator Tom Harkin from the state of Iowa have retired. Harkin stood on the Senate floor, arguing very persuasively and passionately for disciplinary protections for kids who were threatening others. I was so proud to watch that. There was so much sentiment in 2003 and 2004 about why things should be tightened up regarding behaviorally disordered youth. I was able to tell him how much I really respected that he took a stand with little support.

What do you see in the future for the field of EBD?

I’m most concerned about having people who identify that as their primary area of interest. I’m kind of idealistic, but when I talk with my students about what kind of jobs there will be in the future, my response to them is that you have to follow your bliss. If you have the passion for this, there will be opportunities. Even if they change everything to a generic model, people will still have to deal with significant issues of behavior, mental health, et cetera. So, I say, “Follow your bliss,” although I sometimes worry whether young people feel like they have that option. When looking at their student debt coming out of a program, I realize it was easier for me to follow my bliss when I borrowed $1,000 a year on a guaranteed student loan.

What advice would you offer to those entering the field, whether they are practitioners in the K–12 system or young faculty members entering higher education?

I would be skeptical about the market-driven projections. I think there are a lot of people in very opportune job markets who aren’t very happy. Think about ways to build a support system and to pursue what we really love as opposed what we think we must do to survive. I know that’s easier said than done, but I think it’s a significant key to success.

Dr. Smith, thank you taking your time to share your thoughts with us.