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SUPPORTING UNDERSERVED STUDENTS
The Need for Authenticity Lefki Kourea, Ya-Yu Lo, and Tosha Owens (2016) assert that PBIS can become culturally and linguistically responsive by considering students’ different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, we can conclude that PBIS is not inherently culturally and linguistically responsive because it needs to be adapted in order to have cultural responsiveness. We can even infer that PBIS is not authentically culturally responsive because the original developers of PBIS advise that it should be made so by educators. George Sugai, Breda O’Keeffe, and Lindsay Fallon (2012) state that “implementation can be enhanced further by considering the cultural context and learning history of students and family, faculty, and community members” (p. 204). The Center on PBIS (2021e) also describes this need for adapting PBIS for cultural responsiveness by ensuring that each school’s PBIS has cultural and contextual fit.
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Although use of PBIS itself is not legally mandated, U.S. schools and districts have been required by the U.S. Department of Education since the late 1990s to move toward a positive and proactive behavioral approach in order to comply with IDEA. Additionally, according to Christina A. Samuels (2013), the widespread increase in use of PBIS has in part been incentivized by former president Barack Obama’s Race to the Top educational reform plan. During President Obama’s administration, schools and districts could obtain funding to improve school climate through Race to the Top grants, particularly to address inequities in discipline data in compliance with IDEA 2004’s provision that schools mitigate racial disparities in exclusionary discipline. Furthermore, according to a fact sheet by Partners for Dignity and Rights (2021), PBIS was specifically highlighted “as a transformation model for turning around a state’s lowest achieving schools.” Thus, the combination of legal compliance with IDEA, possible access to federal funding, and research showing the ineffectiveness of punitive policies created the conditions for PBIS’s expansive growth. Since the early 2000s, the PBIS approach has demonstrated its effectiveness in reducing exclusionary discipline and shifting teachers, schools, and districts toward a nonpunitive approach (Sugai, O’Keeffe, & Fallon, 2012). Yet, as previously noted, this success has not been all-inclusive (Sugai et al., 2012; Vincent, Sprague, CHiXapkaid, Tobin, & Gau, 2015). In other words, the data show that PBIS has worked for some students but not equitably for all students. Despite PBIS’s documented success, data for schools and districts implementing the PBIS framework reveal that Black and Latinx students have continued to be disproportionately represented in exclusionary discipline (Vincent & Tobin, 2011). Why, then, has this approach not consistently shown the same effectiveness with historically underserved and marginalized students as it has with the demographically dominant group (specifically, White students)? We argue that this discrepancy exists because PBIS was not originally culturally and linguistically responsive in its inception and its intention. The next section outlines the reasons for this argument.
