The History of PBIS Diffusion

The widely implemented PBIS framework has been leading this antipodal shift in school discipline paradigms since the late 1990s. According to the Center on PBIS (2021b), as of 2018, PBIS was being implemented in nearly 28,000, or about 25 percent of, schools across the United States. As of 2018, California, our home state, had nearly 2,500 schools using a PBIS framework, and twenty-one U.S. states had at least five hundred schools using PBIS (Georgia Department of Education, 2018).

In order to understand PBIS’s ascendance as the most diffusely applied positive and proactive approach to school discipline in the United States (Center on PBIS, 2021b), it is important to take a brief look at its origin and subsequent history. The next section traces how PBIS got its start in federal laws passed to protect the civil rights of students with special needs and in the work of the U.S. Department of Education. This is followed by the influence of federal policies and grant money made available to schools for improving school climate and culture and mitigating disproportionality in exclusionary discipline. Last, we reveal the paradox, or what we call the open secret, of PBIS’s overall effectiveness in improving school safety and reducing the need for punitive practices, yet its limited success at creating equity in school discipline and welcoming school environments for underserved students.

The History of PBIS Diffusion

So, how did the PBIS framework come to be used in thousands of individual schools and districts across the United States? PBIS, alternatively referred to as schoolwide positive behavioral interventions and supports (SWPBIS) and positive behavioral supports (PBS), was developed in the late 1990s by researchers out of the University of Oregon (Goodman-Scott, Hays, & Cholewa, 2018). Educators had known about prevention-based approaches for addressing problematic student behaviors since the 1970s but they had not yet been implemented on a wide scale (Sugai & Horner, 2002).

In 1997, the U.S. federal government passed the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which included provisions for schools to adopt positive and preventive disciplinary practices in order to address the overrepresentation of students with special needs in exclusionary discipline (Bal, 2015; Goodman-Scott et al., 2018). In response to IDEA, researchers at the University of Oregon developed the PBIS framework and a federally funded national center to support schools, districts, and states with their implementation of PBIS, called the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) Technical Assistance Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (Goodman-Scott et al., 2018). In 2004, IDEA was reauthorized with added requirements that schools address racial disproportionality in exclusionary discipline (Bal, 2015). Moreover, PBIS was the only schoolwide disciplinary approach specifically mentioned in IDEA 2004 (Bal, 2015), and this near endorsement had profound ramifications for PBIS’s subsequent national diffusion.