GRADED: PBIS- Positive Behavior Interventions & Supports

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PBIS is implemented in over 25,000 schools. Your district swears by it. But does it actually help kids- or just make the data look better? 

In this candid episode of my Graded series, I'm giving PBIS the report card it deserves... and it may not be what you expect. 

What you'll learn: 

• The gaps in the research that nobody seems to mention 
• Why equity matters, and how it isn't automatic in PBIS (with studies to prove it) 
• The "invisible kids" PBIS never identifies 
• Real strategies for counselors working inside PBIS systems 

By the end, you’ll know what PBIS can do for your campus... and where you’ll need to step in.

⚠️ This episode challenges the status quo. If you're ready for real talk about what's really happening in PBIS schools, press play.

This episode is highly researched: email for reference citations

Chapters

• 0:00 The Kids PBIS Misses
• 3:31 PBIS Explained: Research vs Reality
• 6:59 The Problem with Rewards
• 10:53 Implementation Challenges in Schools
• 14:10 School Counselor's PBIS Survival Guide
• 20:04 Final Grade and Call to Action

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Picture this. It's 10 15 in the morning at a local school campus. There are three kids already sitting outside the principal's office, and they're the same three kids from last week. They're even sitting in the same chairs. Zoe's there for eye rolling and talking back during math. Marcus got sent out for wandering the classroom and humming. Apparently that was disruptive. And Aisha, her referral just says defiance. But here's what the referral slips don't tell you. Zoe's parents are getting divorced. Marcus hums when he's anxious. It's his coping mechanism. And Aisha asked to use the bathroom three times during the lesson because her stomach hurts when she's overwhelmed. The principal looks at their PBIS dashboard. Office referrals are down 30% this year. The district is thrilled. But these three kids are not getting better. Their behavior has changed, sure, but it's getting quieter. Which brings us to the question that should keep every school counselor awake at night. Does PBIS actually help kids, or does it just teach them to suffer in silence? By the end of the episode, you'll know the answer, and you might not like what you discover. Before we go any further, let me tell you something your administrator probably left out of the PBIS training. Nearly all the research that they're using to justify this system is from elementary schools. Suburban elementary schools with stable leadership and ongoing coaching support. So when they tell you PBIS is evidence-based for your middle school, your high school, or your Title I school with 40% turnover every year, they're making a promise that the research never actually made. But to really understand PBIS, we need to start at the beginning. Hey school counselor, welcome back. In this episode of our graded series, we're tackling one of the most widely adopted behavior frameworks in schools today, PBIS, or positive behavior interventions and supports. You've been told PBIS will reduce office referrals, improve student behavior, and create a more positive school climate. But does it really deliver on those promises? Or is it just another system that looks good on paper while leaving the real issues untouched? I'll share where PBIS actually shines: the research that shows its blind spots, and the counselor-specific strategies you'll need if you're working in a PBIS school. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, a little clarity and maybe a touch of rebellion, you're in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. All right, so before we grade PBIS, let's be crystal clear about what we're actually evaluating. You probably know PBIS is a three-tiered framework. And Tier 1 is the stuff that everybody sees. Those are the school-wide expectations, positive reinforcement, teaching behaviors like academic subjects. This is where schools post those colorful posters, train in behavior matrices, and hand out PBIS tickets. Tier 2 adds targeted support, check-ins, small groups, and progress monitoring for kids who need more structure. And then tier three gets intensive with functional behavior assessments, wraparound planning, and individualized interventions. Now here's what your administrator probably didn't tell you. Nearly all the research that they're using to justify PBIS focuses on tier one in elementary schools. And to be fair, those tier one elementary studies are strong. They show PBIS can really shift the climate when implemented well. But that doesn't automatically mean that the same thing happens in middle schools or high schools, or even in tier two and three supports. So when they say PBIS is evidence-based, they're talking about teaching kindergartners to walk quietly in hallways. That research doesn't automatically apply to your high school, your tier two interventions, or your kids with complex trauma. The evidence base for PBIS gets thinner and thinner the further you move from suburban elementary schools. Remember that. But let me be fair here: PBIS isn't educational snake oil. The research does show genuine benefits, and ignoring them would be dishonest on my part. Office discipline referrals do drop significantly. In the largest randomized trial, which was 37 schools over four years, kids in PBIS schools were 33% less likely to get sent to the office. That's one out of every three referrals that are prevented. Imagine your current week. Instead of seeing the same five kids rotating through the office, you're seeing three. Instead of teachers feeling defeated by constant disruptions, they're actually teaching. And that means there's more learning happening. Bullying decreases, school climate improves, teachers report less stress. These aren't small effects we're talking about, and they're consistent across multiple large-scale studies. But here's where it gets interesting. High schools show much smaller and less consistent effects. The magic happens in elementary schools who have stable leadership and ongoing coaching support. So PBIS works under specific conditions for certain populations when measured in particular ways. Are you starting to see the cracks in this approach? So then let me tell you about the kids who haunt me. These are the kids that PBIS is never gonna catch. Let me tell you about Maya. She's not real, but she represents dozens of kids that I've worked with. Maya is a seventh grader with anxiety. She sits in the back corner, she never causes trouble, gets decent grades. Teachers love her because she's not a problem. But Maya's stomach hurts every morning. She has panic attacks in the bathroom stalls. She's convinced she's stupid because her brain goes blank during tests. She goes home exhausted from the emotional labor of appearing fine all day. How many office referrals do you think Maya has generated? You're right, it's zero. Is she struggling more than half the kids who do get referred? Absolutely. PBIS research is almost silent on anxiety and depression. The framework is designed to catch externalizing behaviors, the kids who act out. But what about the kids who internalize? What about the ones whose response is to disappear rather than to disrupt? We're optimizing a system to catch the loudest pain while the quietest suffering goes completely unnoticed. That should terrify us. And while PBIS is missing those kids, there's even another blind spot that we need to talk about. It's not the kids this time, though, it's the tools that PBIS relies on to shape behavior. And this is always a hot topic among school counselors. PBIS rewards. PBIS is built on reinforcement, and in most schools, that looks like tickets, tokens, prize boxes, pizza parties, right? The idea is simple. You reward the behavior you want to see, and you'll see more of it. But here's where it gets tricky. Decades of research on rewards paints a complicated picture. DC Costner and Ryan 1999 found that expected tangible rewards can actually undermine intrinsic motivation if they feel controlling. Think about it. If students start behaving just to earn a ticket, what happens when the tickets disappear? On the flip side, Cameron, Banco, and Pierce 2001 argued that the undermining effect isn't universal. Under certain conditions, rewards don't harm motivation at all. So what do we do with that? Here's the takeaway. Some argue that the undermining effect is overstated, but I think the caution is still valid. If PBIS becomes all about tickets and treasure chests without thoughtful design and a plan to fade them out, we're building compliance, not capacity. Rewards can buy us short-term calm, but calm is not the same thing as growth. And that's the danger. When we start mistaking quiet classrooms for thriving ones. So you may be thinking by this point, okay, Steph, I get it, PBIS has problems, but it's the system that I'm working in. My campus requires it, so what do I do now? And that's a fair question. It means we need to talk about what actually happens when schools try to implement PBIS in the real world. Let's talk about the stuff they don't put in the research papers when we talk about PBIS meetings. Imagine it's November. The PBIS coach is reviewing data with your team. Someone mentions that referrals are up in the fifth grade. The principal suggests more rewards. The coach talks about reteaching expectations. But no one mentions that Miss Smith refers twice as many kids as Miss Rodriguez. No one asks why defiance referrals spike right after lunch. And no one wonders if the kids getting referred are the same ones who didn't have anybody to eat lunch with. Here's what the research really shows about implementation. PBIS implementation requires massive infrastructure, ongoing coaching, leadership stability, staff buy-in, data systems, time for teaching, and reinforcing behaviors. And that's not just my observation. There are studies to back this up. Coffee and Horner 2012 showed that PBIS sustainability depends on leadership and resources. Paws and Colleagues 2019 found that schools in statewide PBIS rollouts only saw benefits when they had coaching and systems support. Most schools get a two-day training if they're lucky and some posters for the hallway. Then they wonder why their outcomes don't match the research studies that had full-time coaches and monthly data reviews. Enthusiasm is not the same as evidence, and a framework is only as good as the systems that support it. All right, so we've covered the research, the problems, and the kids being left behind, and you've been really patient through all of this complexity. But let's talk bottom line. Where does PBIS actually work? What grade does it earn? And what should you do about it tomorrow morning? Here are the real conditions for PBIS success. Elementary schools with stable leadership, ongoing coaching, and integrated systems see consistent benefits. When PBIS isn't running as an isolated program, but as part of comprehensive support that includes SEL, mental health services, and equity audits, that's where the magic happens. Picture that first school again, but done right. Teachers get monthly coaching regarding their recent behavior referrals. The counselor runs some anxiety screenings alongside PBIS data collection. Tier two interventions are function-based, not just behavior checklists. And student voice is built into expectation setting. That's PBIS as a foundation, not the finish line. It creates calm enough space for real progress to happen. It reduces the background noise so school counselors can focus on the more complex cases. But getting there requires very specific measures. So if you're working in a PBIS school, here's your survival checklist because I'm sorry to tell you, with this knowledge, your job just got a little bit more intense. First, don't trust office referrals as your only data. Push for climate surveys, attendance patterns, nurse visits for stomach aches. Disaggregate everything by demographics, disability, gender, teacher, location, because that is where the real stories live. That's what we're working on right now in our data discussions cohort inside the School for School Counselor's mastermind. Second, build your own mental health radar. PBIS is never going to identify all your internalizing kids. Create screening systems, train teachers to refer withdrawn students, and make space for the quiet strugglers. And third, become the equity watchdog. You might be the only person in those PBIS meetings asking why certain teachers refer more students in certain categories. It's not a comfortable job to have, but it is necessary. And then fourth, make tier two interventions actually functional. Daily check-ins are not counseling. Progress monitoring is not relationship building. Push for the time to implement interventions that address why kids struggle, not just whether they comply. You know, I'll be honest with you. And it felt so much better than the punitive systems that so many of us grew up with. It took seeing too many Mayas slip through the cracks before I realized we might be measuring the wrong things. We were celebrating quieter hallways while students were having panic attacks in the bathroom. We were proud of reduced referrals while the most vulnerable students became more invisible than ever. That's when I learned the difference between compliance and true support. And that's why I'm asking you to think bigger about PBIS. All right, so you've been patient. Time for the report card. Here's what PBIS does well. Elementary schools with proper support see real improvements in behavior and climate. So that's solid B territory and sometimes even B, if their conditions are strong. But here's where it struggles. High schools see much weaker results. Equity isn't automatic. It requires intentional design. And PBIS has significant blind spots when it comes to internalizing concerns. Academic effects are inconsistent. Some studies show gains and others don't. And sustainability completely depends on having coaching and infrastructure that most schools don't actually have. So what's the overall grade for PBIS? A C. PBIS can create calmer schools and reduce certain discipline problems. And that has real value. But it's not comprehensive, it's not equitable, and it misses huge populations of struggling kids. PBIS is a decent foundation. But if you mistake the foundation for the whole house, a lot of kids are going to end up freezing out in the rain. So, what do we do with all this? First, stop wondering does PBIS work? I can't tell you how many times I see that question asked. Instead, start asking, for whom does it work? And who are we missing? Secondly, use PBIS data as a starting point, not the end point. When office referrals drop, dig deeper. Are kids getting better support, or are they just getting better at hiding struggles? And third, become the advocate for invisible kids. You might be the only person in your building systematically looking for the quiet strugglers or the anxious overachievers or the kids whose trauma makes them disappear rather than disrupt. Your district wants you to implement PBIS. I get it. But I want you to transcend it. Use it as your starting point, then build the supports that actually transform lives. Because here's what I know about you. You didn't become a school counselor to improve data dashboards. You became a counselor to make sure that every kid feels seen, valued, and capable of growth. PBIS can help with that goal, but it cannot be the goal. Kids like Maya, the ones PBIS never even notices, are counting on you to go beyond the numbers. And speaking of thinking bigger than PBIS, if this episode resonated with you, I want to tell you about something that's been a game changer for school counselors who are ready to go beyond surface level solutions. It's called the School for School Counselors Mastermind. And it's where school counselors like you come together to tackle the hard questions that PBIS trainings never ask. Questions like, how do we actually find the Mayas in our schools? What do we do when district initiatives conflict with what kids really need? And how do we advocate for equity without burning bridges? This isn't just another online workshop or professional development session where you sit and listen. This is a community of counselors who refuse to settle for good enough data when kids are struggling. We dig into the research, share real strategies and experiences, and hold each other accountable for creating change that actually matters. So if you're tired of feeling like the only person asking the uncomfortable questions, you're not alone. And you don't have to figure it out by yourself. Head to schoolforschool counselors.com slash mastermind to learn more about joining us. Because better counselors really do mean better outcomes. And that starts with school counselors who think critically, act boldly, and never stop advocating for every single kid. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, keep asking the hard questions, keep fighting for the invisible kids. And remember, better numbers don't always mean better students, but better counselors always mean better outcomes. Take care.