Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) has shaped how schools approach student behavior for more than three decades. Most of us, however, might not know how deeply PBIS is rooted in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA)—or how that relationship explains both the power and the limits of our current systems. It’s time to widen our toolbox to include not just reinforcement and data, but also the psychology, compassion, and connection that help every student thrive.
-by Dr. Tim Grivois, Executive Director
The Split Between PBIS and Applied Behavior Analysis
Dr. Lauryn Toby and Erica Ranade, in Psychology Essentials for Behavior Analysts, describe how Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) can heal by returning to its psychological roots. When ABA split from traditional psychology, practitioners within the field began applying a much narrower set of tools. And, as the saying goes, when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
This evolution matters because ABA became the foundation for Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS). Understanding the relationship between PBIS and Applied Behavior Analysis helps explain both the strengths and limitations of how we support student behavior in schools today.
When your only tool is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.
Why the ABA Foundation Matters for Educators
From the beginning, PBIS was built to take what worked best from ABA and apply those already narrow tools to schoolwide systems. The idea was simple: choose the most effective hammers for shaping positive behavior and use them everywhere.
In principle, this made sense. ABA provided a structured, data-informed way to identify behavior patterns and reinforce what works. PBIS extended that structure to the entire school, creating consistency across classrooms and staff.
“PBIS was built to take what worked best from ABA and apply it everywhere.”
The Best of PBIS Is Still Worth Keeping
To be fair, the basics of PBIS are hard to argue. Of course, students benefit from consistent, clear expectations. Obviously, recognizing students for the good they bring to our school communities makes positive habits more likely. And every teacher I’ve ever met appreciates when their school has a common language for responding to unexpected behaviors.
At its best, PBIS can be a framework for living our values out loud—helping all students, without exception, become successful learners and good people.
“At its best, PBIS can be a framework for living our values out loud.”
Dr. Tim Grivois
When PBIS Starts to Believe Its Own Hype
When PBIS becomes divorced from its broader roots in psychology and education, it starts to believe its own hype. In a recent conversation I had with Dr. Alan Cook, he described PBIS as “the longest running educational research project in the United States.”
He’s not wrong. PBIS proponents have developed frameworks for fidelity and enforced them through research. The result is that we now know a narrow range of highly specific hammers can reliably drive nails in school systems—but we’ve done little to explore what other tools might build something stronger, more humane, and more whole.
“We’ve proven PBIS can drive nails. The question is whether a nail was ever the right fastener.”
This is one of the key limitations of PBIS and Applied Behavior Analysis as currently practiced: fidelity frameworks often outpace curiosity. When the focus is on proving what works, we sometimes forget to ask whether it’s what students actually need.
When the Tools Stop Fitting the Work
For example, we don’t need to turn to research to tell us that PBIS stores are boondoggles—but we certainly could. Studies like Maggin, Freeman, & Sugai (2021) question the motivational value and equity implications of token economies in schools.
Furthermore, every school I know implementing Check-In/Check-Out as a Tier 2 behavior intervention knows that the main source of implementation stress is asking teachers to circle numbers on a daily point card when the real intervention is the conversation.
“The real intervention isn’t the point card—it’s the conversation.”
Every PBIS trainer everywhere, including Dr. Tim Grivois
And finally, why would we create a color-coded system of support that assumes a certain percentage of students will always need more help? That’s not a reflection of student need. It’s a reflection of how deeply we’ve come to believe in our own framework. This is exactly what a solution in search of a problem looks like.
These examples illustrate how PBIS and Applied Behavior Analysis, when narrowly applied, risk becoming systems for managing behavior rather than understanding people.
PBIS and ABA: Returning to What’s Human
If PBIS is to fulfill its promise, we’ll need to look beyond hammers and remember that behavior support, at its core, is a deeply human practice—one rooted not in compliance or color-coded tiers, but in curiosity, compassion, and connection.
Healing the relationship between PBIS and Applied Behavior Analysis means restoring the full psychological context of behavior: people learn, grow, and change through relationships, not just reinforcements. When schools widen the toolbox, behavior support becomes less about management and more about meaning.