From Disciplinary Order to Medicalized Order With Response to Intervention/Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports

• In Event: Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Translating Policy Into Practice in Schooling Contexts

Abstract

As per IDEA 2004, inclusive leaders shifted their schools from disciplinary to therapeutic approaches to disorderly behavior via Response to Intervention (RTI) and Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS). Two discourses of disorder figured prominently in their leadership: disorder-as-disease and disorder-as-unruly-conduct. This qualitative study demonstrates that compliance and order define normal behavior. In five districts, school leaders were followed as they set the terms for their schools' work with the students whom they felt most challenging. Order and compliance were the basis of normal student behavior as per Codes of Conduct. In RTI/PBIS regimes, that same work was done by the first tier of the pyramid. With that baseline established, upper tiers then did the diagnostic work of medicalizing deviance.

Author

• Joshua Bornstein, Syracuse City School District