The Problem with ABA and Special Education

“He is just going to end up in a facility, so we just need to teach him to behave”. The youngest person I heard that said about was just 5 years old, but I heard this exact sentiment constantly when working in ABA and special education.

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I had been working as a chemist after my PhD for about 2 years when I decided to go work in ABA (applied behavior analysis) to see why some autistic people were struggling. As it turned out, my education and teaching experience made this extremely easy, to the surprise of people who had been in the field for years. I began by primarily focusing on working with non-speaking autistic teens, then branching out to non-speaking toddlers and young children, and then later to 2e (twice exceptional) and other highly verbal children. I hadn’t set out with a bone to pick against ABA, but given everything I saw I cannot support even the new “ethical” ABA.   

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It used to be the case that autistic people were strapped to chairs, locked in rooms, or were ignored because they "weren’t capable of language.” This is still done in many places, and autistic advocates have been trying to say this for longer than I have been alive. I learned when taking BCBA (board certified behavior analyst) courses that it is considered against the BCBA ethics code to listen to advocates because that is not considered evidence-based. Some people claim that level 1 autism shouldn't be categorized with level 2 and 3 autism, but a real scientist would see that there are some autistic people who are able to be successful and some that aren't, and assume the ones that are knew something that they didn't. Would it perhaps not be more parsimonious to consider that the difference between functioning levels may be because engineers and professors know more about how to raise people like them than unskilled educators? 

It has been intimated to me by people high up in ABA that they are aware that the people working in clinics, as opposed to academic ABA, are unskilled and unethical. In an actual applied science, one would be familiar with Six Sigma and do things like root cause analyses to identify and correct this problem. In ABA, unskilled people in clinics continue to proliferate exponentially (see graph shown to the right). The unskilled teach the unskilled, diluting what little skill they had in the first place each time, and damaging autistic people with their incompetence. Instead of identifying and fixing the problem, ABA has codified sweeping it under the rug (see slides pictured to right). It is against the BCBA ethics code for BCBAs to speak negatively about ABA, since doing so might "reduce people's faith in science and evidence-based treatment." Real science would not be afraid of this. 

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In 2008, after the explosion at UCLA, the chemistry world increased its safety culture, promoting transparency and  psychological safety for workers and grad students, and encouraging people of all levels and abilities to raise concerns if they felt there might be an issue. The American Chemical Society teaches that everyone needs to be able to learn how to do important reactions safely, and so the culture and training was brought to a high standard to allow for this. ABA does the opposite. ABA tries to sweep the problem under the rug, BCBAs openly reprimand employees who bring up concerns, and most clinics turn away challenging cases. ABA likes to call itself a natural science.

Since ABA refuses to listen to autistic advocates or fix the problem, you can read the horrors described by their own workers on posts about the field (here, here, here, here, and here, for example). I too witnessed people yelling at autistic children. Nevertheless, I did my best to work in places following the “new, ethical ABA,” which took the ABA world by storm after Dr. Greg Hanley’s blog post in 2020. While Hanley meant well, his post not only comes off as odd and patronizing to autistic people, the same people running the old ABA still run the new ABA. Now, they lock children in rooms for hours with nothing to do in the name of being “sensory friendly,” force compliance gradually instead of abruptly, or don’t teach them at all for “ethical reasons." These are not isolated incidents, and I saw them in every place I went. In therapy, when one person is engaging in abuse in a family or relationship, counseling is contraindicated because all it does is teach the abuser to hide the abuse with therapy-speak, and that is exactly what happened with ABA. ABA learned how to be more covert in their abuse and neglect, cover it up better, and keep billing insurance for it. Parents of autistic children shouldn’t have to choose between the educational abuse or the educational neglect of their child, and autistic people shouldn’t be subject to it at all.

Autistic children also shouldn't have to deal with adults showing submission to them, as Hanley recommends they do in his article. This is what is known as parentification in developmental psychology and it is an excessive amount of emotional responsibility, bordering on neglect, for a young child to be entirely responsible for their own learning and future as well as the person who is supposed to be leading them. The fact that abusive and controlling people with no tangible skills seek authority over autistic people to cruelly dominate them to validate their own insecurities does not mean autistic children should be left completely alone without guidance in life and having to choose between being parentified or being abused.

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In these places, the staff teach the autistic person "functional skills" like sorting silverware, which they treat as a pinnacle of an autistic person's existence. They deem tasks like this as a big deal to learn instead of something that is simply a part of a person's developmental journey. While it is certainly better to teach a "functional" skill over a "nonfunctional" skill, there is more to life than being able to do a useful action. It feels as if they never considered learning as something that is normal and desirable for young people, so evidently neurotypical people can do everything without ever being taught. Most people, not just autistic people, would find it upsetting being raised solely to be someone's cute little stimmy pet that can do tricks on command like sort silverware.

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There was an instance when I was working in special education in which I asked why the programming of the students hadn’t been updated in 3 years and I was indignantly told, “not everyone needs to have a PhD in chemistry!” I was confused. I got to be trained to a high level in the topic I was most passionate about. Who said anything about need? Education is a gift and I now had the skills to give this gift. And even if the level of education I received is too much for the average person, surely not being taught at all in school for 3 years straight is still wrong? Somehow, nobody around me seemed to even recognize the possibility that not allowing someone to develop and then blaming their lack of ability to do things on a “developmental disability” could be wrong.

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Autistic people have more sensitivity to sensory input than an average person, but this gets used against them in the same way women used to have overstimulation used against them. Women who were stressed out from being abused by their husbands and not being allowed to engage in meaningful work used to be treated for hysteria with bedrest, and it is uncanny how The Yellow Wallpaper could just as easily be written today with an autistic protagonist. The most striking characteristic of autistic people is not their overstimulation but their courage to keep fighting and their love of interesting things about the world.

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Through my work it became clear that the goal of these places- special education and ABA- is to protect the egos of parents and workers, nothing more.  
 

Why doesn’t ABA work?

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In Teaching to Transgress, Bell Hooks talks about how there are two different classes of education- that given to those with a gifted label, where they learn to challenge the status quo, and that for everyone else who is expected to conform. The problem for autistic people is that unless they are put on the gifted pathway, they will struggle to learn. If at any point the autistic person is deemed unworthy of being seen as gifted, whether by parents, teachers, or therapists, their development will usually come to a halt. The majority of the reason there are different “levels” of autism is simply a matter of how old someone was when they were put on a behavior path versus a gifted path. The behavior path is "low status" education and the gifted path is "high status" education.

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The reason I was so good at teaching was that I myself had been both raised in a gifted pathway and had also taught university-level chemistry classes and self-directed language classes. In essence, I had learned to teach through these “high status” teaching methods. High status teaching focuses on growth and learning, while low status teaching focuses on behavior and the emotions of the teacher or parent. The reason BCBA-Ds (doctoral level BCBAs) tend to be better at behavior analysis is not because behavior analysis itself is valid, it is because they themselves were not taught via the low status teaching methods of ABA, and therefore possess skills beyond ABA, unlike the majority of masters level “scientists” that dominate the field. All autistic people deserve high status education, because that is what allows them to succeed, instead of what gets inflicted on them by the likes of ABA and its advocates such as Autism Speaks.

 

What can be done?

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Activists like Oliver James (pictured on the right) have done an incredible amount of work fighting to learn to read after having been failed by special education that never taught him how. You can watch his reading journey on YouTube. Nevertheless, it is not enough to just sit by while victims of this “education” teach themselves. The system itself must change, and those of us with the power to do something about how much this system lets young people down need to step up.

 

When I was taking classes for the BCBA program through Florida Tech (considered by many to be the highest ranked online BCBA program), I got to witness something truly bizarre. I was taking the Ethics for Behavior Analysts course and sat there and listened as Dr. Mary Jane Weiss, who is a member of the ABA ethics hotline, pleaded with us to be understanding of how hard they were trying to listen to “people with autism,” who then spent the entire lecture talking about the feelings of the parents and how hard the parents have it and how to ensure one listens to the parents of “children with autism.” The lecture was focused entirely on validating the parents and not upsetting them. 

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I then sat there and listened as Dr. Kaitlynn Gokey told us that “virtue ethics are a form of rule-based ethics,” that “rule-based ethics aren’t valid because you can’t have a rule for everything” and that “deontology means that everything is contextual, for example that it is ethically mandated to push someone out of the way of a moving car, ethically neutral to push someone in a moshpit, and ethically wrong to push someone to take something from them.” I cannot emphasize how incorrect all of this is. Even if you disagree with Kant, it is insane to completely recategorize deontology to something that it isn’t (and somehow a separate category from rule-based ethics).

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Gokey also sang high praise for Skinner, whose work the entire field of ABA is based on, for his ethical “discovery” that there is no such thing as good and bad behavior, and that ethics is completely derived from what he termed “countercontrol.” This would strike anyone who is familiar with Nietzsche as odd, given that Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil many years before Skinner was even born, and that what Skinner calls “countercontrol,” Nietzsche calls herd morality. Gokey is of course just repeating what the ABA literature and textbooks say and is not at fault for the fact the field itself doesn't know this, but you can see the ineffectiveness of herd morality by the fact that it didn’t change the behavior of the ethics professors to make them listen to autistic people more, it only made them plead at us more to be “understanding” of them. The antidote to herd morality is fighting to have the skills to actually make a change, but by denying autistic people anything other than functional skills, they make it impossible for autistic people to fight back.

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ABA, together with organizations like Autism Speaks, put a lot of money into convincing people that autistic people are fundamentally disabled and need their services through lobbying, funding biased research, and online campaigns. Nevertheless, the first step towards dismantling these abusive organizations is simple. Nietzsche had much better things to say on language, behavior, and on what one can know than anything Skinner had to say. Skinner writes like a high schooler who stayed up all night reading Sparknotes to write an essay. We don’t fix the system by pleading with them to be ethical, we prove that they are incompetent and don’t even understand behavior to begin with and that Skinner was a fraud.