The High Costs of Classroom Disorder

Since at least 2022, the education world has been preoccupied with the “teacher exodus”: a troubling trend of teachers quitting at record rates. Though attrition has eased somewhat since its pandemic peak, it remains stubbornly high. Deteriorating classroom conditions are a big reason. Teachers cite chronic student misbehavior as the top source of stress and burnout, ranking it above workload and even pay.

Longtime educator Ben Foley is one of many who found the situation unbearable. After more than two decades teaching middle school in California, he resigned midyear, worn down by classrooms that had descended into chaos. He described the daily environment as “anarchic,” with students routinely ignoring basic instructions, roaming the room, throwing things, and roughhousing. Foley likened the experience to “death by a thousand cuts,” explaining that “for every request I make, several kids flat-out defy it.”

Foley blamed the breakdown on lax discipline practices introduced under Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), a widely adopted framework for managing student behavior. In debates over weak school discipline, PBIS often escapes scrutiny, overshadowed by its more politically charged cousin, restorative justice. But PBIS is no less problematic; it simply masks its anti-punitive bias behind uncontroversial goals like improved data collection and clearer communication. It’s also far more widely used than restorative justice and has been a fixture in school discipline policy for decades—backed by a dedicated, taxpayer-funded center run by the U.S. Department of Education.

When I began asking teachers about PBIS, I heard no shortage of complaints. Educators described how it drove disruptive classrooms, undermined their authority, and made effective teaching nearly impossible. Yet when I spoke with PBIS trainers and reviewed official materials, the disconnect was striking: trainers insisted that the teacher accounts didn’t reflect the structured framework they endorsed. It quickly became clear that PBIS is complex and highly adaptable, with implementation varying widely from school to school. To understand how one discipline model can produce such divergent outcomes, we need to examine what PBIS is, where it came from, and how it rose to dominate school discipline in the United States.

PBIS is designed to promote positive student behavior—and, ideally, to reduce the negative kind. Trainers emphasize that PBIS is a management system, not an intervention. It doesn’t mandate specific behavior expectations or consequences for misconduct; instead, those decisions are left to each school’s discretion, with PBIS offering tools to manage and assess them. Still, the framework strongly encourages rewarding positive behavior over punishment, and newer versions take ever-firmer stances against punitive measures.

PBIS operates through a three-tiered system, with each tier offering increasingly targeted support for students struggling with behavior. Tier 1 is universal: school leaders set conduct expectations for all students. While full implementation includes all three tiers, many schools—and most PBIS studies—focus only on Tier 1, due to limited resources. Tier 2 provides extra support for students who don’t respond to the universal approach, using tools like regular staff check-ins. Tier 3 delivers individualized strategies for students with the most serious behavioral challenges. This layered model is also used in related frameworks like the Multi-Tiered System of Supports and Response to Intervention.

PBIS’s flexibility stems from its lack of specificity about expectations and tools at each level. It emphasizes communication, management, and data collection. In Tier 1, for example, trainers underline the importance of school leaders setting and communicating clear student expectations—but without defining what those should be or how to convey them. When it comes to consequences, however, flexibility narrows: PBIS explicitly discourages punitive measures and prioritizes positive reinforcement.

PBIS was originally intended for kids with disabilities, not the general student population. Its development began in the 1980s, drawing on applied behavioral analysis to help educators manage students with behavioral disorders. The 1997 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act cemented PBIS’s role in school behavior management by establishing the national Center on PBIS within the Department of Education to support implementation. With federal backing, PBIS expanded in the 2000s beyond special education to become a framework for all students.

PBIS’s rapid growth in the 2000s and 2010s paralleled a broader backlash against the strict school discipline and crime policies of the 1990s. “Zero-tolerance” policies had emerged in reaction to rising crime rates and gained momentum after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, which heightened fears over school safety. Early critics complained about the rigidity of these rules in schools, especially the harsh punishments for relatively minor infractions. But rather than advocating for more balanced approaches, many pushed to relax disciplinary practices broadly, arguing that most forms of school punishment were inherently prone to abuse.

The final blow to zero-tolerance policies came with the rise of the “school-to-prison pipeline” narrative, which claimed that strict discipline practices effectively criminalized black and Hispanic students. This marked an early win for critical race theory in education, relying on the now-familiar tactic of equating racial disparities with discrimination. Proponents highlighted higher punishment rates for black and Hispanic students compared with their white and Asian peers, while largely ignoring underlying differences in behavior. The Obama administration’s 2014 “Dear Colleague” letter called out these disparities and pressured schools to adopt more “equitable” discipline policies. In this climate, educators embraced PBIS not just as a classroom-management tool but as a political response to media and government demands to reduce discipline rates among minority students.

Trainers and advocates for PBIS equivocate when addressing the framework’s politicization and its bias against punishment. In March 2025, Virginia’s Montgomery County Public Schools began considering adopting PBIS. Board member Dana Partin, who described herself as “old-fashioned” on discipline, expressed concern that PBIS was too lenient. But Superintendent Bernard Bragen Jr., alongside the district’s PBIS director, assured her that the program wouldn’t mean “going soft” on student misconduct. Kelly Perales, co–executive director of the Midwest PBIS Network, acknowledged in an interview that politicization of education had become a major hurdle in promoting the program—but accepted no responsibility for that politicization on PBIS’s part.

While promoters may try to present PBIS as everything to everyone to “make the sale,” their own materials tell a clearer story. The best resource to understand what PBIS truly entails is the “fidelity score,” formally known as the Tiered Fidelity Inventory (TFI). The TFI outlines criteria for evaluating how faithfully each PBIS tier is implemented; trainers and researchers routinely use it.

Most of the criteria seem routine—such as whether schools regularly meet to discuss student expectations or whether behavior data are accessible and utilized in decision-making. But under the Tier 1 category for “responses to contextually inappropriate behavior,” the latest TFI manual gives schools a score of 0 if their responses rely solely on “reactive and punitive consequences.” A top score of 4, by contrast, gets awarded when schools emphasize “functionally relevant, instructional, and restorative responses,” restrict suspensions to safety-related incidents, and eliminate or closely monitor practices like restraint. So much for PBIS being flexible enough to accommodate both strict and lenient approaches.

The criteria for Tiers 2 and 3 further expose PBIS’s ideological bent. Both require schools to assess whether “disaggregated data demonstrate equitable representation” in support by race, disability status, language, and gender—and to use that information in decision-making. In practice, this means that racial disparities must be avoided, even if they reflect actual behavioral differences. Does race factor in to how consequences are assigned? One criterion suggests that it might: requiring “decision rules” for Tier 2 interventions to consider “cultural fit.” That’s a thinly veiled rationale for race-based differential treatment, recalling Harvard’s use of “personality scores” to penalize Asian American applicants.

The Department of Education’s Center on PBIS is explicit about the program’s emphasis on equity, particularly racial equity. On its “What is PBIS?” page, the center presents a modified Venn diagram outlining the program’s five core “elements,” with equity placed in the middle. In explaining why schools should adopt PBIS, the center highlights its ability to reduce “racial inequities in discipline,” which means that schools “significantly decrease the racial disparities they see in their discipline practices.”

Despite its politicization, PBIS has managed to become popular in both Republican- and Democratic-run states. Various factors explain its appeal, but the most important is probably its widely touted evidence base. The Center on PBIS proudly claims that “research shows [that PBIS] works, time and time again,” citing more than 200 academic papers purporting to evaluate its effect on outcomes ranging from school climate to academic performance.

Not all research is created equal, however—especially in the social sciences, where a replication crisis has exposed how frequently published findings fail to hold up when studies get repeated. The gold standard in social-science research is the randomized controlled trial (RCT), which best isolates the causal relationship between interventions and outcomes. But RCTs are time-consuming and expensive, which is why they aren’t as widely used as less reliable methods such as cross-sectional analyses and quasi-experimental studies. Notably, only 24 of the 200-plus studies that the Center on PBIS cites are RCTs. Still, that’s a sizable body of research, and, at first glance, the findings appear positive for PBIS advocates: studies report improvements in organizational practices, reductions in suspensions and office referrals, and mixed results on student academic performance.

But deeper flaws in the research severely limit its value to district leaders weighing whether to adopt PBIS. A key issue is the common use of consequence data—chronicling suspensions and expulsions—as a proxy for actual student behavior. Justin Baeder, a former principal in Washington State and director of the Principal Center, explains the problem: using consequence data “has the potential of confusing cause and effect, as well as creating perverse incentives. For example, banning suspension reduces suspension, obviously, but if suspension is also used as the measure of behavior, this gives the false impression that banning suspension actually improves behavior, which we have no independent measure of.”

Looking back at the fidelity score criteria, it’s clear why this poses a serious difficulty for PBIS research. Schools are penalized for relying too heavily on punitive consequences and rewarded for “restrict[ing] the use of out-of-school suspensions only to behaviors with safety concerns.” Thus, when RCTs evaluate PBIS’s influence on outcomes like suspensions or office referrals, they often find statistically significant reductions—but these likely reflect the intervention’s design, not actual improvements in student conduct. This issue applied to at least ten RCTs that evaluated effects on student behavior outcomes.

The second and more fundamental issue with PBIS research is the framework’s variability and flexibility. Because expectations, consequences, and strategies differ from school to school—and many studies fail to specify which strategies were deployed—it’s hard to generalize the findings. Most RCTs don’t examine specific strategies within a tier. Of the six that do, the majority focus on Tiers 2 and 3, even though most schools implement only Tier 1. When Tier 1 details are left to school leaders, the only consistent elements are broad practices such as setting expectations, holding regular behavior meetings, and collecting data. These steps might conceivably improve school climate and student behavior. But can PBIS really claim credit for the idea of “pay more attention to what you want to improve”? Worse, any positive effects from better management may obscure the harms of lax discipline, though we can’t know for sure, since the studies rarely isolate individual program components.

Some studies try to limit variability by measuring the fidelity scores of participating institutions. A high fidelity score suggests that a school is implementing PBIS as intended, reducing some inconsistency. The problem? None of the RCTs uses the most recent TFI manuals; nearly all rely on the outdated 2004 Schoolwide Evaluation Tool (SET). Crucially, the SET lacks the language found in newer TFI versions about “restorative practices” and avoiding “reactive and punitive consequences.” School leaders adopting PBIS in 2025 based on this body of research are, in effect, adopting a very different program—one never rigorously tested.

If that sounds like an overstatement, consider what Perales told me about how trainers fold unsubstantiated “restorative practices” into PBIS: “Restorative practices doesn’t yet have its own evidence base. So the idea is to kind of put it within the evidence base of PBIS so that you’re more likely to see the benefits of the ideas behind [restorative practices].”

None of the RCTs that I reviewed mentioned “restorative justice” or “restorative practices.” If PBIS officials are willing to play this fast and loose with the evidence, school leaders should view claims about the program’s strong research base with a healthy dose of skepticism.

School leaders contemplating adopting PBIS should consider the gap between how the program looks in controlled studies and how it functions in practice. Educators who have experienced PBIS in their schools often said that, rather than improving communication and setting clear behavioral expectations, it became a way for administrators to overlook misconduct and avoid confrontations with the parents of disruptive students. The result: teachers were left to manage increasingly unruly—and sometimes violent—classrooms on their own.

Consider the experience of Tiffany Hoben, a former Florida teacher at a school that had implemented PBIS. Hoben had been dealing with a disruptive student whom she routinely had to escort out of the hallways. One day, during lunch, the situation escalated: the student threatened to hit her. Fortunately, the school’s security camera captured the incident. After reviewing the footage, administrators called the student’s mother to say that threatening a teacher was unacceptable. But in a reaction all too common among parents of such students, the mother insisted that the teacher “had it out for him” and demanded that her son be kept away from Hoben. The assistant principal sided with the mother and sent the student back to class—where he continued to disrupt. This “ignore the problem and hope it goes away” approach fits neatly with Tier 1’s emphasis on avoiding punishment.

Jennifer Hill, who taught in various Arizona schools, had a similar experience at a PBIS-implementing campus. She recalled an incident in which one student repeatedly slapped another with a rubber ruler, leaving welts on the victim’s back. When Hill called the perpetrator’s parent, the father accused her of lying and misrepresenting the situation. At the same time, the victim’s father blamed Hill for letting it happen. Rather than backing Hill, the principal sided with the misbehaving student’s parent and imposed zero consequences.

With PBIS now incorporating restorative practices into its recommendations, further relaxation of discipline policies seems likely. Daniel Buck, a former teacher in Wisconsin, recalled an episode at a school using restorative practices when a student who wasn’t supposed to be in his class picked a fight with another student. Buck evacuated the room to protect the other students and managed to de-escalate the conflict. He recommended suspending the aggressor, but administrators—committed to restorative justice—insisted that the student be allowed back the same day. They struck a compromise to keep the student out for the rest of the day, though even this prompted some pushback. Buck said that whenever he advocated for exclusionary discipline measures, administrators often portrayed him as a “mean, white oppressor who just hated black students.”

Schools often overlook bad behavior in the name of meeting racial equity standards. But some teachers argue that lowering expectations for minority students only hurts them. Trish, who now shares her teaching experiences on her YouTube channel Teacher Therapy, worked in schools that implemented Behavior Intervention Support Team: an approach similar to PBIS and sometimes used alongside it. She recalled a professional development session where the speaker justified tolerating poor behavior from black girls by claiming that they were simply misunderstood. “We get messages like this all the time,” Trish said, warning that it will ultimately backfire. “If [students] take that same attitude into interactions with police officers or their boss one day, they’re most likely not going to get the same soft responses.”

Lax discipline doesn’t just affect school climate; it also undermines the quality of instruction. Foley preferred direct instruction: a structured, teacher-led method with a strong evidence base, especially effective for at-risk kids. But in chaotic classrooms, he found it unworkable. “I’d be interrupted so many times that I would give up and . . . revert to what the norm is at these schools, which is group work.” He also observed that other teachers leaned on classroom-management tactics like building lessons around “vast arsenals of colored pencils.” As Foley put it, “It’s a fantastic pacifier.”

As student behavior continues to deteriorate post-pandemic, it’s becoming clear that schools need to shift their focus from reducing exclusionary discipline to cracking down on classroom disorder. Research shows that exposure to disruptive peers can harm students’ long-term outcomes, and disordered classrooms contribute to teacher burnout and turnover. While PBIS may succeed in limiting the use of exclusionary discipline, it isn’t the right approach for the challenges that teachers and administrators now face.

Even if schools move away from PBIS, meaningful reform is still needed to address school discipline effectively. One major obstacle is state-level restrictions on exclusionary discipline, such as suspensions, along with mandates to monitor racial disparities in their use. Kristen Eccleston, a school mental-health consultant with administrative certification, told me that these metrics can distort behavior reporting: “Sometimes there are mandates from central office to principals or administrators saying, ‘We don’t want your suspension data to look a certain way’ ”—creating pressure to skew the numbers.

This isn’t to say that discipline data shouldn’t be reported; on the contrary, more transparency is necessary. State and local governments should require schools to report not only suspensions and other disciplinary actions but also baseline rates of infractions and classroom disorder. Oversight should concentrate on high levels of misbehavior, not just the use of consequences like suspensions. This would make the impact of discipline policies more transparent and give researchers better data, rather than relying on flawed proxies for student behavior. States that are worried about racial disparities should calculate suspension rates relative to each group’s baseline misbehavior, offering a clearer picture of potential discrimination.

States should also explore alternatives to PBIS that take student accountability seriously, such as discipline policies that escalate consequences as conduct worsens. This doesn’t mean returning to the excesses of zero tolerance but ensuring that punishments fit the offense and that consequences reflect the broader impact on peers.

Addressing the post-pandemic crisis in student behavior and teacher attrition requires taking a hard look at frameworks like PBIS. That means revisiting ideological narratives from the Obama era, such as the school-to-prison pipeline, and taking the spillover effect of misbehavior seriously. It also means listening to teachers when they report disruptive conduct instead of deferring to defensive parents. Focused, orderly classrooms are essential for learning. Creating and maintaining them require more than positive reinforcement.

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