Ronnie Detrich (1946–2023): A Versatile Behavior Analyst Who Demanded More of Behavior Analysis and Education

Abstract

Those of us who think in terms of legacies hope that, when our time comes to cease being a behavior analyst (when they pry that tattered copy of Science and Human Behavior from our cold, dead hands1), we will be remembered for doing something well. The difficulty in memorializing our friend and colleague Ronnie Detrich (Figure 1), who passed away peacefully on September 9, 2023, is that he was, in whatever he chose to work on, among the best we ever met.

Ronnie worked on a lot of things over a career that spanned more than 5 decades. His early professional years were spent delivering services to people with disabilities in places where few wanted to tread: the back ward of a state hospital, a desperately underfunded Native American reservation, and schools that needed but didn't want his expertise. Between then and 2023, he also conducted translational research in a pigeon laboratory, conducted applied research on correspondence training, helped to build a model service delivery agency (Spectrum Center), and cofounded a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting evidence-based education (the Wing Institute2). He read and discussed philosophy, developed rigorous but supportive staff supervision systems, and organized multidisciplinary events that brought together behavior analysts and others who care deeply about the education system and the people it serves.

The thing about Ronnie was that if you weren't paying close attention, you could easily miss him. He was the furthest thing possible from a self-promoter, and if he had something to promote—for instance, mission-driven Wing Institute “think tank” gatherings—the topic was front and center. First and foremost, he was a listener. When he did speak up, his message was forceful and incisive, yet designed to advance the conversation, not to advance his standing. No one we've known more comfortably embodied Skinner's (1972) perspective on personal credit and responsibility, as laid out in “A lecture on ‘having a poem’” and elsewhere.

During the second half of his career, Ronnie took aim at two things he found intolerable: that the public education system should be mediocre and that behavior analysis should treat big social systems like education more or less as an afterthought. Ronnie understood that this meant tilting at some pretty intractable windmills. He knew, for instance, that the world inhabited by applied behavior analysis is not a gentle one. The work is difficult and societal systems are not always welcoming of the change that a behavioral approach can bring. Yet Ronnie's hardscrabble early years in rural West Texas, especially his background in sports, prepared him well for this world. He did not shy away from hard work, and he had limited patience for those who were interested in shortcuts, especially those who cried “Foul!” when behavior analysis wasn't instantly celebrated by the larger world. His advice, when things got rough, was in effect to “Rub dirt on it”3 (Figure 1) and to keep working until you made something happen. Unsurprisingly, he loved Skinner's (1956) “Case history” and pretty much any empirical report in which following the data led to counterintuitive conclusions.

To illustrate Ronnie's personal commitment to engaging with the world, here's an anecdote that, in light of his humility, Ronnie would hate us sharing. At an age when many people are ready to retire, Ronnie, along with his colleagues Jack States and Randy Keyworth, sold the Spectrum Center, yielding a sizeable financial windfall. Instead of coasting on the proceeds, they used them to create the nonprofit Wing Institute to enlist interdisciplinary expertise toward nudging educational systems. Ronnie remained active with the Institute up until the end. His last public appearance was via Zoom at an Institute-sponsored conference on single-case methods that brought together people from many disciplines with the goal of resolving uncertainties about how single-case evidence is aggregated and evaluated within the evidence-based practice movement.

Ronnie's knack for making a complicated point in a common-sense way served the Wing Institute well. He was a born information aggregator and the Institute's web site (https://www.winginstitute.org/) remains rich with his insights. One example: Figure 2, which at a glance shows that formative assessment (regular direct measurement of academic skills, providing feedback to teachers and students) creates vastly more student progress than a host of more popular educational interventions that have little if anything to do with instruction (the contrast is even greater when you consider the relative cost of the interventions; see Detrich, 2020). No ivory-tower philosophical argument here about the superiority of a behavioral approach, just the raw demonstration that doing things a certain way gets superior results. You could teach a graduate course on evidence-based education using only the Wing Institute site, but the site also serves as a great model for how to communicate about evidence to educational-system stakeholders. Ronnie had a major influence on the site's direct, pragmatic language.4

Ronnie was an unusual scholar in that most of his best written work emerged only after quite a latency. Following graduate school in the early 1980s, he immersed himself in service delivery for a couple of decades and started publishing in earnest only in the early 2000s. It says much about the robustness of his repertoire, both conceptual and compositional, that he seemed to slide effortlessly into this new role. Ronnie would of course say that if he succeeded, it was due to his willingness to emit behavior, take some lumps, “rub dirt on it,” and press forward. Whatever the case, he had a lot to say about how to behaviorally understand the place of behavior analysis in a larger society. For those who might have overlooked Ronnie, as an introduction to his legacy we recommend articles on evidence-based practice (Detrich et al., 2007; Slocum et al., 2014; Spencer et al., 2012), treatment integrity (Detrich, 2014, Detrich et al., 2010), and dissemination and program adoption (Detrich, 2013a, 2013b, 2018, 2020; Detrich & Keyworth, 2016; Pinkelman et al., 2022).

And yet, for someone who touched on so much of what behavior analysis can be at its best, articles tell only part of the story. Ronnie may have been easy to overlook, but once you knew him, he was always inside your head. His best quality was that, by example, he made you better, personally and professionally. To illustrate that legacy, one to which everyone can and ought to aspire, we now share four subjective perspectives on an irreplaceable colleague and friend.

Ronnie was born and raised in Snyder, Texas, where the horizon stretches far across the landscape. Perhaps that's what gave Ronnie a vision as wide as the prairie—a vision where all students, anywhere and everywhere, would learn and thrive. Like the vast fields that surrounded him, Ronnie's passion for evidence-based practice and equity in education knew no bounds. He devoted his life to promoting the ideal that every student, irrespective of origin or circumstances, would have access to an education informed by best practices and evidence, provided in a way that creates confidence and joy, that ensures all students success in school and beyond. Although the rural Texan values of grit, integrity, and care for community shaped Ronnie and his life's work, we use the word grace to describe this tried-and-true Texan's steadfast and gentle way of caring for others and the confident yet humble way he carried himself.

Few others have been as relentlessly passionate about equitable access to the science of behavior applied to education, a passion ignited in Ronnie in 1967 when he first worked with children and youth. Inspired by Walden Two (Skinner, 1948), Ronnie's social activist views became entwined with his idea of education systems that worked for all. He grew to view public education as the most important system in our culture, one with enormous power to make the world a more equitable place. For Ronnie, public schools were systems in which behavior analysis could have a significant influence on society.

Although many of his publications identify teaching practices informed and guided by data-based decision making, Ronnie also called on us to examine the larger contingencies that must be in place for quality practices to be implemented and sustained. By considering how both individual- and systems-level contingencies affect students and those in their lives, his work was not only more influential but also more socially relevant. Ronnie's unique and expansive view set the stage to examine entrenched problems in public education, such as challenges related to the scaling up of research-validated practices in schools. As a Senior Fellow at the Wing Institute, he and colleagues brought together behavior analysts and public-school personnel to focus on the widespread adoption and systemic implementation of evidence-based practices, with the goal of creating more effective and equitable learning environments. The intent of this approach was to create a ripple effect, not only benefiting individual students but also transforming the entire educational system for the better. Ronnie understood that if we are to produce change that lasts, systems change must be a major goal of our work (Holland, 1978).

In addition to modeling grace through his actions, Ronnie also arranged conditions for others to display grace, and he reinforced grace when he saw it. Ronnie was notoriously generous with his time, which provided him with ample opportunity to arrange these contingencies for others. He was tactful and subtle in teaching others to embody grace, and if you were fortunate enough to learn from him, his grace was felt. In conversations with Ronnie, you were seen, understood, welcomed, and valued (though contingencies did apply; sometimes the Texan in him found it difficult to suffer fools). Ronnie was aware of potentially oppressive power differentials, and he behaved in ways that intentionally broke down those structures. This is evidenced not only in his daily interactions with people in his community but also in his approach to collaboration with stakeholders in his work. Ronnie recognized the necessity of meaningful and harmonious collaborative efforts between researchers, educators, and policy makers. Through these everyday interactions, Ronnie was living true to his dream of making the world a better place.

Ronnie's unwavering commitment to improving education for all, his advocacy for struggling students and individuals with disabilities, his use of data to make decisions large and small, his bigger picture world view, and his unique perspective shaped by rural Texas have left an enduring legacy. Through his embodiment of grace, Ronnie taught us the power of using evidence, context, and stakeholder values as a guide to applying the science, seeing what is there, and that shaping the system is just as important as shaping the individual. Ronnie left us pearls of wisdom, many shared in the selected references below. Let us carry forward his vision to create a world where education truly matters for all.

After meeting Ronnie Detrich in 2000, my wife Paula and I agreed to move from São Paulo, Brazil, to the Bay Area in northern California to work for Spectrum Center as Education Coordinators. We were initially indirectly supervised by Ronnie as he fulfilled his role as Director of Clinical and In Class Support Services. When I began working in this role, I was two steps down from Ronnie in the pecking order with respect to the organizational chart of clinical services, yet what struck me immediately about him was that he was clearly not going to be hung up on that technicality when it came to implementing smart, efficient, and efficacious clinical services on the campus to which I was assigned. Having previously worked in organizations that adhered strictly to the chain of command, it was a nice change of pace to know that when needed, I could bend his ear about a clinical situation—not out of disrespect for the senior clinician above me but rather out of appreciation for the incredible resource I had at my fingertips in Ronnie. Thankfully, occasionally skipping a step in that chain to speak directly with him came without any negative repercussions whatsoever and in fact, our early clinical conversations were always received with enthusiasm on his part.

Between 2000 and 2004, while working under Ronnie in the Bay Area in northern California, some of us became part of his regularly scheduled Friday evening research group. Yes, Friday evening research group. Although most people look forward to closing out the work week with a well-earned happy hour at a local watering hole, Ronnie persuaded a small team of the supervisors at Spectrum Center to forego happy hour in favor of spending a portion of our Friday evenings reading articles, discussing problem behavior, and designing functional assessments and subsequent functional interventions, with the hope of one day submitting our findings as manuscripts to various journals.

During these Friday evening meetings, we were always happy to sit and listen to this man who had so much insight to share about getting “the biggest bang for your buck” in treatment settings (this was one of his favorite clinical catch phrases). Ronnie's ability to convey his message to an audience was so compelling that we would have been fine not speaking in those meetings at all, but he always encouraged active participation. He was a master at engaging via that all-too-under-used skill, listening. A nod of agreement or understanding from him was such a powerful reinforcer that we couldn't help but be active participants in these most enlightening of clinical and educational discussions.

When Ronnie listened, it was not out of courtesy. As both a person and a professional, he wanted to hear from anyone who was in the business of helping kids learn—most especially those kids many others deemed as being “unteachable.” Ronnie was steadfast in his desire to work with those who wanted to help kids learn, especially where they were most vulnerable and where there was a tremendous need… in public schools. It might seem a non sequitur to mention that Ronnie was also a hardcore baseball fan and specifically a fan of the Oakland As. During a large portion of Ronnie's life, the As, who were poorly funded and worked out of crumbling facilities, were nothing short of terrible—but they were scrappy and sometimes accomplished more than you'd expect given the circumstances. I like to think Ronnie's affinity for this lowly baseball team mirrored his passion for behavior analysis in the public-school sector—He supported and vehemently fought for those with the odds (sometimes almost impossible odds) stacked against them.

Ronnie was a champion of struggling students and struggling educators in the public-school sector, and he rarely passed up the opportunity to communicate about the challenges through publications, presentations, video interviews, webinars, and workshops on the subjects of dissemination, contextual fit, and application of behavior analysis in nontraditional clinical settings. To this end, there are scores of professionals in the fields of general education, special education, and behavior analysis who have benefitted from his brilliant yet surprisingly common-sense contributions to our science. For some of us, professional relationships blossomed into friendships that would include more discourse and collaboration with respect to behavior analysis, the public education system, and baseball than any of us could have ever imagined. Simply stated, Ronnie influenced so many professionals in so many ways that it is absolutely appropriate to affirm that his influence on the field of behavior analysis has been, in a word—profound.

I found it difficult to think of what I could say about Ronnie Detrich that would convey his humanity and give others a sense of his influence on me. After watching me struggle for a day or two, my wife Jill suggested recalling the first time I met Ronnie. I tried to nail down when and where Ronnie entered my life, but I could not. We never worked in the same program, never taught in the same department, or played on the same baseball team, but it feels as if Ronnie has always been a trusted colleague and treasured friend.

So, from now on my “how-I-met-Ronnie” story will go like this: Ronnie and I bumped shoulders while taking front row seats to hear Grammy winner Tom T. Hall at a 1990 conference in Nashville. We listened as Hall talked about personal experiences he had turned into country and western hits. One of those experiences was an encounter with an elderly janitor at a Miami airport lounge in 1972. Hall said the old man initiated a conversation and “talked about philosophy and everything,” but especially his fond memories of old dogs, children, and watermelon wine. Whether or not Ronnie and I actually attended that event together, I can't honestly say. But I'll bet he knew the back story of Hall's wonderful song.5 And I'm certain Ronnie loved old dogs and children. And maybe watermelon wine.

Ronnie was a gentle, pragmatic behavior analyst who was committed to improving educational practice, parent training, staff training, single-case research design, and ultimately the topic he felt of most import: the infusion of behavior analysis into society. The gap between the potential of behavior analysis to help make the world a more humane place and society's limited acceptance and adoption of what the science has to offer bothered Ronnie deeply. What sets Ronnie apart from many behavior analysts who have wrung their hands over society's failure to come running for our good stuff is that he dedicated much of his later career to studying the science of dissemination (e.g., Baron, 2010; Rogers, 2003) and shared what he learned with the behavior analysis community (Detrich, 2018; Slocum et al., 2012).

One of the big ideas Ronnie took away from his study of the diffusion and adoption of scientific discoveries is the importance and power of storytelling. Ronnie's stories were special treats. Like Hall's chart-topping story songs, Ronnie's stories covered a multitude of humanly relevant topics. Be it a tale of Ronnie watching a young adult with intellectual disabilities take their first significant steps toward independence, an anecdote in which Ronnie learns something from about changing behavior from a classroom teacher he'd come to assist, or a pitch-by-pitch description of his exploits as a crafty southpaw on the dusty ball diamonds of West Texas, Ronnie's stories always welcomed you in, taught you something valuable, and left you with optimism and purpose.

Ronnie's life exemplified everything that's good about being a team player and managing a winning team. Baseball competed with behavior analysis for Ronnie's attention. Since 2006, Ronnie managed a team he dubbed the Old Timers in a highly competitive fantasy baseball league. Half of the league's 14 teams are managed by behavior analysts who also are passionate about baseball. I'm happy to report that the Old Timers captured their third league championship in 2023.

Ronnie Detrich was the clearest of anyone I know when it came to things behavior analytic. His world view was shaped by the likes of Don Whaley and honed by clinical experiences in places like Texas, Michigan, and South Dakota. By the time he matriculated at West Virginia University in the doctoral program in clinical psychology, he had more experience than many of our clinical faculty and certainly a more sophisticated understanding of behavior analysis. Our first encounter was in his first semester when he enrolled in my experimental analysis of behavior course, which was required of all of our clinical doctoral students. This course was followed by ones with me covering behavior theory and philosophy and reinforcement and punishment.

Ronnie was one of several clinical doctoral students who actually did laboratory research with animals in my lab during that time. When he took a position at Spectrum Center in Oakland, California, our interactions, both professional and personal, continued. Over the years, brief encounters at conferences evolved into long discussions at what became an annual dinner that we both savored. Our discussions ranged widely and wildly: the state of the discipline, specific research topics of the moment, the translation of behavior analysis into practice, its history, our children and, in more recent years, our grandchildren. Every moment with Ronnie was an experience well worth having. His insights not only into behavior analysis in education, which were among the most thoughtful of anyone in the area, but also of behavior analysis in general affected me and many others profoundly.

Ronnie always cut to the chase and honed in on the real contingencies at play in whatever situation or circumstance we were discussing. His ability to reframe problems in clear, behavior-analytic ways was amazing. He was as at home with a lucid discussion of private events, pragmatism, or realism as he was with the latest developments in behavioral assessments in the classroom. Everyone who knew him valued his perspective for its thoughtfulness, integrity, and intellectual honesty. He minced no words in asserting a behavior-analytic position and defending it with vigor. At the same time, he could engage in sophisticated interpretations of both clinical and experimental problems at the highest levels of discourse. He could, and would, weave myriad stories about the Wild West days of behavior analysis in some of its more remote outposts and of his mom's adventures as a left-leaning lady living the dream in a small town in West Texas. The latter were especially memorable, reflecting his deep affection for her. It was my final good fortune with Ronnie to have met regularly with him, thanks to the technology that evolved during COVID, from the time of his diagnosis until a few weeks before his death. I will remember all of our encounters, the years of live and those of cyber, for the rest of my own days. They, like, or more accurately, because, of Ronnie were filled with exciting insights and great humor. Ronnie affected many of us by his total commitment to behavior analysis; his principled ways; his brilliant grasp of human nature and the nature of our discipline; and his kind, witty, and alert self. He was the Real Deal.