Are Maine Schools Falling for FC Pseudoscience Again? (We already went through this in the 1990s)
A few weeks ago, one of our readers (thank you) alerted us to a Spelling to Communicate (S2C) pilot program in Maine’s public schools. When I read the email message, I got chills. How is it that FC—in the form of S2C—is being reintroduced into Maine’s public schools some 30 years after FC was thoroughly discredited?
In today’s blog post, I’ll lay the groundwork for why this news is so alarming to me and, in the next, I’ll share a letter some colleagues and I wrote to the superintendents and special education directors of Maine. Hopefully, by then, I can report back to you their responses.
Screenshot from ASHA’s website, 2025
As a reminder, FC was introduced to the U.S. around 1990 by Douglas Biklen of Syracuse University. FC was embraced by parents, educators, caregivers and other professionals across the country, seemingly without any regard for scientific inquiry into the phenomenon. A spate of false allegations of abuse cases (starting with founder Rosemary Crossley of Australia and eight of her trained facilitators) quickened the pace of scientific research into FC. (See a list of False Allegations cases here, though not every case makes it into the news. Some are settled outside of the public eye). Proponents claim the false allegations of abuse cases caused FC’s demise, but most of the controlled studies conducted in the 1990s did not involve false allegations of abuse cases. Many involved Syracuse-trained facilitators (not the “poorly trained” facilitators as proponents claim) and still the results consistently showed facilitator influence and control over letter selection. (See Systematic Reviews and Controlled Studies).
By 1995, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the American Psychological Association published statements opposing FC and strongly recommended that their members not use the technique until and unless reliably controlled studies could rule out facilitator influence and control over letter selection. These opposition statements remain in place today, despite periodic review, with other organizations following suit. I recently added the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists to the list (see Opposition Statements).
The facilitator holds onto Jeff Powell’s arm during letter selection (from Prisoners of Silence, 1993)
In the early 1990s, two people were largely responsible for spreading the use of FC in Maine: the University of Maine’s Alan Kurtz and William Ashe of the Vermont Facilitated Communication Project at Washington County Mental Health in Barre, Vermont. According to a personal email I have from Kurtz (dated April 6, 2012), Ashe had taken several FC-workshops through Syracuse University and Kurtz had taken Biklen’s first graduate course in FC at Syracuse University in the fall of 1990. Both men had taken a workshop directly from Crossley in Vermont. Kurtz moved to Maine in the fall of 1993 but had previously hosted several two-day workshops at UMaine’s Center for Community Inclusion in 1992 and 1993. I’d taken the training in January 1993.
A record of the FC workshop I took for 1.4 CEUs.
The reason I’d emailed Kurtz in 2012 was that I was writing about my experiences as a (now former) facilitator for the journal Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention (see my article below) and wanted to check my memory about the FC guidelines we’d been issued. I no longer had my notes from the workshop because after I’d participated in reliably controlled testing and gotten access to the research from the O.D. Heck Center (see Wheeler et. al., 1993) that clearly showed facilitator control over letter selection, I’d shredded my notes to make papier-mache for an art project. Besides ruining my blender, I had no idea that in 2012 I’d still be talking about FC.
A lot had happened between 1993 (when I stopped using FC) and when I emailed Kurtz. For one thing, I’d learned the difference between anecdotes and reliably controlled evidence, and I wanted to see if in the intervening years the guidelines had changed any.
1992 FC article by Douglas Biklen published in the “Word of Mouth” newsletter targeted at speech/language clinicians in the public schools.
Kurtz was evasive in the email exchange. A couple times he claimed that he didn’t know what guidelines I was talking about and then he said the FC guidelines didn’t exist in 1992 and 1993. That made no sense to me, especially considering that Kurtz also told me in the email that he and Ashe had developed training materials for the Maine workshops based on Biklen’s and Crossley’s work as well as their own experiences. Surely, there were protocols he and Ashe wanted their facilitators to follow.
Kurtz specifically mentioned Crossley’s book “Facilitated Communication Training” in the email, but, he couldn’t have used her book for the 1992-1993 trainings because it was published in 1994.
For the record, it doesn’t matter a whole lot that Kurtz got the dates wrong. The book is nothing more than an anecdotal account of Crossley’s experiences with FC and contains no scientifically rigorous evidence to back up her claims of communication independence. Besides the fact that Crossley was vehemently against reliably controlled testing, she admits in the book that her “initial use of facilitated communication had no theoretical basis. It was,” she wrote, “forced upon me by circumstances.” (p. 4, Crossley, 1994) (emphasis mine)
Still, my recollection was (and is) that we were given a list of guidelines. How else would we know how to implement the technique?
And, despite what Kurtz claimed in the email, I found a copy of what I remember to be the guidelines in a 1992 Word of Mouth newsletter (pictured above). The article was written by Biklen and targeted to speech/language clinicians in the public schools. Biklen made FC sound easy and accessible for those who believed enough in their students. There were no words of caution about facilitator cueing and control. Nor was there any mention of the dangers of false allegations of abuse via FC-generated messages.
Note: A version of these guidelines are also mentioned in Biklen’s 1990 article “Communication Unbound,” which is probably where Kurtz got them for the 1992-1993 workshops he conducted.
In the email, Kurtz claimed that he emphasized the following in his workshops:
Identification of specific issues interfering with independent typing (e.g., perseveration, radial-ulnar instability, low muscle tone) as identified in Crossley’s FCT book. (Doubtful, because, as I noted earlier, Crossley’s book was published in 1994),
Recognition that many individuals needed instruction to develop or expand literacy skills,
Avoiding physical guidance, and
Fading of physical support and moving toward physical independence.
Note: I’ve never found any information in pro-FC literature that details how to systematically fade support. Fading facilitator “support” is, I guess, just supposed to magically happen. Facilitators using “newer” versions of FC (S2C, Rapid Prompting Method, Spellers Method) try to avoid physical support (though physical touch still happens), presumably to give the illusion of physical independence during the letter selection process. For example, facilitators hold a board in the air while their clients extend a finger toward it. But, the so-called “no touch” forms of FC rely heavily on visual cues (e.g., body movements, hand signals), verbal cues (e.g., verbal coaching to direct the client toward the desired area on a letter board or select a desired letter), and facilitators controlling access to the letter boards. Like all variants of FC, S2C/RPM only work if the facilitator is within visual or auditory range of the clients.
Sue Rubin from “Autism is a World” (2004) purportedly using FC, but the facilitator holds a keyboard in the air (a precursor to S2C/RPM?).
And, while Kurtz mentioned that the FC trainings were two days long and that he and Ashe “presented a lot of information,” he didn’t mention that much of the workshop I took was based on anecdotes—slides of FC-generated poetry and testimonials from parents of children being facilitated who’d fallen for the illusion of FC. He also didn’t mention that he (or maybe Ashe) warned us that some “bad publicity” was about to come out about FC, but we, as workshop participants, were to ignore it. Looking back now, I’m guessing he either meant one or more of the following:
Reporter Paul Heinrich’s series about the ‘Carla’ false allegations of abuse case in Australia that involved founder Rosemary Crossley. Heinrich’s articles were published in 1991-1992 so it’s likely Kurtz and Ashe knew about this problem. Oddly, workshop leaders told us to expect disclosures of abuse via FC without any precautionary instruction to test authorship before believing them. They also spent a good deal of time talking about “bad or poorly trained” facilitators, which turned out to be a running theme used by proponents for anyone who participated in reliably controlled testing. Ironically, Kurtz called me “poorly trained” in a 20/20 interview with Hugh Downs that focused on the false allegations of abuse case I was involved with that aired, I believe, on April 29, 1994 (the Friday after Nixon died, which is the only reason I remember the date).
Producer Jon Palfreman’s documentary called “Prisoners of Silence” that exposed the flaws in FC and raised serious questions about authorship. (Little did I know at the time I took the workshop, that the case I was involved in would also be featured on the program when it aired in 1993). This documentary, sadly, is still relevant, though it would be great if a science-minded producer would do an updated version and include the so-called “newer” forms of FC, like S2C, RPM, and Spellers Method.
Reliably controlled authorship testing being conducted across the country that was raising serious concerns about FC authorship. Hundreds of facilitators were tested with thousands of trials and yet, despite proponent claims to the contrary, none of these tests resulted in communications that were free from facilitator control. (See controlled studies) I didn’t receive copies of any of the controlled studies until after I’d participated in the testing. To the extent Kurtz and Ashe knew about the studies, they downplayed their significance in the workshop and demonized the researchers as being “against people with disabilities,” which as I've learned is not only wrong but a ridiculous characterization of the experts I’ve met over the years who’ve helped me understand why FC cannot be an independent form of communication.
Reading the email now, it’s interesting to me that, in 2012, Kurtz seemed defensive and unable to provide me with any reliably controlled studies to back up facilitator claims of communication independence. He could have said, “I don’t remember what guidelines we used in 1992-93, but here’s what we’ve learned about FC since then. We’ve done some testing and here are the results of the studies addressing critics’ concerns about facilitator influence and showing communication independence.” But he didn’t. He couldn’t. Because there were (and still are) no studies from the FC community that address these issues or back up FC/S2C/RPM proponent claims that facilitator-dependent techniques lead to independent communication.
The reason I’ve mentioned Kurtz and Ashe before moving on to the current problem of S2C in Maine’s schools is that Kurtz and Ashe (both highly educated people) weren’t the only ones to be taken in by the illusion of FC in the early 1990s. As Jon Palfreman, the producer of Prisoners of Silence put it, FC “spread like wildfire” back then. And many of us (including me) were taken in by the “new and revolutionary” technique. People taking the FC workshops wanted so desperately for FC to work, they, apparently, left their critical thinking skills at the door (or perhaps didn’t have the requisite critical thinking skills to begin with—which might say something about our school curriculums at all levels, including universities where many of the pro-FC courses are taught).
Different ways facilitators cue their clients during FC/S2C/RPM sessions. (Images from a variety of pro-FC videos and articles)
In closing, I think that whoever is pushing the S2C pilot program in Maine in 2025 must have a personal connection with S2C and is, perhaps, unaware of FC’s history. As we learned over the years, FC proponents are pretty skillful at “flying under the radar” by rebranding the technique. But, if you pay attention to facilitator behaviors (e.g., visual, auditory, and physical cueing), FC by any other name is still FC. We’ve collected over 20 different pseudonyms for FC and listed them on our homepage. The list continues to grow. It’s really not that surprising that people might not realize at first that S2C is really FC in disguise.
Proponents have been playing whack-a-mole with critics for a very long time. The rebranding of FC started around 2010 when Biklen’s “Facilitated Communication Institute” at Syracuse University was rebranded to '“The Institute on Community and Inclusion” or ICI. According to an article by New York Times reporter, Daniel Engber, the folks at the Facilitated Communication Institute did this to “fly under the radar.” This is also around the time that facilitators started using the term “supported typing” instead of FC. (There were probably other names kicking around as well, but this was one of the more popular pseudonyms).
Since 2010, the ICI has undergone yet another rebranding. It is now referred to as “The Center on Disability and Inclusion.” Supposedly, in this newest iteration of the ICI, the center has dropped their FC program, but I find it difficult to believe Christine Ashby (Biklen’s disciple, a staunch proponent of FC, and the person who took over Biklen’s position at Syracuse when he retired) would give up FC that easily. Has FC gone underground again? Will Syracuse start promoting FC again in the future? Or has “ground zero” for FC migrated to, say the University of Virginia or Cal Lutheran or some other university? I guess only time will tell.
To me, FC is like a virus and this is how it starts: a well-meaning parent or teacher takes an FC/S2C workshop, becomes convinced of its efficacy (despite a dearth of scientific evidence to back up proponent claims of communication independence) and then someone in authority endorses it (A professor? A superintendent? A trusted teacher or friend?). With practice, facilitators begin to feel like the communications are coming from the other person (see Ideomotor Response). They remember the “hits” (or when the FC-generated messages seem real or accurate) and forget the “misses” (or when the messages are unintelligible, wrong or completely inane). Disappointingly, the people promoting FC (in all its variant forms) don’t make a distinction between anecdotes, testimonials, and reliably controlled testing. They claim FC “works” because people using FC say it “works” and completely ignore or downplay any evidence that goes against their dearly held belief in FC.
As I mentioned at the start of this very long blog post (my apologies, but thanks for reading to the end), my colleagues and I have written a letter of concern and sent it to Maine’s superintendents and special education directors (plus some local and state officials) in hopes that Maine schools will not repeat history by continuing to promote FC/S2C. In my next blog post, I will post the letter and, hopefully, be able to report on the school administrators’ responses.
References and Recommended Reading
Biklen, D. (1990). Communication unbound: Autism and praxis. Harvard Educational Review, 60(3), 291–314. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.60.3.013h5022862vu732
Boynton, J. (2012). Facilitated Communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 6:1, 3-13. DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2012.674680
Crossley, R. (1994). Facilitated Communication Training. Teachers College Press.
Engber, Daniel. (2015, October 25). The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield. New York Times.
Heinrichs, P. (1992, February 16). Suffering at the Hands of the Protectors. The Sunday Morning Herald.
Heinrichs, P. (1992, February 16). State 'tortured' family – 'tragic'. Sunday Age (Melbourne, Australia) Late Edition, pp. 1
Hemsley, B., Bryant, L., Schlosser, R.W., Shane, H.C., Lang, R., Paul, D, Banajee, M., Ireland, M. (2018). Systematic review of facilitated communication 2014-2018 finds no new evidence that messages delivered using facilitated communication are authored by the person with disability. Autism and Developmental Language Impairments, 3, 1-8. DOI: 10.1177/2396941518821570
Mostert, M. (2012). Facilitated Communication: The empirical imperative to prevent further professional malpractice. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 6 (1), 1-10. DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2012.693840
Palfreman, J. (2012) The dark legacy of FC. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 6 (1), 14-17. DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2012.688343
Schlosser, R.W., Hemsley, B., Shane, H. et al. (2019). Rapid prompting method and autism spectrum disorder: Systematic review exposes lack of evidence. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 6, 403–412.
Sigafoos, J. and Schlosser, R. (2012) An experiential account of facilitated communication. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 6 (1), 1-2. DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2012.710992
Spitz, H. (1997). Nonconscious Movements: From Mystical Messages to Facilitated Communication. Routledge. ISBN 978-0805825633
Todd , J.T. (2012) The moral obligation to be empirical: Comments on Boynton's “Facilitated Communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator”. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 6 (1), 36-57. DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2012.704738
Tostanoski A, Lang R, Raulston T, Carnett A, Davis T. Voices from the past: comparing the rapid prompting method and facilitated communication. Developmental Neurorehabilitation. 2014 Aug;17(4):219-23. doi: 10.3109/17518423.2012.749952. Epub 2013 Oct 8. PMID: 24102487.
Wheeler, DL, Jacobson, JW, Paglieri, RA, and Schwartz, AA. (1993). An experimental assessment of facilitated communication. Mental Retardation. Vol 31 (1), 49-60.