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.

我们这些从遗产的角度思考的人希望，当我们不再是一名行为分析师时（当他们从我们冰冷、死气沉沉的手中撬开那本破烂的《科学与人类行为》副本时），我们会因为做了一些出色的事情而被铭记。我们的朋友兼同事 Ronnie Detrich（图 1）于 2023 年 9 月 9 日平静地去世，纪念他的困难在于，无论他选择从事什么工作，他都是我们见过的最优秀的人之一。

罗尼 (Ronnie) 在长达 5 多年的职业生涯中做了很多事情。他早期的职业生涯是在很少有人愿意涉足的地方为残疾人提供服务：州立医院的后病房、资金严重不足的美洲原住民保留地以及需要但不想要他的专业知识的学校。从那时起到2023年，他还在鸽子实验室进行了转化研究，进行了函授培训的应用研究，帮助建立了一个模范服务提供机构（Spectrum Center），并共同创立了一个致力于促进循证教育的非营利组织（The Wing研究所2）。他阅读并讨论哲学，制定了严格但支持性的员工监督系统，并组织了多学科活动，将行为分析师和其他深切关心教育系统及其服务对象的人聚集在一起。

关于罗尼的事情是，如果你不密切注意，你很容易会错过他。他是最不可能自我推销的人，如果他有什么要推销的东西——例如，以使命为导向的 Wing Institute“智囊团”聚会——话题就是最前沿和中心的。首先，他是一个倾听者。当他真的发言时，他的信息是有力而尖锐的，但旨在推进对话，而不是提高他的地位。我们所知道的没有人比他更能轻松地体现斯金纳（Skinner，1972）关于个人信用和责任的观点，正如“关于‘拥有一首诗’的讲座”和其他地方所阐述的那样。

在他职业生涯的后半段，罗尼瞄准了两件他无法忍受的事情：公共教育系统应该是平庸的，行为分析应该或多或少地把教育这样的大型社会系统视为事后的想法。罗尼明白这意味着要倾斜一些相当棘手的风车。例如，他知道应用行为分析所居住的世界并不温和。这项工作很困难，社会系统并不总是欢迎行为方法所能带来的改变。然而罗尼早年在德克萨斯州西部乡村的艰苦生活，尤其是他的体育背景，为他进入这个世界做好了充分的准备。他并不回避艰苦的工作，对于那些热衷于走捷径的人，尤其是那些喊着“犯规了！”的人，他的耐心有限。当行为分析并没有立即受到更大的世界的欢迎时。当事情变得困难时，他的建议实际上是“擦掉污垢”3（图 1）并继续努力，直到有所作为。不出所料，他喜欢斯金纳（Skinner，1956）的“案例历史”以及几乎所有根据数据得出反直觉结论的实证报告。

为了说明罗尼与世界交往的个人承诺，这里有一个轶事，鉴于他的谦逊，罗尼讨厌我们分享。在许多人准备退休的年龄，罗尼与他的同事杰克·斯泰茨和兰迪·基沃斯一起出售了频谱中心，获得了一笔可观的意外之财。他们没有坐享其成，而是利用这些收益创建了非营利性 Wing 研究所，以招募跨学科专业知识来推动教育系统的发展。罗尼一直活跃在研究所直到最后。他最后一次公开露面是通过 Zoom 在研究所主办的单案例方法会议上，该会议汇集了来自多个学科的人们，目的是解决在循证实践运动中如何汇总和评估单案例证据的不确定性。

罗尼以常识性的方式提出复杂观点的技巧对翼研究所很有帮助。他是一位天生的信息聚合者，研究所的网站 (https://www.winginstitute.org/) 仍然充满了他的见解。一个例子：图 2 乍一看表明，形成性评估（定期直接测量学术技能，向教师和学生提供反馈）比一系列更受欢迎的教育干预措施（几乎没有任何关系）创造了更多的学生进步。 （当考虑干预措施的相对成本时，对比会更大；参见 Detrich，  2020）。这里没有关于行为方法优越性的象牙塔哲学论证，只是原始证明以某种方式做事会得到更好的结果。您可以只使用 Wing Institute 网站来教授基于证据的教育研究生课程，但该网站也可以作为如何向教育系统利益相关者传达证据的一个很好的模型。罗尼对该网站直接、务实的语言产生了重大影响。4

罗尼是一位不同寻常的学者，他的大多数最好的书面作品都是在相当长的潜伏期之后才出现的。20 世纪 80 年代初从研究生毕业后，他沉浸在服务提供领域数十年，直到 2000 年代初才开始认真出版。这充分说明了他的曲目的稳健性，无论是概念还是作曲，他似乎毫不费力地滑入了这个新角色。罗尼当然会说，如果他成功了，那是因为他愿意发泄行为，接受一些困难，“擦去污垢”，然后继续前进。不管怎样，他对于如何从行为上理解行为分析在更大的社会中的地位有很多话要说。对于那些可能忽视了罗尼的人，作为对他的遗产的介绍，我们推荐关于循证实践（Detrich et al.,  2007；Slocum et al.,  2014；Spencer et al.,  2012）、治疗完整性（Detrich,  2014，Detrich 等人，  2010 ），以及传播和计划采用（Detrich，  2013a ， 2013b ， 2018，2020 ；Detrich 和 Keyworth，  2016；Pinkelman 等人，  2022）。

然而，对于一个深入了解行为分析最佳效果的人来说，文章只讲述了故事的一部分。罗尼可能很容易被忽视，但一旦你了解他，他就一直在你的脑海里。他最好的品质是，他以身作则，让你在个人和职业上变得更好。为了说明这一每个人都可以而且应该向往的遗产，我们现在分享对一位不可替代的同事和朋友的四种主观看法。