The consumer movement has probably been responsible for many of the educationally related legislative changes in the United States within the past few years. Students with special needs, and their parents, have been demanding and, more and more often, receiving legal support for their free, appropriate public education. The landmark, "Education for All Handicapped Children Act," Public Law 94-142, epitomizes the results achieved by such consumer efforts. The law includes provisions that imply a need for accountability, least aversive and restrictive conditions of education, and services by competent service providers. Behavior analysis lends itself ideally to those requirements, because by its very nature it is an accountable system demonstrating the functional relations between the variables it measures and the conditions managed. The foregoing discussion has emphasized how the field has tended to heavily rely upon positive and minimally intrusive approaches and how it has been responsive to consumer ratings. However, in addition, it has begun to attempt to improve the quality of its offerings by improving training and evaluation of its practitioners. An illustrative effort is one recently conducted by Sulzer-Azaroff, Thaw, and Thomas ( 1975) . The study attempted to identify those behavioral competencies that were apt to lead to responsible behavior modification practice. The extensive list of skills has been revised and refined several times by various groups concerned with training and evaluation, and many of the skills are being incorporated into training and evaluation programs. Thus, consumerism has had its effect on the quality control of the field.

The foregoing discussion has considered a sampling of issues and trends that have evolved as behavior modification of the classroom has developed as a field. We have seen the emergence of issues about selection of target behaviors, who should be considered the client to be served, how much emphasis should be placed on antecedent and how much on consequential contingencies, whether consequences should be negative or positive, whether they should be managed with individuals or groups, and what influence the consumerism movement may be having. A consideration of those issues by members of the field has led to a number of trends: toward the selection of more constructive target behaviors, toward a broader conception of the client role, toward a heavy emphasis on consequential contingencies and a reemerging emphasis on managed and nonpersonal ecological antecedents, toward a preference for positive rather than negative consequences, toward group contingency arrangements, and lastly toward an increasing responsiveness to the concerns of consumers. These trends support a conclusion that the field of behavior modification in the classroom is flexible and responsive, continually striving for a balance among effectiveness, efficiency, and an appreciation for human rights and humanistic values. . .

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