Michael Carrero Spent 51 Episodes on ABA’s Bad Habits. Now He’s On a Mission to Fix Them.

HICKORY, NORTH CAROLINA – Michael Carrero has spent 16 months and 51 numbered episodes of the Rad N Bad Podcast telling ABA what it gets wrong. His argument comes down to measurement. The field, he says, logs supervision hours without asking what the trainee learned, rewards clinicians for utilization (the share of their paid time that gets billed) rather than for outcomes, and counts therapy hours when the better measure is what a family can do without them. On September 21, he and his co-host, Hickory Learning Group founder Sean Yocum, launched a website for the business they built around that argument.

Rad N Bad Behavior Consultants sells supervision for BCBA candidates and for BCaBA candidates (the assistant-level credential), one-on-one mentorship, continuing-education courses, parent resources, and consulting for schools and clinics, all from Hickory. The site opens on two BCBAs “who’d had enough,” and a block it labels “The manifesto” promises “No Fluff. No Sugar-Coating. Just Results.”

“This field is full of outdated norms, complacent supervision, and people who’d rather protect their comfort than protect outcomes,” Carrero told BreakingNewsABA. “We’re not here for that. We raise hell so we can raise standards, for the clients you serve and the practitioners doing the serving.”

10 Years in the Reserve, 16 Years in ABA

Carrero has been in the Army Reserve nearly twice as long as he has been in ABA. He finished a psychology degree with a Spanish minor at Lasell University in 2016 and joined the Reserve that September as a behavioral health specialist, a part-time role he still holds. He earned a master’s in applied behavior analysis from Northeastern University in 2020, entered the field in 2021 through apprentice and technician roles, and became a BCBA in February 2022.

He was a BCBA at Compleat Rehab in Hickory from February 2022 to July 2023, and at Highlights Healthcare in Hickory from June 2023 to January 2025, where he spent 7 months of 2024 as director of operations. From December 2024, he worked for himself, delivering ABA in families’ homes, and in June 2025 he joined Hickory Learning Group as chief clinical officer.

The Reserve made him a drill sergeant in August 2024. He wrote about the job in June 2025, after a monthly Reserve weekend focused on land navigation. “Most people picture drill sergeants as all yelling, screaming, and endless push-ups. But the truth? It’s a highly strategic, relationship-driven teaching role,” he wrote. “The structure of Army training is textbook ABA.” He says the military work reinforced a preference for building people “through structured instruction, feedback, and mentorship.”

By his own account, he still carries a full caseload alongside the C-suite title and the Reserve commitment. He also describes himself as an adjunct at Purdue Global, teaching ethics and research methods to future BCBAs, and as a bilingual provider focused on getting ABA to rural families.

From Podcast to Consulting Firm

The Rad N Bad Podcast launched on May 23, 2025, a month before Carrero joined Yocum’s company. Its own description calls it “a full-blown wake-up call” from “two BCBAs from Hickory Learning Group” who are “calling out the BS in the field.” It has published roughly weekly since, and Episode 51 came out on September 28. Recent guests include Jon Bailey, founder of the ABA Ethics Hotline, on an episode titled “The Billable Hour, Driver’s Ed Ethics, and Making Therapy Unnecessary,” and Steven Merahn, a physician executive, on why medicine thinks ABA is arrogant.

Carrero’s own posts run hotter than the show notes. On June 21, 2025, he published “Dear Recruiters: Know My Name or Don’t Bother,” a complaint about the mass emails and group texts BCBAs get from recruiters, and it drew 110 reactions and 79 comments. “It is exhausting watching companies throw money at providers just to use their certification like a resource to be mined,” he wrote. “Our field is too important to treat like a revolving door.”

The supervision the site sells is pitched as preparation for the field rather than for the exam: “Direct feedback, real cases, no hand-holding.” Carrero made the longer argument in an article posted the same day the website went live: a trainee should be judged by what they can do, not by the hours a log records. “A supervision log can tell me that time occurred, but it cannot tell me what happened during that time,” he wrote. “There is a difference between developing clinicians and auditing clinicians.”

“We don’t need to lower the standard for becoming a BCBA. We need to stop pretending the credential is the entire standard.” – Michael Carrero, Chief Clinical Officer, Hickory Learning Group (2026)

Asked how the firm began, Carrero said: “We’re BCBAs who got tired of watching good practitioners drown in bad systems.” Asked about the hardest thing he has had to get through, he described managing an entire location under “constant pressure to grow and expand via telehealth,” and making sure staff and families “received the quality of care they deserved the entire time I was present.” He did not name the employer. Of the new firm, he said: “The ‘corporate’ world doesn’t ‘own’ us; we are individuals who stay true to the science and cannot be bought. Ethics and values should never have been for sale.”

Caregiver Competence as the Outcome

The firm’s research section is a link to a study Carrero co-authored in his day job. Hickory Learning Group measures success by what parents can do once the clinic steps back; Yocum’s own account of founding the company puts it as “when families no longer need us.” The company scores that with a tool it calls the GAIN Protocol, built around a caregiver questionnaire, and it treats a planned reduction in therapy hours as a clinical win rather than lost business.

On September 18, Carrero, Yocum, and Cate Davis of the practice-software company Hi Rasmus published a study of that questionnaire. It is a retrospective review of 20 families treated at Hickory Learning Group between 2024 and 2026, under a model that pairs clinician-delivered therapy with structured coaching sessions for parents. The questionnaire, the GAIN-P, rates a caregiver on 15 domains for a score of 0 to 75 and sorts families into 5 tiers, from High Support to No Additional Support Needed. Once at least 75% of a child’s goals have held up outside sessions and over time, and the caregiver’s score has risen at least 25%, the clinic cuts direct therapy hours by about 25%.

Scores rose from a mean of 24.0 to 46.9. Of the 20 families, 18 moved to a tier needing less support, none moved the other way, and two reached the tier the authors treat as consistent with readiness for discharge.

The authors are candid about what the study cannot show. A sample of 20 families is small, and the authors excluded 18 of 38 records for missing scores. There is no comparison group. The same clinician scored a family at baseline and at follow-up. And the organization that built the questionnaire also scores it and uses the scores to decide when billed hours come down, which the paper calls “a direct financial conflict of interest” and plans to address in the next round with independent, unaffiliated scorers. The results, the authors write, are “preliminary rather than definitive proof of effectiveness.” Carrero said he presented the assessment with the Hi Rasmus team at the Florida Association for Behavior Analysis conference in Orlando, held September 23 to 26, his first time at the conference.

The study runs parallel to an argument Carrero had already made about business metrics. “Productivity and effectiveness are not the same thing,” he wrote on September 16, in an article that names utilization rates, caseload size, and units delivered as the easy numbers ABA organizations have learned to reward with praise, bonuses, and advancement. “If a field built around measurement cannot distinguish between what is easy to measure and what actually matters, then we don’t have a data problem. We have a values problem disguised as a spreadsheet.”

“The culture of an organization isn’t what it writes in its mission statement. The culture is what it reinforces every day.” – Michael Carrero, Chief Clinical Officer, Hickory Learning Group (2026)

The next test for the GAIN-P is the one its authors set: test-retest data and scoring by people with no stake in the clinic. The next stop for Carrero is the Berkshire Association for Behavior Analysis and Therapy (BABAT) conference in Worcester, Massachusetts, October 7 to 9, where he joins a panel, moderated by Yocum, on clinicians handed leadership roles with, as he put it, “zero training, zero guidance, and zero mentorship.”

AT A GLANCE

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