Recently I received a pleasant, unexpected email from a retired teacher in New York State who had read a blog entry here and wrote to reminisce with me about work we had shared in the mid-1980s. We were helping to implement approaches to kindergarten entrance and early grade placement that involved thorough child development screening for all children before they began school. We also worked on providing extra year placements in transitional classrooms for children who, for overall developmental reasons, would benefit from a classroom environment that matched their developmental needs.

Skillful teachers, professionally trained as developmental examiners, were quite able to do a good job differentiating between children.These teachers knew which children were fully ready for the pace and demands of the standard paper-and-pencil academic curriculum. And they knew which children needed the gift of extra time to be immersed in a more child-centered, holistic, discovery-based classroom. Each year, in many school districts, at least one class of children would experience this extra transition year before entering either kindergarten or first grade. Sometimes an extra year in first grade would occur for a child in the years of mixed-age primary classrooms.

Extra time options remain available in some districts in neighboring states — by parent choice! So many parents have expressed such gratitude for the gift that extra year has provided for one of their children. They see how the  year benefits their child’s academic preparedness over the long haul.

After the 1980s, developmental or transitional classrooms often fell out of favor because in many places the concept was poorly applied. Understanding of developmental principles was inadequate, and so were the screening tools. Children were placed in transitional classrooms because of inadequate academic readiness skills instead of overall developmental readiness. This led to unwarranted and wrongful practices of tracking and, in some areas, clear discrimination based on race, language, or class.

When developmental readiness is properly understood, differentiated instruction is the way of teaching embraced within our long-standing tradition of developmentally appropriate practices. Differentiated instruction — adapting our teaching to children’s particular developmental needs — enables us to reach across the broad range of normal developmental differences to teach all children in our early childhood and primary classes. This is no easy task in today’s classrooms. That’s why it’s exciting to see the resurgence of a “whole child” voice emerging from national leadership in ASCD and other organizations. The growing whole-child emphasis serves as a counterbalance to the No Child Left Behind focus on academic accountability, a focus that, among other problems it causes, often inflates the need for special education referrals and services.

We can hold on to the developmental truth that some children need more time than others to move through the rather inflexible educational institutions we have created for their learning. And we have the scientifically based field of child development to bring to the table. Child development knowledge helps us make sure that while meeting the laudable goal of leaving no children behind academically, we also take care not to leave their childhood behind.