A book with the title The Best Schools conjures up images of a long list of schools ranked according to some clear standard of excellence. U.S. News & World Report (Morse, Flanigan, & Yerkie, 2005) has done this with “the best colleges”; Newsweek has done this with “the best high schools” (Kantrowitz et al., 2006); and numerous Internet sites have done this with elementary schools (see, for example, www.learn4good.com). This book, however, has no such pretensions. Instead, my aim is to describe the best practices in education based on what we currently know about human development. In this book, you will find examples from more than 50 schools that are engaged in such best practices. These schools, however, are not ranked in any particular order, and many other schools could have been cited as well. In the Newsweek survey, high schools were ranked according to the following formula: the number of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests taken by all students at a school divided by the number of graduating seniors. There are no formulas in this book. I believe that attempts to create such formulas, and “best schools” lists in the first place, are symptomatic of a disturbing trend in this country (and across the world) to use test scores and a “rigorous academic curriculum” as the primary criteria for defining what constitutes a superior learning environment. Rather than test scores and rigor, I am far more concerned in this book with how responsive schools are to the real developmental needs of their students.

Because I am using developmental criteria to define “the best schools,” I need to clarify here what I mean by “developmentally appropriate” and “developmentally inappropriate” educational practices. Certainly every educator recognizes that it is developmentally inappropriate to plunk a college calculus textbook down in front of a 2-year-old child and expect her to master the material over the course of a year. But beyond this sort of clear-cut scenario, there seems to be a wide range of interpretations of what “developmentally appropriate” actually means. I have seen arguments made for the belief that scripted learning and direct instruction are developmentally appropriate practices (Kozloff & Bessellieu, 2000). I disagree.

I have also noted that some practices that were considered developmentally inappropriate a decade or two ago are now suddenly deemed developmentally appropriate. One good example involves standardized testing in early childhood education programs. In 1987, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) published a position paper that cautioned against most standardized testing for children under the age of 8. Sixteen years later, however, NAEYC abandoned this position and instead made a key recommendation in a position paper to “make ethical, appropriate, valid, and reliable assessment a central part of all early childhood programs” (2003, p. 10). Similarly, 16 years ago, when I was writing an article about computers and young children for a national parenting magazine (Armstrong, 1990), most child development experts that I contacted cautioned against any computer use before age 4. Now, it would seem like heresy to suggest that 3-year-olds should be deprived of the opportunity to prepare for a high-tech future. I will, however, suggest that very thing in Chapter 3 of this book.

The changes in the definition of what is considered “developmentally appropriate” over the past two decades have occurred, I believe, because of the growing dominance of what I'm going to call in this book “Academic Achievement Discourse.” Words and phrases used in this discourse include “accountability,” “standardized testing,” “adequate yearly progress,” “No Child Left Behind,” “closing the achievement gap,” and “rigorous curriculum.” In Chapter 1, I discuss in detail the core components, history, and problems with this almost universally embraced discourse in education. In Chapter 2, I strongly urge educators to leave this narrow definition of learning behind and return instead to the great thinkers of human development that have informed educational practice over the past 100 years—Montessori, Piaget, Freud, Steiner, Erikson, Dewey, Elkind, Gardner—and to the newest findings in how the brain develops over the course of childhood and adolescence. In this way, we might fashion a renewed discourse in education: a Human Development Discourse. In this discourse, educators and educational researchers are required to pay close attention to the vast qualitative differences that exist in the physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual worlds of preschoolers, elementary school students, young teens, and high school students, and to develop educational practices that are sensitive to these differing developmental needs.

It almost seems as if these days the term “developmental” has come to mean “how students perform on pre-tests compared to how they perform on post-tests.” As a result, the term “developmentally appropriate practices” no longer means what sorts of educational practices children at different ages should be engaged in, but what practices they can engage in. Because research shows that 3-year-olds can learn a lot from a computer, this becomes, ipso facto, “developmentally appropriate,” despite the fact that their actual needs require rich interactions with the sensory world and not a “virtual world” at all.

In this book, I propose that educators focus on one particular developmental need at each of the four main levels of formal education: early childhood, elementary, middle school, and high school. In Chapter 3, I suggest that play is the crucial need for preschoolers and kindergarteners, and that current high pressure academic practices in early childhood education be abandoned as harmful to their growth and development. In Chapter 4, I suggest that the central developmental issue for children at the elementary school level is learning how the world works and that practices that take children at this age away from the world (and into artificially contrived learning environments) are developmentally misguided. In Chapter 5, I highlight the crucial importance of puberty and the need for educational practices that focus on social, emotional, and metacognitive learning to create developmentally appropriate practices at the middle school level. Finally, in Chapter 6, I suggest that “developmental high schools” (a term that ought to be used, just as we speak of “developmental kindergartens”) should ultimately focus on helping students prepare to live independently in the real world. Please note that I am not suggesting that these are the only developmental issues that are important at each level.

Similarly, I want to make clear that each of these goals are important for all students regardless of their developmental level. High school students should be playful in their learning, just as preschoolers need to develop socially, emotionally, and even metacognitively (e.g., when they are playing “king of the mountain”). However, I do want to emphasize that there are developmental features specific to each level (e.g., the uncommitted cortex of preschoolers, the broader social context of elementary school children, the experience of puberty in early adolescence, and the proximity to adulthood of high school students) that make each goal that I have selected especially important as a focus in creating best practices in the schools.

What compels me to write this book is my grave concern that pressures on students at all levels to achieve academically are causing educators to ignore the true developmental needs of children and adolescents. The push for higher test scores and the demand that all students exhibit high proficiency in reading, math, and science is sending reverberations throughout all levels of education, creating stressed-out 12th graders, violent 8th graders, attention-deficit 3rd graders, and 4-year-olds who have had their childhoods stripped away from them. This situation cannot be allowed to go on as it is. It's time that we returned to the great questions of human growth and learning: How can we help each child reach his or her true potential? How can we inspire each child and adolescent to discover his or her inner passion to learn? How can we honor the unique journey of each individual through life? How can we inspire our students to develop into mature adults? If educators lose touch with these questions in their mad dash to boost test scores, then culture as we know it may truly cease to exist some day. This book is written in the hope that such a day never comes, and that we instead regard the optimal and natural development of children and adolescents as our most sacred duty as educators and our ultimate legacy to humanity.