Developmentally Appropriate Practices and Early Childhood Special Education: A Reaction to

on Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) were necessary, but not sufficient, for evaluating programs serving young children with special needs. This paper met with some criticism, most recently in a paper by Johnson and McChesney Johnson (1992). That paper provided a theo-retical defense of DAP for young children with disabilities and discussed objections to some early childhood special education (ECSE) practices from a developmental perspective. In the present article, we attempt to redirect the debate about the appropriateness of DAP for young children with dis-abilities from an exchange about the differences between the DAP guide-lines and ECSE practices to a discussion of the many areas of overlap between these two rich sources of information about educational prac-tices for young children. We appreciate the opportunity to respond to Johnson and Johnson's (1992) reaction to the paper we wrote entitled "Develop-mentally Appropriate Practice: Appraising Its Usefulness for Children with Disabilities. " Our original paper was an attempt to caution the field of early childhood special education (ECSE) against "jumpin