A personalized school is one in which each individual person, whether student or teacher, matters a great deal and has a program that is good for him or her. Today, schools are faced with an equally large transition from arbitrary grouping patterns to personalized learning alternatives. Unfortunately, they are also currently blessed with policy makers who believe they can solve all educational problems by testing. What schools require are new models for a new kind of schooling. They need to avoid the pitfalls of earlier decades when they successively concentrated on new curricula utilizing old teaching techniques or old content using new structures. In this article, the author argues that contemporary schools must acknowledge the validity of the personalization premise. They must accept the biological truth that no two organisms are alike, and that includes learners. Thus, the whole learning environment must be restructured to help students become more self-directed. School principals, school leadership teams, teaching staffs, parents and community support groups must work together and keep clearly in mind that personalization simply means humanizing the learning process and placing the learner first. (Contains 14 endnotes.)