Yes, teachers must know the needs of their students, and yes, teachers should fashion lessons and classroom design to address those needs, but there is no need to get so bogged down in the swamp of data collection and individualized plans in order to get that done.
I would call for a more balanced, "common sense" approach to empower our teachers (and students). I enjoyed reading these observations from Mr. Wyborney in his book, The Writing on the Classroom Wall:
Adequately personalizing a lesson for each and every student is nearly impossible when I try to contain the personalization within my own abilities. However, what is possible is empowering students to seek connections between the content and their lives.
A notable irony is that the more I try to control the personalization of the lessons, the more uniformity I create. I may even come to believe that if I rest the lesson on a topic to which I believe the students can relate, I have succeeded in personalizing the lesson. Yet if I empower the students to look for pathways, to hunt for connections, to seek how the learning intersects with their lives, they are much more likely to create meaningful personalization.
The challenge remains. How do we still strike a personal chord with each student without creating even more uniformity? How do we foster personal relationships?