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My favorite education innovation is better than yours.

That seems to be the reigning sentiment in many policy discussions across the education blogosphere these days. Gotham Schools offers a recent, though relatively mild, example. Together, New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and NYU professor Pedro Noguera visited PS 28, a successful Brooklyn elementary school serving low-income children. They came back describing what could have been two different schools.

Noguera praised the school for its focus on both the academic and non-academic needs of its students: The school offers an extended school day, social services, social and emotional learning, professional development for teachers, etc. Klein praised the school for using data to improve instruction.

Frustrated by what he saw as Klein's unwillingness to acknowledge the school's focus on non-academic needs, Noguera told Gotham Schools reporter, "I told him to look at the full picture, all of the things that they were doing.... A lot of people are stuck on this idea that there’s only one way to go about educating urban kids: It’s the KIPP way."

The Gotham Schools story illustrates a common destructive tendency to set apparently successful school reform models in competition with each other. Data-driven improvement can exist comfortably with support for non-academic needs, but you wouldn't know it from much education policy discussion these days.

Happily, both Noguera and many KIPP supporters can see the virtue of multiple approaches to school reform. A KIPP teacher responding to Noguera's comments argued that his/her school did more than most to support students' social and emotional needs. Noguera in turn characterized the KIPP approach as a valuable--but not the only valuable--model for school improvement.

Unfortunately, prominent national commentators like Checker Finn often prefer a smackdown. In a shrill commentary last fall, Finn portrayed the community schools model as a "gooey and emotional" attempt to "turn the spotlight away from cognitive learning" by attending to students' non-academic needs. He contrasted community schools with the "new paternalism" of KIPP schools, which require parents and students to sign contracts holding them accountable for academic performance.

Such unproductive either/or thinking thrives in many over-the-top blog comments: KIPP schools are tools of corporate interests that need compliant drones to plump the workforce; Community schools are anti-intellectual day-care centers that coddle irresponsible parents and unambitious students.  The often unspoken but sometimes explicit corollary to these arguments: Whoever doesn't agree with me doesn't care about poor kids.

So let's get something straight. There is more than one path to an excellent school. Schools can, and generally should, address both non-academic and academic needs. And people who work hard in education or education policy almost always do so because they care about poor kids.

We'd all do well to heed a famous KIPP slogan: Work hard. Be nice.

[Hat tip to John Thompson for the Gotham Schools story.]