I feel pretty lucky to be involved in a conversation with sharp thinkers like Andy Rotherham, Alex Kotlowitz, and Amy Wilkins - let alone a conversation in which I get to refer (and link) to my book.

Both Alex and Andy wrote explicitly about the divide between the two camps in the Democratic Party on education today - a subject I've also written about on Slate recently. It's a fascinating and compelling question, for me. Sometimes this divide can seem fairly artificial, as Alex suggested, and sometimes it can seem pretty real, as Andy wrote. I'm hoping Andy can say a bit more about what he thinks is behind the schism.

Personally, I'm certainly sympathetic to the principles of the Education Equality Project. And it's not that I want to talk any of that manifesto's signers out of their focus on schools and accountability.

But I do think that the Broader, Bolder people are calling for something more specific and significant than just "good pre-natal, infant, and children's health care," as Andy put it. To me, the most important element in the BBA statement is the word "education-related" here: "There is solid evidence that policies aimed directly at education-related social and economic disadvantages can improve school performance and student achievement."

In other words, they're not promoting health care for health care's sake: they're promoting specific early-childhood interventions, targeted at poor children, that will help to narrow or eliminate the achievement gap before kindergarten. (At least I hope they are.)

In the Times Magazine earlier this month, I wrote about some specific interventions that Susan Neuman (a Broader, Bolder signatory) has identified as particularly effective: Early Head Start, the Nurse-Family Partnership, Avance, and Bright Beginnings. I'd add to that list three programs from the Harlem Children's Zone that I wrote about in my book: Baby College, the 3-year-old Journey and Harlem Gems, the pre-kindergarten.

To me, supporting the expansion of those programs is much different than vaguely calling for better health care for kids. It's about using government policy to promote specific interventions that counter the achievement gap between poor kids and middle-class kids. And so to me, anyway, it seems to go directly to the goals of the Education Equality Project.

What it sometimes seems that I'm hearing from the EEP side is: "Sure, we're in favor of early-childhood interventions, eventually. But teacher pay and accountability and school choice is what's important to deal with right now." And what I think I'm hearing from the BBA side is, "Sure, we're in favor of improving the public schools, eventually. But first, and more importantly, we need to improve all these social supports."

Whereas I want someone to say: What we need right now is an expansion of everything that has been demonstrated to reduce the achievement gap, from Baby College to Bright Beginnings to performance-based teacher pay to an elimination of state caps restricting the growth of charter schools. These measures are all equally important, and it doesn't make sense to do some of them without doing all of them simultaneously.

I know: that and $50,000 will get me my own full-page ad in the New York Times, right?

To me, though, that's the lesson of the Harlem Children's Zone (and, I hope, of my book): that we can and should do all of these things at once, and soon.

One place where I absolutely agree with Andy: it's very good news that Obama has indicated that he supports both accountability in schools and the expansion of comprehensive programs like the Harlem Children's Zone. That is a policy combination with a lot of promise.