Karl Dean bent on closing public schools

In an analysis of education reformer and recent Nashville transplant Michelle Rhee, Nicholas Lemann traces the business model behind this "reform movement":

education reform proposes to take apart the main structures of schooling in America—a network of districted public schools and a unionized teaching corps. It proposes, as an urgently necessary national project, to replace them with a school system governed by metrics, choice, incentive compensation, and personnel reductions. It is roughly the same prescription that activist investors would apply to an industrial corporation of the same vintage as the education system

Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has expressed admiration of Ms. Rhee in the past. The dovetail of his own budget priorities and the proclivity of reformers for corporatist flip of public education was made clear yesterday in Mayor Dean's speech to the Chamber of Commerce.

He intends to close public schools and he is letting the Chamber carry that water for him: