Karl Dean covered a lot of territory during the blogger lunch meeting he hosted on Friday, and I have several pages of notes from the event. Here are several items from the conversation on education that I thought were worthy of noting:

• Will the fact that Dean sends his children to private school be a liability for him during the campaign? When Dean was asked about this decision on Friday, I thought he struggled to respond. He mentioned that he is “a product of public education” and asserted that he can be a “champion” for public education regardless of where his children attend school. In my opinion, Dean needs to be able to answer this question more emphatically. His hesitation seemed to me to give off a sense of his own worry about where his children go to school becoming a campaign issue.

• Regarding schools, Dean said that “we’ve got to be innovative” and “do something dramatic” about struggling schools that have high dropout rates. “The status quo is not our friend,” he added. “Anything we can do to encourage innovation should be on the table.” He specifically mentioned providing vocational training options and different and possibly later hours for students pursuing nontraditional paths.

• Dean said that he opposes appointments, rather than elections, to the school board and noted that the move toward appointments in other cities has not been successful. He also noted that last fall’s election and resulting change in board membership has appeared to be a positive change for the board.

• When asked on a couple of occasions about charter schools, Dean repeatedly mentioned that Tennessee’s laws for establishing charter schools are “restrictive” and that charters and school vouchers are “state issues” (as opposed to city issues).

• Dean made the argument that the primary responsibility for public education falls on the school board rather than the mayor. The mayor’s #1 impact, he said, is “to be a champion for the school system,” and he implied that allocating resources in the budget for education is a major element of that role.

Dean did say that resources for education were likely to be a matter of reallocation rather than increased revenue (i.e., new taxes) in the near future. More on that and on taxes and budgeting in general to come.