Education reformer Michelle Rhee appeared on Fox News to denigrate Republican candidates running for president. She doesn't "understand why they're not talking about merit pay...tenure, and last-in-first-out" in their debates and campaign stops. Instead some have talked about dismantling the entire Department of Education. To which the social entrepreneur responds:

The notion that the answer is to get rid of the Department of Education and go back to local control is actually pretty ludicrous. What they're saying is that we should allow thousands of local school boards most of which are controlled by teachers' unions to dictate what's happening instead of setting a national standard for what is happening in our country which will make our kids competitive with kids internationally. I just think it's absolutely out of touch and it's the wrong focus.

Wow. Media-hyped, Republican governor backed Michelle Rhee wants the public schools in America to be run by a central governing body. She not only wants to take elected school boards out of the picture thus removing taxpayer say over how the schools operate, she also wants to "nationalize" the schools.

That can only mean one thing: a Department of Education which tells the states exactly how to run their business. From Teach for America to Harvard to The New Teacher Project to StudentsFirst, all of Rhee's work for the past 20 years has been to set up a framework to usher in the communizing of public education.

All but a few of the states have already adopted the Common Core standards issued by the DoEd. In and of themselves, the standards appear, well, standard; yet it's the federal issuance which should make us pay attention.

And who would disagree that unions are corrupt and removing ineffective teachers is a good thing? But remember, in order for Rhee's vision of a brave new education system to take effect she would have had to remove obstacles like teachers' unions and "bad teachers;" thus creating a more compliant education population.

The rock star of education reform has been hard at work moving public education in the direction of a centralized department overseeing a vast network of schools. The only question left is who will run this ministry of education?

Read more Ann Kane at Potter Williams Report