If you follow education issues, you’ve heard of Michelle Rhee. She was going to save Washington, D.C., schools until she was fired for expecting too much, a victim of dead-end union teachers. Or something like that.
New reporting indicates that she, by her own admission, exaggerated her own record as a classroom teacher in Baltimore. Harsher evaluators are saying she lied.
If you really want to dig into the Rhee case, the Daily Howler — here and also here — is the place to go. He comments, after referencing some of the overblown reporting on her record:
Rhee, of course, had been brilliant. She knew this because she had read it in the Wall Street Journal; she also dreamed that she had seen it on Good Morning America. But around her, those other teachers were “shitty,” as she later told [the Washington Post’s Jay] Matthews. Of course, those shitty teachers never had to renounce long-standing claims about the gigantic success they attained, as Rhee was forced to do last week. But still, Rhee knew how shitty they were.
For reasons we can’t begin to explain, she knows this deep in her bones.
Rhee has told these ugly, inaccurate tales all through her rise to the top. Millionaire marks in Upper Manhattan have cheered her savage acts on. Last week, she had to walk her sacred tale back …