The buzz about Rhee from "The Bee Eater"
My holiday weekend reading included an early copy of "The Bee Eater," Richard Whitmire's biography of former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, due out next month. Full disclosure at the top: Whitmire, a former reporter and editorial writer for USA Today, interviewed me and devotes a few pages to The Post's coverage of Rhee, including mine. It's fair to say he was not a fan.
"The Bee Eater" (title refers to the oft-told tale of how as a young teacher she silenced a rowdy grade school class by killing and swallowing a bee) doesn't unload any real revelations about the D.C. schools story. But there are a few interesting new nuggets for Rheeologists. New to me, anyway.
One is the role Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp played in pushing Rhee for the chancellorship. Kopp had already been a key figure in Rhee's career, reaching out to her to run the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that helps school districts recruit teachers. Whitmire reports that at the 2007 annual meeting of the NewSchools Venture