Give former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee a dollop of credit: unlike a number of the voices in the current debate claiming to know all of the ills of the modern public school classroom, Rhee actually did spend time inside of the classroom.
Yep...for three whole years.
It is a fact she works hard to embellish: in a recent op-ed in the New York Post, Rheerefers to herself as "a former teacher with almost 20 years in the field." It was a clever rhetorical flourish, designed to give the impression that she had been a foot soldier in the classrooms for decades, when in reality her tenure as a classroom teacher ended in 1995, after having begun in 1992.
Indeed, those three years have even become the crux of an embellishment controversy all their own.
They are the cornerstone of the Rhee hagiography, one in which the heroine is cast as a transformational figure. The story goes something like this: despite her youth and inexperience, Rhee's students ascended from the bottom of the educational pyramid to the 90th percentile in two short years. When Rhee was being considered for the position of Chancellor of the DC
