Acting District of Columbia schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee on Monday said she would cut through bureaucratic tangles and pursue an aggressive national search to recruit top-quality educators.

Rhee, Mayor Adrian Fenty’s controversial nominee to lead the city’s failing 55,000-student school system, faced the D.C. council which has been openly skeptical about her qualifications and the process by which she was chosen for the job without the panel’s consultation.

In her confirmation hearing before city lawmakers, Rhee was unable Monday to produce documentation about a claim on her resume that she helped increase test scores at a Baltimore elementary school where she taught during the 1990s.

Council Chair Vincent Gray has said he was concerned that she could not back up those claims.

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Rhee used the lack of data supporting her Baltimore teaching claims to argue that school administrations must work harder to better support educators.

“For me, the lesson here is we have to be able to provide documentation as to what impact teachers are having on their students,” Rhee said. Rhee, who taught for three years, has never led a school system or been a top administrator in one.

As leader of The New Teachers Project, which Rhee founded in 1997, she helped attract hundreds of teachers to work in D.C., but the majority of them wound up leaving, said Council Member Jim Graham, D-Ward 1.

He said that experience has helped prepare her for the challenges she will face leading a system with 11,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $1 billion.

In the three weeks since Fenty nominated her, Rhee said she has found a lack of support for educators up and down the leadership chain within the District’s schools.

She said she will put in place new systems of accountability for principals and consider a system of grading each school to gauge its success.

She has already appointed interim leaders at several schools with principal vacancies but would not say how many teachers or administrators she expects to weed out.

“We will no longer describe failure as the result of vast impersonal forces like poverty or a broken bureaucracy,” Rhee said.

Rhee is expected to be confirmed by the council at its July 10 legislative meeting.

cmabeus@dcexaminer.com