Michelle Rhee’s recent departure from StudentsFirst, the organization she started, reveals the bankrupt claims of the corporate education reform movement.

Rhee launched the organization in 2010, shortly after she had left her job as schools chancellor in Washington, D.C. following an election, widely viewed as a referendum on her, in which the mayor who had appointed her was voted out.

Someone more concerned about the views of parents and the public might have read the election results as a rejection of her agenda of firing teachers, closing schools and making test scores the holy grail of education.

Not Rhee.

She went onto the Oprah Winfrey show to announce the formation of a national advocacy organization that, she boasted, would sign up a million members in its first year.

While the organization claims 2 million members, many if not most of those are people who were added to the organization’s membership rolls after they signed noncontroversial online petitions, such as “Every student deserves to attend a great school.” According to Politico, the group’s recent tax filings show it spent $1.7 million to place such petitions on the grassroots site Change.org. Recent rallies and meetings that Rhee has called have had sparse turnouts of parents.

Corporate reformers claim they speak for parents and students. But a growing number of parents recognize that the reformers’ real aim is to undermine our public education system.

Of course, Rhee’s abrasive style didn’t help her win supporters.

She is known for such statements as this from a 2008 speech about her leadership of Washington, D.C. schools: “I think if there is one thing I have learned over the last 15 months, it’s that cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated.”

Harsh words.

But Rhee says in public what we imagine many corporate education reformers say privately. Consensus-building and collaboration are not, after all, hallmarks of their movement. Rhee’s fall from grace shows the limits of such arrogance.