The police are buzzing like hornets around Freedom Plaza in downtown DC, on edge and anxious to protect the city from a large labor rally. The chant leader is chanting. Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! Rhees and Fenty got to go. But hold it. These people don’t look like a rowdy bunch of angry union members. Angry they are, but rowdy they’re not. There’s one thing clear to me, we stand here in unity. These are the nicest people in our city, the women and men who guide our children every day through a society that is anything but nice. The chant leader gets one backwards, No peace, no justice. No peace, no justice. These are school teachers, about 2,000 of them, and they’re here in the late afternoon to push back at a tone-deaf schools chancellor who just riffed several hundred of their sisters and brothers with very little warning and, in many cases, no justification.

One speaker says this is the largest teacher’s rally in the history of DC. Another, a 10-year veteran, tells how she was called in and fired by a brand-new principal who hadn’t even had time to do even one performance evaluation. A well-spoken young woman says, “Do the Math — less teachers for more students does not add up to a better education. An older man, black like seventy percent of the crowd, says, “There’s an old African saying that when spiders unite, they can bring down a lion.” One, two, three four, escort Rhee right out the door. Escort? I told you these were nice people, professional nice people. A woman bumps into me and stops to apologize. But if they are so nice, what the hell are they doing out in public yelling at their boss?

Michelle Rhee is an acclaimed schools administrator who was hired two-and-a-half years ago by new DC mayor Adrian Fenty to reform a school system that is in desperate need of it. When I visited the city’s famed Cardoza High that same year whilst producing a video about vocational training, I was ashamed as a citizen, a taxpayer and as an erstwhile parent. Windows broken out. Walls crumbling, paint peeling. All but one set of restrooms out of order. Heat not working. A wreck, just like virtually every other public school in out nation’s capital, heartbeat of the free world, bastion of culture. Rhee went right to work savaging what was left, the teachers who were struggling to hold together a decrepit 50,000-student educational system with bubble gum and bailing wire.

A year ago, Ms. Rhee publicly rolled out a contract offer she thought the Washington Teachers Union, still recovering from a corruption scandal, would be hard-pressed to reject. It called for a questionable system of “performance pay” and union negotiators turned it down. The teachers have now been bargaining without a contract for 14 months.

In June of this year, Chancellor Rhee terminated 248 teachers after having hired 900 new ones. Then, just as schools were opening in September, she and Mayor Fenty announced a “budget shortfall” of $35 to $40 million and used it to justify the termination of another 229 teachers and over 100 security and service personnel, all without the use of their own new evaluation tool, IMPACT. Rather, the teachers say, the firings were done by individual school principals, and many “excellent teachers, popular teachers, smart teachers” were fired. The media revealed no budget problem exists — although local funding has been cut slightly by the mayor and the city council, economic stimulus money from the feds made up the difference and the system has total funding of $779.6 million dollars, a nine percent increase over last year, while student enrollment has dropped from 47,744 to 44,681.

One wonders whether the Chancellor is attempting to do less with more, or just trying to weed out teachers who’ve asked too many questions and challenged too many principals. Whatever her motives, her timing is awful — it’s just plain destructive to lay off teachers, increase class sizes, weaken security and curtail maintenance just as school is starting. And she’s infuriated parents, teachers, union officials and city politicians alike with a haughty, condescending style, acting first, consulting and communicating only when forced to do so. Fenty? He’s seems not only to be her boss, but her mentor, both of them public relations and employee relations trogdolytes.

When the teacher’s national union president, Randi Weingarten, speaks to the rally, she intones over and over, “These cuts hurt kids.” A woman walks around in a Mother Jones costume, carrying a sign that says, Rhee must go. Newly-elected AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka says, “A real expert is not someone who hires 900 and fires 400,” and calls the cuts “a screwy case of mismanagement …. a cold hard case of union-busting.” The president of the city council says he and his colleagues did not cut the budget. The president of the union representing the service workers compares Fenty to Adolph Hitler and Rhees to Heinrich Himmler.

I agree with Trumka: “screwy mismanagement” is the correct phrase. It’s the legacy of the DCPS (District of Columbia Public Schools). My guess is that things are going to have to get worse before they get better, and that’s what really hurts kids.