[WS:] My point exactly - you need to look at the racial and gender composition of the teaching profession to understand the vitriol dumped on it by the political class. Michelle Rhee pulled the same stunt in DC - she fired some 270 teachers, most of them Black, on flimsiest pretexts, and then went on making thinly veiled racist accusations (e.g. that they were sex offenders.) Most of the sacked teachers were subsequently re-hired as a result of a lawsuit, and the popular hatred of Rhee was such that it was among the factors that cost her patron Fenty his mayoral job.
Wojtek