But with a potential teachers strike approaching, the Chicago Teachers Union and its friends among public employee unions put on an impressive show of strength Monday, drawing thousands of red-shirted supporters to a Daley Plaza rally that turned into a protest march around City Hall and outside the Clark Street headquarters of the Chicago Public Schools.

With a fervor reminiscent of the Occupy Chicago marches, the teachers chanted labor slogans, waved placards and were fired up by several speakers, including CTU President Karen Lewis, who brought the crowd to a roar when she called Mayor Rahm Emanuel “a liar and a bully.”

Thousands of teachers and public workers attended the speeches in the Loop plaza, with many wearing red shirts in support of the teachers. After the rally, the crowd moved across Clark Street to march around the City Hall-County Building, then headed south on Clark to the CPS offices.

The crowd in the plaza appeared to be at least 10,000 people. The teachers union said 18,000 people showed up. Police blocked off traffic in the otherwise lightly populated Loop as the orderly protest briefly took over the streets.

Teachers in the crowd said the school system is treating them with disrespect and, in its drive to cut expenses, refuses to spend on needed facilities such as libraries and lunchrooms. “All the parents have told me that they support a strike. They realize it’s about the kids,” said Tiera Robinson, who teaches preschool special education at Hughes Elementary School

“The news media makes it out that it’s just about salary,” said teacher Mike McCormick. “But really we are fighting for public education and strong neighborhoods.”

Asked about parents or taxpayers who might oppose a strike, McCormick replied, “It’s really the only action we have to advocate for the type of education that all students in Chicago deserve.”

The rally, which lasted more than two hours, came a week before more than 26,000 teachers and other school workers could hit the street, disrupting what would be just the second week of school for hundreds of thousands of Chicago public schoolchildren.

“The commitment to the children of the City of Chicago is in our hearts, in our minds,” Lewis told the cheering crowd. “It’s in the work we do.”

Lewis called the ongoing negotiations “a fight for the very soul of public education — not only in Chicago, but everywhere.”

Lewis at one point lit into Emanuel, saying: “He’s a liar and a bully.” She accused the mayor of advocating that money not be spent on the lowest-scoring 25 percent of students, and then denying saying so.

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