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New York City voters by and large do not trust the teacher ratings released late last month. But most wouldn’t mind if future assessments of teachers’ quality were also made public, according to a poll whose results were released this morning.

The poll, conducted by Quinnipiac University last week, asked 964 New Yorkers about teacher evaluations both in theory and in practice. It found that just 20 percent of voters said they trusted the city’s “recently released teacher evaluations” known as Teacher Data Reports, and nearly half said the results were flawed. (The ratings, which had massive margins of error, were not actually used to evaluate teachers.) But 58 percent said they approved in theory of releasing the results of teacher evaluations to the public.

The poll’s findings suggest voters simply haven’t made up their minds about the role that teacher evaluations should play even as battles over new evaluations have dominated the headlines in recent months.

Just a third of poll respondents said they thought teachers who score low on evaluations should be fired, a use that advocates of new evaluations have championed. But 54 percent said they thought top-rated teachers should be rewarded with additional pay, something Mayor Bloomberg has suggested and the UFT has opposed. And 84 percent said they thought performance should trump seniority if the city needed to lay off teachers, a policy position that Bloomberg made his priority last spring, to no avail.

The poll contained soothing news for politicians worrying how to navigate the rocky terrain of public opinion on teacher evaluations: Sixty percent of respondents said whether a candidate supports the release of teacher ratings would not affect their vote.

Plus, the ratings’ release did not exact a toll on New Yorkers’ opinion of Chancellor Dennis Walcott or Mayor Bloomberg’s handling of the city public schools. Voters’ approval of Walcott, who publicly warned that the ratings were out of date and unreliable, actually rose significantly since February, to 43 percent, the highest since his tenure began a year ago.

Bloomberg, who defended the teacher ratings’ release even when Walcott was more circumspect, also saw a slight uptick in his approval rating on education. The poll found that 32 percent of New Yorkers approve of how Bloomberg is handling the schools, up slightly since February and relatively steady over the long term.

The proportion of New Yorkers who say they have a favorable opinion of city teachers also held steady, at about 50 percent, as did the portion who said the teachers union is playing a positive role in improving schools. (The poll of 964 registered voters, conducted March 6-11, had a margin of error of 3.2 percent.)

Both city and union officials found data points to support their positions in today’s poll results.

A spokeswoman for the city, Lauren Passalacqua, pointed to Walcott’s surging approval rating and noted that “even 74 percent of union households agree that teachers should be considered based on performance and not seniority.”