GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

New York state voters said they aren’t crazy about the idea of a longer school day, a new poll shows.

Fewer than four in 10 voters responding to a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University’s survey center said they believe Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s extended learning day proposal should be a priority for Cuomo and state legislators. The poll focused on five of the proposals Cuomo floated during his ambitious State of the State speech three weeks ago, three of which are education-related.

New York voters were more open to his proposals to improve teacher quality, including a tougher “bar exam” and merit pay. (more…)

Fewer than four in 10 New Yorkers think closing schools makes for sound education policy, according to the results of a new poll released today. And approval is lowest in the borough most hard-hit by school closures under the Bloomberg administration.

The poll, conducted by Quinnipiac University’s survey center, focused largely on 2013 mayoral race and found that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is a clear frontrunner among the Democratic candidates. But it also asked a raft of questions about education policy in the city.

Several of the questions had been asked before and yielded consistent results. New Yorkers still want the next mayor to share school control with an independent board, disapprove in large numbers of how Mayor Bloomberg is handling the city’s schools, and are divided about whether the teachers union exerts a positive force.

But one question had never appeared on a Quinnipiac poll before. It asked, “Mayor Bloomberg wants to close a number of low performing public schools and replace them. Which comes closer to your point of view; this is good educational policy, or this is an attack on the teacher’s union?” (more…)

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. (more…)

New York City residents won’t be appointing Mayor Bloomberg as students’ chief lobbyist any time soon.

Nearly twice as many New Yorkers trust the teachers union to protect students’ interests than they do Bloomberg, according to a new poll out of Quinnipiac University. Bloomberg’s approval rating on schools has hovered around 25 percent since early 2011, according to the poll.

The poll, conducted Jan. 30-Feb. 5, found that 56 percent of registered voters in New York City say they trust the union more to go to bat for students. Less than a third, 31 percent, said they trust Bloomberg more. (The poll of 1,222 registered voters had a margin of error of 2.8 percent.)

Among households containing public school students, the split was even more pronounced. Just 21 percent of those voters picked Bloomberg, and 69 percent chose the teachers union. Parents’ backed the union more often than even households with union members.

The news comes in an education-packed poll conducted after a month in which in a showdown over new teacher evaluations led Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew Cuomo each to ratchet up rhetoric against teachers and their unions. The poll found that the percentage of New Yorkers with favorable opinions of teachers had fallen, from 54 percent last March to 47 percent now.

But while a different poll earlier this week found high approval for Cuomo’s school policies, a set of questions designed to assess New Yorkers’ feelings about a slate of policy initiatives Bloomberg proposed during his State of the City address last month elicited mixed results. (more…)

UFT President Michael Mulgrew wants parents to know that he doesn’t mind if new teacher evaluations cause some teachers to leave their jobs.

Ever since negotiations over teacher evaluations fell apart during winter break, Mulgrew has taken fire for costing the city federal funding and opposing changes that could make teachers easier to fire.

But in a full-page advertisement that appears in today’s New York Daily News, titled “An Open Letter to New York City Parents,” Mulgrew argues that evaluations that are conceived and executed according to the union’s specifications would indeed usher teachers “who cannot succeed” out of the profession.

More than that, he argues, better evaluations would help struggling teachers get the support they need to stay in the classroom. An exodus of teachers from city schools stands at 66,000 teachers in the last decade, he said — equivalent to more than three quarters of the city’s teaching corps. (more…)

Eight months on the job has done little to boost Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott’s image in the eye of New Yorkers.

A Quinnipiac poll released today shows Walcott’s approval rating as essentially unchanged since he became chancellor in April. But his disapproval rating is way up.

According to the poll, 33 percent of New Yorkers approve of Walcott’s handling of his job. That’s up just 2 points from a similar poll in May, a month after he became chancellor.

During the same period, his disapproval rating swung from from 21 percent to 34 percent. His disapproval rating among public school parents rose from 32 percent to 45 percent.

It appears that many of the people who have made up their minds about Walcott since April have decided they do not approve of his job performance. (more…)

A month’s more time in the public eye has done nothing to lift Chancellor Cathie Black’s approval rating. The number of New Yorkers who approve of her work remains at 17%, according to a NY1-Marist poll released tonight.

That’s the same place last month’s Quinnipiac poll put Black and a drop from her 21% approval rating measured by Marist last February. And for context, the 17% figure is two percentage points below Governor Paterson’s approval rating at its lowest, a number Marist described as historically low.

Approval for the public school system’s performance overall is higher, but not by very much. Only 38% of respondents said they approved of the school system’s performance, and 20% rated the schools’ performance as poor.

School performance reports divided along racial lines. While 45% of white residents polled by Marist rated the schools highly, only 36% of Latino respondents and 25% of African-Americans did the same.

Approval was higher among households with children who attend public schools. A little more than half, or 53%, said they approve of the system’s performance. (more…)

A Marist College poll released this evening shows that new Schools Chancellor Cathie Black has less public support than her predecessor, Joel Klein, did when he took the job eight years ago.

Current poll results show that 21 percent of registered New York City voters think that Black has done a good or excellent job of handling of the public schools. When Quinnipiac University first surveyed the public on Klein in 2003, a month after he took office, its results showed that 46 percent of  New Yorkers approved of him.

The two sets of poll numbers aren’t a perfect comparison, as the Marist poll found that 35 percent of New Yorkers think Black has done a “fair” job, while the Quinnipiac poll only allowed respondents to approve or disapprove of the chancellor. Because of this difference, Klein had more detractors than Black does. In 2003, 27 percent of people disapproved of him, while the Marist poll has 19 percent of respondents rating Black’s performance as “poor.”

Though she has garnered plenty of headlines in the month she’s been in office, Black is about as unknown as she is liked. The poll shows that 26 percent of respondents don’t have an opinion of her yet, or haven’t heard of her. In 2003, roughly the same number — 28 percent — of people didn’t have an impression of Klein.

Klein’s early approval rating of 46 percent was the highest he earned over the eight years he as in office.

When Mayor Bloomberg named Black to the post in November, a Quinnipiac poll found that 51 percent of voter surveyed didn’t think she was fit for the job. That number rose when the pool was whittled down to just public school parents: 62 percent of whom disapproved of her selection. (more…)

A Quinnipiac University poll released this morning found that most New Yorkers do not think publishing executive Cathie Black is qualified to run the city’s school system. Her approval rating dropped further when voters with children in the public schools were polled.

Sixty-two percent of parents with children in the public school system disapprove of Mayor Bloomberg’s choice for the next chancellor and 63 percent say Black isn’t qualified. Fifty-one percent of voters in general think she’s not fit for the job.

A majority of voters, 64 percent, think that experience in education is important for whoever manages the city’s school system.

“Do New Yorkers approve of the Black appointment? Does she have the right experience? No and no, voters say,” said Quinnipiac pollster Mickey Carroll in a statement. (more…)