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Yesterday’s Quinnipiac poll results showed the chancellor’s popularity holding steady. But no one would call him popular — his approval rating has never broken the 50 percent mark.

Not true for charter schools. The poll results Quinnipiac released today show that 67 percent of registered voters in New York City want to see more charter schools open. Among public school parents, the number rose to 72 percent. Support for an expansion was highest in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where charters are prevalent. One caveat: Only registered voters were polled. In a city of immigrants, many public school parents are not registered to vote.

As far as I can tell, this is the first time Quinnipiac has asked about charters. (more…)

If we’re to believe a recent piece in New York Magazine, some city leaders are turning against Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. But among regular New York City voters, according a new poll, Klein is about as popular as he ever has been, even with the debate over mayoral control ratcheting up in recent months.

A new poll out of Quinnipiac University found that 44 percent of registered voters say they approve of the job Klein is doing. That’s roughly unchanged since last July and only two points lower than the highest approval rating Klein has ever recorded in a Quinnipiac poll, back in January 2003.

The blue line represents parents grading the system an A or B; the green line is parents who gave it a D or F.

To prove that parents — and especially poor parents — approve of the changes that Mayor Bloomberg has brought to the schools, his administration often cites data collected by a group called the Community Service Society, which every year conducts a survey of low-income families called “The Unheard Third.” The troubling thing about this data is that it doesn’t exist anywhere on the Internet. (When I referred to it earlier today, I just plucked the figures Klein cites.)

Until now! Thanks to a spokeswoman at CSS who just called me back, I’ve got the numbers from all the surveys that asked a question about the school system since 2002. They tell a story that is encouraging, but less black and white than Klein has had it. “We don’t want to paint such a rosy picture that people say, ‘Oh, everything is good,’ because it truly is not,” the spokeswoman, Tracy Mumford, told me.

The data suggest that more parents gave the school system a high A or B grade on the survey in 2007 than did so in 2002: The number is up to 35% from 22%. Less encouragingly, the percentage of families who grade the system an F, 11%, is still higher than the percentage who grade it an A, 9%, and the F percentage has been climbing since 2005. C remains the most common grade by far, and the portion of parents grading the schools a C has actually risen since 2002, by one percentage point.

The figures also suggest that the path to higher satisfaction has been bumpy, with parent upset rising to a peak in 2005 — the same year Mayor Bloomberg won re-election. The result is that while the portion of parents giving D and F grades has fallen substantially since 2005, the change since 2002 is less dramatic.

Here’s one other way to look at the figures graphically, below the jump, plus a chart showing the raw numbers: (more…)

His handling of the public schools may be second only to crime on Mayor Bloomberg’s bragging list, but a new Marist poll finds that voters rate his handling of the schools second to last, below crime, security, taxes, and even public transportation.

The portion of voters who approve of Bloomberg’s schools policy, 40%, was higher only than the portion who approve of his handling of unemployment, 36%. By contrast, 71% of voters said they approve of the mayor’s handling of crime, 50% said they approve of his economic development work, and 41% said they approve of his work with public transportation.

Several of these policy areas generated higher approval ratings than the last time Marist asked these questions, in 2005. The approval rating on schools did not change, while the disapproval rating dropped one percentage point, to 52% from 53%.

The poll adds to a small and decidedly mixed body of public opinion data on the school reforms Bloomberg undertook in 2002. (more…)