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The city teachers union has polled members about the Common Core standards, budget cuts, and contract terms. Now it’s polling them about which union antagonist they hate least.

The UFT’s website always hosts one flash poll questions. As of this weekend, the featured question is “With whom would you least want to be stranded on a desert island?”

The list of options is a who’s who of teachers unions’ most vehement critics: former city schools chancellors Joel Klein and Cathie Black; StudentsFirst founder Michelle Rhee; Twitter-wielding capitalist Donald Trump; and Mayor Bloomberg.

So far, only eight users of the UFT’s website have answered the poll. But the lead is going to Michelle Rhee, who so far is the least despised of the people on the list.

Thanks to the eagle-eyed reader who pointed us to the latest poll question!

The city's presentation on the results of last year's Principal Satisfaction Survey show that some initiatives have fallen out of favor with school leaders as new ones have emerged.

The Department of Education’s tools to assess schools are falling out of favor with New York City principals, according to results of the city’s most recent survey of school leaders. Instead, principals are getting behind new reforms that are aimed to strengthen individual students and teachers.

Released this week, the findings are based on principals’ responses to the ninth round of the survey, known as the Principal Satisfaction Survey. Since 2007, the education department has administered the surveys to principals to get feedback about the support they are receiving.

Overall, about three out of four principals said they were generally happy with how the city helps them do their jobs, slightly more than last year but lower than in 2009, when an all-time high of more than 80 percent of principals said they were satisfied. But the department initiatives that won the strongest approval have shifted, and principals reported being much less happy with the support they receive for students with disabilities.

In the past, the survey has also polled principals on their satisfaction with the chancellor and the Panel for Educational Policy, the school board that has never rejected a city proposal. But those questions were not on the survey when it was administered at the end of 2011-2012 school year. (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…)

Nearly three-quarters of New Yorkers approve of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s carrot-and-stick approach to getting new teacher evaluations in place, according to poll results released today.

Last month, Cuomo vowed to withhold increases in state school aid to districts that do not settle in short order on new teacher evaluations that take test scores into account.

The poll, conducted last week by the Siena Research Institute, asked respondents, “Do you support or oppose the Governor’s plan to link school aid increases to the implementation of an enhanced teacher evaluation process?” Seventy-one percent said they support that plan. (The poll of 807 registered voters had a margin of error of 3.4 percent.)

The support was evenly split between respondents in New York City and the rest of the state and was especially high among black New Yorkers (77 percent) and young people between 18 and 34 (78 percent). Households with union members (61 percent) and Jews (63 percent) supported Cuomo’s plan least often, but even they stood by it in large numbers. (more…)

City principals are increasingly unhappy with their jobs, according to the union that represents them.

In the latest newsletter from the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, President Ernest Logan reported that 73 percent of union members are not happy with their workload, compensation, and job security. That’s up from 68 percent the last time the union surveyed its members, in 2009.

The survey of CSA members was conducted by Global Strategy Group in September and October, according to Chiara Coletti, a union spokeswoman. She said assistant principals and other administrators in the union were less dissatisfied, leading to an overall dissatisfaction rate of 59 percent. In 2009, that number was 48 percent.

In recent years, principals have seen their role shift from setting a vision and strategy for instruction to managing a seemingly unending list of procedural tasks. In his first communication with principals in April, Chancellor Dennis Walcott promised to cut down on their paperwork load, and in November he outlined steps that he said would cut down time spent on administrative tasks by an hour a day.  (more…)

The city Department of Education is one of five large urban districts that have opened up their email Rolodexes to The New Teacher Project for a study about teacher recruitment and retention. The nonprofit group, which runs the city’s Teaching Fellows programs and studies teacher job markets around the country, sent the voluntary, 30-minute survey to about 68,000 of the city’s 80,000 teachers and one large charter school network.

The 50-question survey — which one teacher sent us in a series of screenshots, above — asks teachers what would make them want to work in, or remain in, a high-needs school.

The survey is a first step in TNTP’s efforts to produce a followup to “The Widget Effect,” according Dan Weisberg, a TNTP vice president who used to be the DOE’s chief labor negotiator. The influential 2009 report urged school districts to revamp teacher evaluations based on survey responses of 15,000 teachers from 12 districts across five states (New York City was not among them).

Now, dozens of states, including New York, are in the process of overhauling teacher evaluations. Weisberg said this year’s survey is the next step toward figuring out how to place the most effective teachers in classrooms with the neediest students. (more…)

The last two years have been disastrous for public opinion of Mayor Bloomberg’s school policies, according to a new poll.

The poll, conducted last week by Marist, found that just 27 percent of New Yorkers approve of how Mayor Bloomberg is handling the city’s public schools. That’s down from 53 percent in June 2009, the last time the question was asked. Since then, longtime chancellor Joel Klein resigned and was replaced with education newcomer Cathie Black; test scores plummeted after revelations about the quality of state tests; and Bloomberg has waged high-profile battles over school closures, charter schools, and teacher layoffs.

Black’s own poll numbers have been abysmal. Just 17 percent of New Yorkers approve of her performance, according to a Quinnipiac poll earlier this month, and 34 percent said they didn’t know who she was or couldn’t judge her. (In contrast, Klein’s approval rating, always the lowest among public officials, bottomed out at 33 percent in 2007 after he cut school bus routes in the middle of winter.)

Today’s poll also probed New Yorkers’ views on the fight over “last in, first out” layoff rules, which Bloomberg wants to end, and found that half see the mayor’s position as a power grab. (more…)

Americans want more news coverage of how teachers and students are performing, according to a survey released today by the Brookings Institution.

More than 70 percent of respondents said that they wanted more news coverage of teacher effectiveness and of student academic performance. Nearly the same percentage want to know more about school safety, curriculum, finances and school reform.

In previous studies, the report’s authors have found that education policy and curriculum issues are frequently under-covered in national news. Of the national news stories on education examined in a 2009 study, just under 5 percent were about education reform, and just 3.4 percent covered curriculum.

Many of the report’s other findings are unsurprising — for example, the survey found that younger adults, who are more likely to have school-age children, want more education news than senior citizens do. (more…)

An excerpt from our report summarizing the results of our reader survey.

Most of you, dear readers, don’t fall neatly into either the Joel Klein or the Diane Ravitch camps on education, and even more of you don’t find GothamSchools ideological. (Phew! Not being ideological is our goal.)

These are among the findings of our first-ever nonscientific reader survey. You can read our full breakdown in this report.

Our aim is to use the survey findings as fuel for self-improvement. For instance, there seems to be something going on with the comments section.

On one hand, almost 30 percent of responders described the comments section as “very useful,” and a strong 41 percent of respondents reported commenting “every so often.” Among the silent readers, a few reported keeping quiet despite using the comments to shape an opinion. ”I visit Gotham to learn from others,” one wrote.

But most of the responders who didn’t comment said it was because of the tone of the comments that are posted. These people peppered their feedback with words like “vitriol” and “offensive.” “I love Gotham Schools but the commenters are nasty!” one wrote. “I’d never want to enter into that fray!”

A few more responses along those lines:

I find the comments are generally people with overly opinionated, yet unsubstantiated views that they want desperately to share but have nobody willing to listen.

I stopped. The comment section has deteriorated from thoughtful commentary to an arena of hysterics, mudslinging, and proselytizing. It degraded from NYT comments to Daily News comments.

Not a good forum for productive conversation–talking at people, not with them (more…)

As the city’s investigation into grade tampering by a high school principal enters its second year, morale at the school has taken a turn for the worse.

A majority of teachers at Herbert Lehman High School who took the city’s annual survey said they don’t trust the school’s executive principal Janet Saraceno. And 81 percent said the principal is not an effective manager.

Results from the survey of teachers, students, and parents also show that in the “safety and respect” category, Lehman is getting poor marks. In total, 23 percent of the school’s teachers and 63 percent of students took the survey, which is below the city’s average participation rates.

Lehman has struggled with student safety this year and is likely to have full-time scanners installed by next fall. While most teachers said they feel safe at the school, a majority also said that crime, violence, and gang activity are a problem.

After I reported on teachers’ complaints that Lehman’s principal was changing students’ grades, Department of Education officials responded by threatening to investigate the teachers. Since then, teachers report that the DOE has not contacted them, nor has the Office of Special Investigations, which is tasked with following up on complaints. (more…)