Fwd: Bloomberg Gets Bad Grades From 78% of School Parents, Poll Says
Mona Davids
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It's truly bad when your own billion dollar company reports you're failure. We, the real stakeholders, parents and educators know this already. From Bloomberg LP today.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-11/bloomberg-gets-bad-grades-from-78-of-school-parents-poll-says.html
Bloomberg Gets Bad Grades From 78% of School Parents, Poll Says
By Henry Goldman - May 11, 2011 6:00 AM ETThe parents rejected Bloomberg’s education policies and practices by a margin of 78 percent to 20 percent. When voters without children were counted, 64 percent found fault with the mayor’s control of the almost 1,700-school system, compared with 25 percent who approved.
The survey is Quinnipiac’s first to measure Bloomberg’s approval rating since April 7, when he accepted the resignation of Chancellor Cathie Black, the former Hearst Magazines chairman whose three months in office drew a 17 percent job-approval rating and protests from parents who said she was out of touch.
Bloomberg has made education of the city’s 1.1 million pupils a signature issue. He won control of the system in 2002 when the Legislature and former Governor George Pataki allowed him to disband the Board of Education. He increased the schools’ budget by 70 percent to about $19 billion, raising teacher salaries, test scores and graduation rates.
“Mayor Mike, you said you wanted to be the ‘education mayor,’ but New Yorkers don’t think you’ve learned how to do it,” Maurice Carroll, director of the Hamden, Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said in a statement. “Even the removal of a historically unpopular schools chancellor doesn’t seem to be moving the approval needle.”
Voters said by 57 percent to 23 percent that the mayor’s takeover of the schools has been more a failure than a success.
Black’s Successor
Black’s replacement, Dennis Walcott, a former deputy mayor who oversaw administration education policy, received a 31 percent approval rating, with 21 percent finding fault with him and 48 percent undecided. Half said they expected Walcott to improve the quality of education in three years.
The survey also found that 40 percent of city voters approved of Bloomberg’s job performance, compared with 49 percent who rated him unfavorably. The results were consistent with a March 16 Quinnipiac poll, which reported 39 percent of voters approved of his performance and 51 percent didn’t.
Fifty percent of New Yorkers agreed when asked whether the mayor has “lost focus” in his third four-year term, which began in 2010. Three percent said the mayor’s term has been better than the first two; 48 percent said it’s about the same, and 47 percent labeled it worse, the poll reported.
The mayor remains personally popular, the poll found, with 33 percent responding that they like him and his policies, 28 percent saying they like him while disagreeing with his policies and 26 percent indicating they neither like him or his policies, the poll reported.
The survey, based upon 962 telephone interviews conducted May 4 to May 9, contains a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points, the institute said.
The mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.
To contact the reporters on this story: Henry Goldman in New York athgol...@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Tannenbaum at mta...@bloomberg.net
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