A survey released earlier this week on the performance of new New York City Chancellor Cathie Black three months after she was selected shows her approval ratings hovering at an anemic 17 percent.
The poll of 772 New York City adults, conducted by channel NY1 and Marist College, shows that 34 percent rated her performance as fair, and 23 percent haven’t heard of her at all. On a positive note, the same poll shows that 38 percent of the surveyed residents believe the schools in their community are excellent or good.That approval rating rises to 53 percent among the people surveyed who actually have children enrolled in New York schools.
Black’s poll numbers have remained consistently low. A NY1-Marist poll in February turned up an approval rating of 21 percent. But she has company. A separate survey conducted by Quinnipiac University in March found that voters weren’t too pleased with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, either.
In the Quinnipiac poll, 17 percent of those surveyed approved of the job Black is doing, compared to 49 percent who disapproved and 34 percent who were undecided. The poll also found that 51 percent of those surveyed said they did not approve of the job Bloomberg was doing, while 39 percent approved. Those disapproval ratings were the highest that Quinnipiac has measured for Bloomberg since 2003.
In other New York news, deputy chancellor Santiago Tavares, who oversaw community engagement, is leaving the district to join Cambridge
Education, a global education business that partners with schools in 22 states and in education systems in over 40 countries. (Education Week wrote an interesting story in 2006 on Cambridge Education’s work in New York schools.)