Teachers aren't the only ones giving low marks to Michael Bloomberg's war on public schools

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has for years been at war with his city's teachers union, using the giant megaphone available to him as both a billionaire and the mayor of the nation's largest city to slam the teachers at every opportunity. But in the past week it's become clear that teachers aren't the only ones to have problems with Bloomberg's heavy-handedness on education.

Voters are not too happy with Bloomberg's role in the schools, for one thing. The city has mayoral control of education, so he appoints the school board. That means that Bloomberg owns education as an issue. He even owns mayoral control itself, which was instituted in 2002 at his urging, making him the only New York City mayor to have had such a large role in the city's education policy. And a new poll from Quinnipiac finds that a strong majority of voters wants to move away from mayoral control: 63 percent want the the mayor to share control of the schools and 13 percent say the mayor shouldn't have any control, while just 18 percent say the mayor should keep control. That's in sharp contrast to 2009, when 55 percent of voters wanted mayoral control to continue.

It's not just that voters don't want the mayor in sole control of the schools, either. The recent Quinnipiac poll also finds that:

By a 53 - 35 percent margin, voter trust the teachers' union more than Bloomberg to protect the interests of public school students.

That's both a judgment on Bloomberg's recent actions against teachers and the context in which the current fights are playing out. And a big fight came to a head this week, centering on teacher evaluations.

Thursday was the deadline for the city and the union to reach an agreement on a teacher evaluation plan in order to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in state education funding, but the negotiations failed. The head of the teachers union said that the union had reached an agreement with Department of Education negotiators, only to have Bloomberg kill the deal. Bloomberg, unsurprisingly, blamed the union, but head below the fold to see how his key reason for doing so crumbles when you poke it.