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Tribune poll: Voters give Emanuel low marks on his school policies

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After a teachers strike, school closings and widespread budget cuts, city voters are increasingly frustrated with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s stewardship of Chicago Public Schools, a new Chicago Tribune poll shows.

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed disapprove of the mayor’s handling of the public school system. And about the same number sided with the Chicago Teachers Union over Emanuel in the ongoing debate about how to improve CPS. Around a quarter of city voters polled back the mayor.

The dismal grades for Emanuel’s education policies are driving down the mayor’s overall job performance ratings. Of the 52 percent of city voters dissatisfied with Emanuel as mayor, almost 9 out of 10 disapprove of his handling of the public schools.

On Thursday, Emanuel suggested that the sharp dissatisfaction with his job performance is tied to a sluggish economy. There is a need to “understand and appreciate there is tremendous stress economically on middle-class and working-class families,” he said.

“We have to have a set of policies in place, from pre-K to community colleges, playgrounds to parks to after-school activities to give everybody a chance to not just look at the (job) gains, but to know they have a future in those gains, and acknowledge that while we’re making progress, we’re not where we need to be,” the mayor said.

The disapproval on schools runs deep across all major racial, age and income categories in the survey of 800 registered voters interviewed by APC Research Inc. by cellphone and landline from Aug. 6 to Tuesday. The poll’s margin of error was 3.5 percentage points.

Asked about Emanuel’s handling of public schools, 65 percent disapproved, 26 percent approved and 10 percent had no opinion. The latest findings show a shift of 5 percentage points toward disapproval from a Tribune poll in May 2013 — just before a vote by the school board to shut nearly 50 public schools.

Among parents of children in Chicago Public Schools — about one-fifth of those taking part in the survey — nearly 4 out of 5 disapproved of the mayor’s handling of public education while only 19 percent approved. But even those without children in the public schools disapproved at a 62 percent rate, while only 27 percent approved.

The mayor kicked off his first term by taking on the CTU, seeking to portray teachers as an obstacle to improving the troubled school system as he fought them over pay, a longer school day and teacher evaluations. The growing discord culminated in a weeklong teachers strike in 2012 and the removal of the mayor’s first pick for district CEO, Jean-Claude Brizard.

Then last year, Emanuel’s school board voted to close 49 elementary schools and a high school program.

While dissatisfaction with the mayor on education crossed racial lines, it was more intense among African-American voters. Critics contend black neighborhoods were disproportionately targeted for school closings. Fully 77 percent of black voters disapproved of Emanuel’s handling of the city’s schools while only 14 percent approved.

Poll respondents contacted later by the Tribune discussed their views.

“It’s hurting the African-American community — those children are being hurt the most,” said Larry Smith, 57, of Englewood. “I don’t see why (Emanuel) doesn’t see that.”

But retired South Shore resident Ervin Smith, 70, said the mayor has gone where his predecessors failed to go.

“He’s forthright, and he’s doing what he thinks is necessary and what hasn’t been accomplished, like shutting down schools that weren’t doing well, period, and upgrading the system,” Ervin Smith said.

As for the idea that African-American students were hit hard by the closings, Ervin Smith, who is black, said those children needed a change in venue.

“They were not learning anything, just going through the motions and being passed along,” Smith said. “For far too long, the union has just been baby-sitting teachers and the teachers have been baby-sitting the kids.”

Among white voters, 52 percent disapproved while 38 percent approved. Those numbers slipped from May 2013, when 46 percent of white voters approved of Emanuel’s handling of the schools and 44 percent disapproved. The poll found a similar dynamic among Hispanic voters.

Lisa Cockerham, 40, of Morgan Park, whose daughter once attended a CPS grammar school, said she was moved by parents and students who begged for schools to remain open.

“They were not taking parent concerns seriously,” said Cockerham, who at one time worked with social service organizations operating in struggling CPS schools. “They went through the process of holding the hearings, but the schools still closed. It looked like the decisions had already been made and those hearings were just a formality.”

With so many students attending new schools amid a fear of street violence, Emanuel staffed up a Safe Passage program, hiring 600 adult monitors. The program appeared to have worked as promised.

Like in much of city government, there’s a cash crunch at CPS. The mayor and school board have blamed the cuts on ballooning teacher pension costs, lack of pension reform and declines in state funding.

While school closings hit mostly the South and West sides of the city, many North Side neighborhood schools experienced budget cuts for two years in a row. Parents have watched their neighborhood schools receive hundreds of thousands of dollars less while the district has increased overall funding to privately run charter schools. CPS says with a new per-pupil budgeting system, the money is now following students, with schools seeing more students getting additional dollars and those losing students receiving less.

Emanuel’s approach on charters versus neighborhood schools was roundly criticized by voters: 72 percent disagreed with that approach, compared with 18 percent who agreed. African-American voters most severely opposed the policy — at 83 percent — while only 10 percent agreed with Emanuel. Nearly 8 in 10 parents of CPS children also were opposed, as well as 75 percent of female voters, 69 percent of men and 63 percent of whites.

“In Humboldt Park, the opening of charters has coincided with closure of some traditional public schools,” said poll respondent Jilana Ordman, 39, a university instructor who lives in the neighborhood. “(Emanuel) has increased funding to charters and allowed permission for more of them to open. Charters give a way to opt out of the public school system, and that distracts attention from building better schools for everyone.”

The mayor’s office has increased the number of schools offering International Baccalaureate programs and made major announcements on an annex for the elite Walter Payton College Prep and for a new $60 million Barack Obama College Preparatory High School. Many parents frustrated by the process to get children into the highly competitive selective-enrollment high schools were happy, but others said the money would have been better spent on improving neighborhood high schools. South Siders were keenly aware that the latter two schools will mostly serve North Side residents.

Since his election as mayor in 2011, Emanuel has found himself battling Karen Lewis, the president of the teachers union and his most prominent potential challenger in February’s city election.

Little more than 15 months ago, more than one-third of Chicago voters did not choose a side between Emanuel and the union. The latest poll finds that the bulk of those voters have opted to side with the union: 62 percent, up from 41 percent in May 2013. A total of 23 percent sided with Emanuel, up from 19 percent more than a year ago. Only 7 percent opted to choose neither the union nor the mayor in the new poll.

Last year, 55 percent of African-American voters sided with the union and 5 percent with Emanuel. Now 79 percent of black poll respondents sided with the union and 9 percent with the mayor. The mayor also lost ground on that issue among white voters. Last year, 33 percent sided with the mayor and 27 percent with the union, while this year, 46 percent backed the union and 39 percent the mayor.

Nearly three-quarters of parents of public school children chose the union as the best to improve education, compared with 14 percent who selected Emanuel.

Among union household members, which make up about one-third of the survey’s respondents, 71 percent side with CTU to 18 percent who side with the mayor. Among nonunion households, 58 percent side with the union while 25 percent side with the mayor.

Cabdriver Melvin Stark, 71, who lives on the Near North Side, said he’s not part of a union. But during the teacher walkout two years ago, he made it a point of blowing his horn while driving by schools.

“It was politically suicidal for him to demonize teachers,” Stark said of the mayor. “I felt teachers were being scapegoated for whatever was wrong with CPS. The problem is they don’t have enough money and they’ve given up on public schools.”

Tribune reporter Bill Ruthhart contributed.

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