PHILADELPHIA – A new poll gauging public opinion of the Philadelphia school district shows many in the city don’t have a very favorable view of their local public schools.

The poll, conducted by Pew Charitable Trusts between July 23 and Aug. 13, also shows city residents in the 18- to 34-year-old category have the lowest opinion of Philly schools, and wouldn’t recommend the city as a good place to raise children. Roughly half of the 1,605 Philadelphia residents who took the survey plan to look for other education options for their children, Philly.com reports.

“Overall, we found that Philadelphians have a very low opinion of their city’s financially distressed system,” Larry Eichel, director of Pew’s Philadelphia Research Initiative, told the news site.

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The results aren’t particularly surprising, especially considering the daily news reports detailing the district’s $304 million budget deficit and the layoff of thousands of school employees. District officials have pushed the city and state to bail the district out of its financial problems, and ongoing contract negotiations with the teachers union have both sides airing their grievances in public.

Researchers noted the poll results likely are influenced by the recent increase in publicity on the district’s budget problems – because the poll was conducted during a daily barrage of news developments on the budget. Regardless, there is a clear trend in public perception that has taken shape since Pew first conducted the annual poll in 2009, Eichel told Philly.com.

“The trend line has been down,” Eichel said.

“You don’t see a pattern like this,” he said. “This is a distinctive pattern.”

While disappointment in the district is to be expected – fueled no doubt by both the financial problems and lagging student achievement in many schools  – other results of the survey were less predictable.

“Asked who was responsible for the district’s financial crisis, respondents placed equal blame on the city and the state. Thirty-one percent pointed fingers at Mayor Nutter and City Council; the same percentage attributed the problems to Gov. Corbett and the legislature,” Philly.com reports.

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“Twenty-one percent cited the district’s administration and the Philadelphia School Reform Commission (the state-appointed school board); 11 percent cited the unions representing teachers and other employees. Six percent said they didn’t know or refused to answer.”

Those figures show that while Philadelphia residents recognize the enormous problems facing the district’s schools, they don’t fully understand what’s causing them. They blame city, state, and district officials before the one group that has contributed the most to Philly schools’ financial mess: the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.

The survey was conducted before the teachers union launched a massive ad campaign targeting Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and Gov. Tom Corbett, so public opinion may now be even more in the union’s favor.

Nearly all the city council members and other officials Philly.com spoke with about the poll cited the need to secure more revenue from taxpayers. Like the city’s residents, they clearly don’t get it.

Until district officials secure substantial concessions from the PFT’s massively expensive teachers contract, there will be no financial stability for Philadelphia’s public schools. It’s not simply a matter of more money, it’s a matter of how the money is spent. Currently, far too much of the budget is devoted to providing expensive benefits and perks for teachers and other employees.

The district’s union contract stipulates district funded paid time off for union officials, payouts for unused sick days, nearly free health insurance for employees, and numerous other provisions that do nothing to improve academics but significantly impact the district’s bottom line.

Until those issues are addressed, we suspect the annual Pew poll will continue to show a downward trend in public opinion about the city’s public schools.

On a side note, there was one ray of hope in the Pew poll: 64 percent of respondents believe the city’s charter schools are improving educational outcomes, and are helping to keep middle-class families in the city, Philly.com reports.