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An August poll showed that nearly three-quarters of New Yorkers regretted giving Mayor Bloomberg a third term in office. Sixty-five percent said they wouldn't vote for him again. But what's not clear is why. His job approval in that same poll was nearly 50 percent. A lot of people are worried about the economy, but they mostly don't blame the mayor for the slump. More people think the standard of living has improved under his leadership than don't. His police commissioner gets high marks. Voters even give him the thumbs up on public health.

Education, however, is the one major policy area where a clear majority of New Yorkers are unhappy with the mayor. It's been that way for some time now. So is this the culprit? Let's take a look.

When we look side-by-side at 11 years worth of Bloomberg's job performance and education policy approval ratings, it's hard to say how much his handling of schools affects his overall popularity. But the two polls did begin to rise and fall together -- coincidentally or not -- early into his third and final term, and have been more or less in correlation since:

As we can see, approval for Bloomberg's education policies bottomed out in the middle of last year and stayed low afterward. Many will blame the severe drop on one disastrous decision: the hiring of Hearst Chairwoman Cathie Black as chancellor. That move on November 11, 2010, and the outcry that followed, certainly marked the beginning of a steep decline for Bloomberg continuing through to Black's firing on April 7, 2011.

It's important to note though that Bloomberg's overall approval rating had been losing ground steadily since his re-election in 2009, and that the politically disastrous blizzard of 2010 also came just six weeks after Black was hired. Bloomberg's popularity as a third term mayor obviously suffered from both missteps.

There is also another likely contributor to Bloomberg's lowly schools numbers: he has spent too much time in office. His education policies were once seen as, at worst, an attempt to shake up an unacceptable status quo in the school system. But, a decade later, now his policies are the status quo--and clearly the status quo is still unacceptable to many. At last count New Yorkers disapproved 2-to-1.

Some will say that it is simply third term malaise. But, despite the correlation during the last two years or so between his job approval and support (or lack there of) for his education policies, the mayor's overall popularity is nearly back to the midpoint between his all-time best and his all-time worst polls. Meanwhile, his education numbers have been hovering for more than a year now around their historical lows.

Perhaps Bloomberg and his crew should have listened to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight (released around the time of the mayor's decision to run for a third term in 2008) when he said, "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." In any case, when it comes to schools, in the view of New Yorkers, Bloomberg should have quit while he was ahead.