Parents and education activists want Mayor Bloomberg and the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, to make smaller class sizes their top priority in city schools, a new report by Fordham University says.

In an attempt to take the pulse of the city’s education community following the mayoral election, the university’s National Center for Schools and Communities conducted an online survey and 40% of the 501 respondents said the city should put reducing student-to-teacher ratios at the top of its education list.

Placing highly qualified teachers in the classroom and reducing overcrowding in schools also got high marks among those surveyed. Only 2% identified the mayor’s agenda: small schools, standardized testing, grade retention, and uniform literacy and math programs.

Authors of the survey conceded that the 501 respondents did not represent a formal sample of New York City education activists. About 70% of the respondents were parents and roughly the same amount identified themselves as white. Only about 15% of children enrolled in public school are white.

The lead researcher and director of the National Center for Schools and Communities, John Beam, said the study illustrated “the distance between the support for staying the course and the other options.”

He said Mr. Bloomberg had not made the issues of class size, overcrowding, and high-quality teachers a main concern since taking control of the city schools in 2002.

Under the Bloomberg administration, average class sizes have in fact dropped slightly in some parts of the school system.

In September, the Independent Budget Office released a study showing that average public school class size for kindergarten through third grade fell slightly last year, to 21.3 students from 21.6 the year before. Over the past seven years, the report shows, class size has shrunk 15%, from almost 25 students a class.

Despite the citywide drop in class sizes, about 46,000 of the city’s nearly 282,000 students in kindergarten through third grade were still in classes with more than 25 students last year.

A spokesman for the Department of Education, Keith Kalb, said the Bloomberg administration has focused on “the kind of strategies any truly accountable school system requires.

“Not only have we reduced or contained average class size at every grade level since last year, we have focused on critical classroom conditions that matter whatever the class size,” he said.

The Democrats seized on the class size issue during the mayoral election. The speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, a mayoral candidate, even collected signatures to create the Smaller Class Sizes Party ballot line.

Democrats jumped on Mr. Bloomberg for running a television ad informing New Yorkers that class size had been one of the highlights of his record on education.

At the same time, his administration questioned the value of pouring more money into creating smaller classes and instead emphasized the importance of having top-notch teachers.

The survey, which was posted on the center’s Web site and was linked to by education listservs, asked people to rank their first, second, and third preferences from a list of 13 possible policy choices.