Mayor Bloomberg pledged 16 months ago to do a better job educating students who can’t speak English, but at a hearing yesterday, the leader of the City Council’s Committee on Education, Eva Moskowitz, said the system is in an “abysmal state of affairs.”

She said the system is a “hodgepodge, a historical accident,” that doesn’t do justice to the 13.5% of children here who aren’t fluent in English.

“It’s been that way for many, many years, so they’re playing catch-up,” she said. “But I’m a little surprised that they’ve been aggressive about a lot of other areas, and I don’t think the reform areas for nonnative speakers of English has been as aggressive.”

When so-called English Language Learners first took a new, more rigorous test in 2003 to get out of bilingual programs and into regular classes, only 3.7% passed. Last spring, that almost doubled to 7.5%.

A 92.5% failure rate is not acceptable, Ms. Moskowitz said.

Last year, 72.5% of the children who passed the test did so within three years. Ms. Moskowitz said the testing data represent “massive failure.”

At the hearing, the deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, Carmen Farina, blamed the low performance on the newness of the test. She also said new professional development for bilingual educators, which is consistent with the city’s reading and writing curriculum, would help them teach children more effectively.

On her way out of City Hall, Ms. Farina said one of the committee members, Oliver Koppell, might be onto something when he said the test might be flawed. “Many more kids actually pass other tests,” she said. “I think to some degree the test doesn’t always show what people are learning.”

She added, “I think we have to look at the test.”

While Ms. Farina claimed there might be some kinks in the testing process, she said a new $1 million contract with West-Ed for professional development was helping educators learn how to teach English language learners more effectively. Last year, more than 1,700 educators were trained in the WestEd methods. So far, 18 of the 107 of the English Language Learner Instructional Support Specialists have passed a certification test, but the education department says by the end of the year all of them will have received formal certification.

She added that the system was getting a new $20 million boost this year. The new money will pay for instructional materials aligned to the curriculum, classroom libraries, extended days, in classroom support for students, and professional development.

New immigrants who don’t speak English can choose between three programs: “English as a second language,” in which children are put in classes with English-speaking children, “transitional bilingual education,” which instructs children 60% of the time in English and 40% in their native language, and “dual language” programs, in which students who speak English and those who don’t learn half in English and half in a foreign language.

Ms. Moskowitz and education advocates at the hearing said parents don’t really have the choice that the department claims they have.

“It’s not a choice that you check that you don’t speak English at home and therefore you end up in a program,” Ms. Moskowitz said. “The department uses ‘choice’ rather loosely. We have choice in high school admissions, we have choice when it comes to No Child Left Behind. This is a very low standard for choice.”