A City Council member, Eva Moskowitz, barely had time to take a breath: After crossing party lines to endorse Mayor Bloomberg, the chairwoman of the Education Committee was back on the council floor yesterday hammering away at the administration for neglecting science in city schools.

“Our programs are failing our kids,” she said during a hearing on science education two days after the mayor’s re-election. “Science education is the foundation of our global economy, yet it has been treated with second-class status.”

About eight in 10 new jobs created are in science and technology, she said, yet more than half of eighth graders failed the state science exam last year, leaping to 55.3% from 46% the year before.

Only one in six students even took the physics Regents exam, and half of them failed it. In chemistry, one in three students took the Regents exam, and half of them failed.

The outlook isn’t so much better when it comes to supplies and facilities.

Science labs are lacking in almost 50 high schools. Of the $3.6 million a year the city spends on science education, about $1.20 goes to each student for supplies, software, and textbooks.

Ms. Moskowitz blamed the mayor and the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, for stressing math and English while ignoring science.

To help address the problem, Mr. Klein hired a new director of science, Julia Rankin, who now oversees the teaching of science in city schools. She first appeared before the committee last September after two weeks on the job.

Since then, she helped develop a more complete curriculum implemented this year and created partnerships with science institutions across the city like the Museum of Natural History to work with students.

“There is no question that science has not been a priority prior to me coming here,” Ms. Rankin said. She also called the science exam failure rate “horrendous.”

“We should be teaching science on a daily basis for the whole year,”she said. The department plans to implement a new requirement that students are taught at least 150 minutes of science a week.

“Standing up and giving lectures doesn’t work, it’s not how we want to teach science anymore,” she said.

The level of science teaching and available supplies is not consistent across the city. A new science teacher arrived at P.S. 202 in East New York this year to discover a science lab with a chalkboard, two old computers, and eight empty supply closets.

A member of the Brooklyn Education Collaborative, Lenore Brown, testified that many students in East New York, Brownsville, and Canarsie are attending schools with few science labs and supplies.

The chancellor recently agreed to make sure that all 39 schools in those districts have at least basic science equipment in place by January 1, 2006.

“To us, this is a very, very important first step,” she said.

There are 3,592 certified teachers working in the public schools – including 1,703 in biology and 499 in chemistry. Still, about 9% of schools don’t have a teacher dedicated to teaching science.