City special-education students are flunking state exams at a far greater rate than in other parts of the state, Education Department statistics show.
The number of special-ed kids in the city who passed the fourth-grade math exam dropped last year to 14.3 percent, from 17.2 percent in 1999.
The situation was even worse at the middle-school level, where just 3.3 percent of the city’s special-education students passed the eighth-grade English test, down from 4.1 percent.
An anemic 2 percent passed the eighth-grade math assessment test.
Ten percent of the city’s fourth-graders with disabilities passed the state standardized English assessment test last year – a 2 percent jump. But the statewide passing rate was 35 percent.
“This is another example of the gap in student achievement,” state Education Commissioner Richard Mills said yesterday in releasing the statistics.
Schools Chancellor Harold Levy downplayed the results.
Levy said that just 11 percent of the city’s students are in special education, lower than the 14.6 percent in other cities and the 12 percent statewide average. That means the city’s kids are likely to be more severely learning-disabled when compared with the rest of the state.
“Because of this, one would expect student performance of the special education population in New York City to be lower,” Levy said.
“Nonetheless, I would hope that special-ed performance on standardized tests will rise as we improve instruction, through better professional development and smaller class size.”
About the only encouraging sign is that of those special-ed students who have taken Regents exams in high school, 57 percent have passed with at least a 55 – still below the statewide average.
The Regents recently extended a regulation exempting students with disabilities from having to pass Regents exams in order to graduate.
Acknowledging the problems, Deputy Education Commissioner Lawrence Gloeckler said the city had been slow with its efforts to integrate special-education students into mainstream classes.
Statewide, the picture is brighter, with more disabled kids taking and passing the Regents exams than ever before, Mills said.
And, for the first time, the state exceeds the national average in the percentage of special-education students who are in general-education classrooms for 80 percent or more of the school day.