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By most measures, middle schools are the weakest link in the school system. And during the past decade, science education has been pushed aside.

But new data shows the city has a particularly big problem with students getting worse at science.

“By not preparing kids to do well in science in middle and high school, we are effectively shutting them out of huge parts of the economy,” said New York Academy of Sciences Educational Director Meghan Groome.

Science results for 17 large cities on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation's report card, were released Thursday. New York fourth graders' scores were right at the average, but eighth graders in the city scored below their peers.

Last week, results from the state science exams showed a similar drop-off in performance. On the state tests, the city pass-rate plummets from 82 percent of fourth graders passing to just 54 percent of eighth graders, a drop of 28 percentage points.

Statewide, the decline is just 17 percentage points.

And it's not just science. As city students get older, proficiency levels also drop in English, math and social studies. In every subject, on both state and national tests, the city's gap between fourth and eighth grade mastery is wider than the gaps statewide, nationally, and for other large cities.

But in science, city eighth graders are much further behind the national average than they are in reading and math. And if students fall behind in middle school, they may never catch up.

“It's going to be a real problem, from jobs that require just a high school degree, to an Associate’s Degree to a PHD, New York City is not going to be able to produce the same number of science superstars that they produced in the past,” Groome said.

It's a problem the city set out to fix almost three years ago, when the mayor and schools chancellor unveiled the largest-ever private donation to city schools – $18- million from General Electric, to develop middle school science programs. But last spring, only two years into the five-year grant, the city quietly diverted the funds towards other projects, saying the middle school science initiative was unsustainable.

Department of Education officials say they are starting to make scientific texts and analysis a much bigger part of reading instruction, and have hired 500 middle school science teachers during the past three years. But they didn't elaborate on why they cancelled the initiative or if they understand why city students experience such a steep fall-off in proficiency.