Add The New York Post on Google The city’s largest charter school dropped nearly 200 places in statewide rankings – all because state bureaucrats blocked the release of advanced placement scores in the ratings, a new lawsuit claimed.
Success Academy — which operates dozens of schools across the city — argued an state Education Department decision to withhold 2026 AP scores from top school ranker US News & World Report rigged the ratings so that Success ended up 196th among Empire State high schools, according to the suit filed Thursday.
That’s compared to Success Academy’s top-tier ranking just a year earlier when the state allowed the release of AP test scores to US News — with the charter school snagging the No. 11 high school in the entire state, according to the suit.
“New York has removed an entire category of objective academic information,” Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz said in a statement. “The resulting rankings no longer provide the public with a complete picture of school performance.
“Our scholars — most of whom are low-income, first generation — took demanding college-level courses, sat for nationally administered examinations, and produced extraordinary results,” she added. “NYSED should not be allowed to prevent the public from seeing what they accomplished.”
Charter Schools are publicly funded and free to attend, but are run privately with curriculums more independent from the public school system.
But that public funding requires them to follow NYSED policies, which this year included the restriction of which test scores were released to US News for their rankings.
The state long released the College Board-administered AP test scores — one of the most widely taken college-preparatory tests — but last year Education Commissioner Betty Rosa decided that only International Baccalaureate test results could be released to US News.
Officials said that decision stemmed from policies about student privacy, which the SED claimed would be threatened if shared with the publication.
“The Department takes its responsibility to protect student data seriously,” an SED spokesperson told The Post.
“Compliance with New York’s student privacy laws is not optional, and it does not take a back seat to US News & World Report’s commercial ranking methodology, or any other desire to turn information about New York’s children into a for-profit product,” they added.
But critics weren’t convinced — with some lawmakers claiming the state was trying to hide its own failures and stifle charter school successes.
“I want to know what the value of the charter school versus a public school. What are you afraid of?” said Assemblyman Lester Chang (R-Brooklyn). “I believe in transparency. I believe our taxpayers should be out there, out in the open.
“And this is an aggregate, not individual,” Chang said of the scores. “So there is no privacy, per se.”
“It is extremely disappointing to see New York spend the most amount of money per student each year on our education system, yet Mississippi who spends among the least per student fares better in state test scores,” state Sen. Steve Chan (R-Brooklyn) added.
“And that’s because we’re not investing the money in the correct places,” he said. “And now Betty Rosa’s decision to not release the AP scores, it’s just a blatant cover up of again, money failing to buy performance.”
Chan’s complaints were highlighted by the results of this year’s state tests — with charter schools vastly outperforming public schools.
Just 50% of New York City’s public-school kids between third and eighth grade were proficient in reading this year — down 6 points from last year — while a mere 57% were proficient in math in the state tests.
Success Academy students, by comparison, scored 91% proficient in reading and 96% in math — with some schools even scoring 100% proficiency on its tests.
And the charter school was not the only New York school to complain about the state’s AP score decision, with numerous schools across Long Island sharing similar complaints that their rankings were tanked by the withholdings, News 12 reported.
And it’s not just the schools which suffered from the AP decision — with Success Academy arguing in its suit that reduced rankings directly affect students’ college prospects, as school rigor is often factored by higher education admissions officials.
But the SED said its job was to protect students data instead of letting it reap profits for a private company like US News, and that “extensive educational data, including AP participation information,” was available online.
“New York State’s AP participation data is collected to reflect student achievement in rigorous coursework, not to rank schools,” the SED spokesperson said. “If Success Academy believes that the commercial value of student information outweighs the State’s responsibility to protect it, it is free to explain as much in a lawsuit. But NYSED does not share that perspective.”
Charter schools have increasingly become a partisan issue in the state with reverberations in the Democratic-controlled government.
The powerful teachers’ unions have continually looked to block the charters from expanding, with Democrats in the state legislature largely siding with the unions while Republicans have sided with charter schools.
