When state bureaucrats chose to deny US News & World Report the data it uses to rank nearly 18,000 public schools on its 2026-27 Best High Schools list, it was a move that harmed New York's top performers. Monkey Business - stock.adobe.com See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google Albany has plenty of ways to punish great students and schools — and now it’s found a new one.
When state bureaucrats chose to deny US News & World Report the data it uses to rank nearly 18,000 public schools on its 2026-27 Best High Schools list, it was a move that harmed New York’s top performers.
Parents are getting a perverse lesson in accountability: A school can give thousands of students college-level exams, and see them pass in extraordinary numbers — only to have the state stifle news of its success.
The stakes are high. USNWR rankings are known as reliable, standardized comparisons of performance.
Families consider them to choose schools and neighborhoods, colleges review them to assess candidates, and schools themselves use them to advertise or improve.
Merit requires measurement. Hide the numbers, you hide the comparison.
Two yardsticks account for 40% of the USNWR ranking, college readiness (30% percent of the score) and college curriculum breadth (10%).
Both measures rest on reported Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate results.
The New York State Education Department, however, has blocked the College Board — the only organization able to verify the students’ AP results independently — from providing school-level results to USNWR.
The result? USNWR used only IB results to calculate the two college-prep measures for every New York state high school — in a state that has 1,110 AP schools but only 56 high schools offering IB.
Suddenly, top-performing AP-only schools got zeros for 40% of their USNWR rankings.
The AP exam is a nationally standardized test of college-level work in a broad array of topics, scored by the College Board, with no hometown refereeing by students’ own teachers.
That makes AP results a useful, comparable measure of how well a school actually prepares students for college.
IB is different: Earning its two-year diploma requires courses in six subjects plus a Theory of Knowledge course, an “extended essay,” and creativity, activity and service projects.
A large share of each IB grade — often about 20% to 30% —comes from subjective teacher-scored internal assessments, coursework and holistic projects.
That’s not the same as a single, independently scored AP exam.
Treating IB as the sole valid metric and erasing AP doesn’t measure college readiness; it just measures which program Albany allowed the public to see.
The resulting New York rankings are plain ridiculous.
Top charter Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts in Harlem, where students pass state exams in reading and math at twice the rate of their district-school counterparts, plunged from 11th in the state last year — and 9th in the city, the highest non-selective school — to 196th statewide.
Those kids didn’t suddenly shrug off their studies: 95% of the class of 2026 passed three or more APs, 79% passed five or more, and 60% passed seven or more.
Similarly, Jericho fell from 9th to 41st in New York state; Bronxville, 14th to 50th; Eleanor Roosevelt, 19th to 106th.
But there’s no intellectual slump in these top-flight schools – just Albany’s information blockade.
Meanwhile Stuyvesant High School — the specialized high school kids prep for years to enter via the SHSAT — is now 22nd in New York, down from 3rd last year.
It’s plummeted from 33rd place nationally down to 2,561st, despite math and reading proficiency near 100%.
Harlem Village Academy West, though, an IB school with about 70% proficiency, is now ranked 5th in the state and 224th in the country.
Brooklyn Latin, another IB campus, is now No. 1 in the state and 73rd nationally — while Bronx Science, with its nine Nobel Laureates, trails at 27th in the state and 2,939th nationally.
Stuyvesant and Bronx Science don’t have the IB, but they do offer a mountain of APs. Those APs counted for nothing.
And while Mott Hall Bronx High School posts 33% math proficiency, compared to Success Academy’s 97%, USNWR must rank Mott Hall above Success — because it gets IB credit and Success does not.
It’s right in line with New York State United Teachers’ years-long effort to sever public schools from objective measures of accountability.
In 2024, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Annual Professional Performance Review law explicitly delinked teacher evaluations from student performance measures like test scores.
NYSUT’s “More Teaching Less Testing” campaign won — at least when it came to the second part of that demand.
Last Thursday, Success Academy sued the NYSED in Manhattan federal court to overturn its ban on providing verified test information to the public.
A state that won’t let the public see who passed calculus is not protecting children — it’s protecting itself from the consequences of its failures.
Wai Wah Chin is founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York and a Manhattan Institute adjunct fellow.
