Staff Reports
New York’s education bureaucracy just pulled a neat trick: it hid the numbers that show which high schools actually prepare kids for college. The State Education Department refused to let the College Board share the AP cohort file with U.S. News & World Report. The result was predictable — dozens of top New York schools suddenly plunged in the magazine’s 2026–27 rankings, not because instruction got worse, but because the scoreboard vanished.
What happened to AP data and U.S. News rankings
U.S. News uses AP and IB results to compute “college readiness” and “curriculum breadth,” which together count for about 40% of a school’s score. New York would not authorize the College Board to give U.S. News the AP cohort file it requested. With AP data unavailable, U.S. News relied on IB results only. That is a big problem in a state with more than a thousand AP schools but only a few dozen IB campuses. The change left many high-performing AP-heavy schools with near-zero credit for that big chunk of the formula and produced wild, year-to-year ranking swings.
AP vs. IB: why the missing file matters
AP exams are one national test, graded by the College Board, so scores are directly comparable across schools. IB is a full program with internally scored projects and subjective assessments mixed in. Treating IB as the sole valid metric is like grading every baseball player on bunting because one team happens to teach bunting. Parents want clear, independent measures of college readiness. Hiding AP results hides the truth about which schools are delivering real, measurable success.
Albany’s “privacy” defense and the politics behind it
The State Education Department says it refused the file on privacy and legal grounds. Fine — protect student data. But don’t then let that protection turn into a cloak that hides results from the public and rewards political priorities over merit. This follows a trend: state policy has already moved away from tying teacher evaluations to test results, and unions have pushed for less testing. If protecting privacy becomes an excuse to erase accountability, the winners will be bureaucracy and politics, not kids. As Success Academy put it, scholars took demanding exams and produced results; the public ought to see them. And yes, Success Academy has sued the department in federal court to restore transparency.
Fix it: transparency, not shadow rankings
Parents, employers, and colleges use rankings and independent measures to decide where to send kids and whom to trust. NYSED can protect student privacy and still allow aggregate, school-level AP reporting that preserves comparability. The easiest fix is simple: authorize the narrow cohort file sharing with safeguards, or publish equivalent state-verified AP school reports. If Albany refuses, judges and voters should step in. New Yorkers should demand data, not excuses — because measuring merit is how we improve schools, and hiding it is how we protect failure.
