Success Academy charter school ranking dropped nearly 200 points after state rigged result: lawsuit
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 i...