Albanys allergy to merit hits top high schools where it hurts in their rankings

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,” a...