The decision deprives students in low-performing schools of information that could point to better ones.
The decision deprives students in low-performing schools of information that could point to better ones.
E va Moskowitz, the formidable head of one of the nation’s most successful charter school networks, recently explained in an op-ed why she is suing New York State’s Education Department over its decision to limit the release of school-level results of Advanced Placement (AP) exams. Education stakeholders across the board need the data to make informed choices about New York’s schools. Parents need the data to decide where to enroll their children and to gauge how well schools are performing. Policymakers need the data for accountability.
The results in dispute show how well a given school’s students do on AP exams. Until recently, those data were shared with New Yorkers in the form of U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of high schools in the state, which factored AP scores into its formula. U.S. News relies on the College Board, which administers AP exams, to verify each school’s performance numbers, preventing schools from cooking their books. But New York State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa forbade the College Board from sharing these data, citing student privacy concerns. Because Success Academy, the institution Moskowitz leads, is a public charter school network, and therefore subject to New York’s jurisdiction, the commissioner ruled they had to conform to this new policy “protecting” student privacy.
The result: Success Academy schools plummeted in the U.S. News rankings. Its students typically outperform those in traditional public schools on AP exams by wide margins: According to Moskowitz’s lawsuit, 95 percent of Success Academy’s 2026 graduating class schools passed at least three AP exams by the time they graduated, compared with the fewer than 25 percent of high schoolers nationally who passed just one such exam. Because U.S. News cannot now verify the AP scores of any school in the state, it omitted these scores from its rankings formula.
As Moskowitz argues, the state’s invocation of student privacy is a canard: Aggregate data, the kind she is seeking, are not nearly as sensitive as individual student records. She is also probably right that the state is violating the First Amendment, since, as her lawsuit puts it, “Supreme Court precedent establishes that dissemination of factual information” — in this case, AP scores — “is speech,” and that New York can’t sidestep First Amendment constitutional speech protections simply by restricting the College Board (rather than Success Academy itself) from sharing the data.
As Moskowitz’s lawsuit plays out, it is worth considering New York’s move. I believe the state is withholding the data because its traditional public schools are not doing their job. The AP data make this clear, but even more damning is how poorly New York’s students perform on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
On the most recent administration of NAEP, in 2024, 35 percent of the state’s eighth graders scored below basic — NAEP’s lowest achievement level — in reading, and New York saw one of the largest increases in that share of any state — up five percentage points since 2022. New York City fared even worse: Thirty-eight percent of its eighth graders scored below basic in reading. Fourth-grade reading results are worse still (46 percent below basic in New York City, 41 percent statewide), as are the results in math.
I have spent decades working with data measuring student achievement. I served as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), an agency charged with collecting and distributing data on the state of American education, during George W. Bush’s administration. I then spent ten years working with about a dozen states to develop ways of holding their public colleges and universities accountable for how well graduates fared in the labor market. More recently, I served as director of the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education, which oversees NCES.
During those years, I learned an ugly truth: Far too many state leaders work hard to bury bad outcomes. This is clearly a rational but unacceptable response: Such data often reflect poorly on their leadership. Entrenched interests, especially teachers’ unions, also have a stake in suppressing these data, since bad outcomes can spur changes to accountability policy, and such changes almost always cut against teacher autonomy and job protections.
In the present case, Commissioner Rosa and the teachers’ unions have a shared interest in making Success Academy schools look worse than their traditional public-school competitors. Here they have done so under the guise of student privacy — an essential protection, to be sure, but one that is too often abused to protect a failing system.
Instead of obfuscating Success Academy’s success, Commissioner Rosa should be championing the schools that get results and working to bring that success to more students. Hindering the flow of data only serves to protect bad teachers and bad schools. Perhaps good politics, but terrible policy.