Eva 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.
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