Eva Moskowitz is the founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools.
Parents deserve to know how well high schools are preparing their students for college-level work. That’s why U.S. News & World Report is a great tool. For years, it has publicized students’ performance on Advanced Placement exams as part of its widely followed national high school rankings. This year, however, New York’s Education Department prevented the site from accessing this data on the state’s schools. Families and colleges, among others, are now left in the dark.
I care about that decision because students at Success Academy, the network of public charter schools I lead, perform extraordinarily well on those tests. We value each AP exam as an independent benchmark and require our students to sit for at least 18 of them to graduate. The results have been remarkable. Although our students are admitted by lottery and generally come from low-income families, 95 percent of graduates this year passed at least three AP exams, and 60 percent passed at least seven. Fewer than 25 percent of high school students nationally, by contrast, pass at least one by the time they graduate.
The state has censored AP reporting on the grounds of privacy, claiming that it “takes its responsibility to protect student data seriously.” But as a U.S. News press release affirmed last week, the notion that the site ever requested “protected, individual student-level data” is “categorically false.” U.S. News reports only aggregate data, which is why publication has been permitted in prior years.
New York also claims that U.S. News shouldn’t be allowed to use student data for a “commercial product.” But the only sense in which the rankings are commercial is that U.S. News, like virtually all major outlets, is a for-profit enterprise. Its webpage isn’t even behind a paywall.
The implications of the state’s argument are astonishing. If accepted, government could restrict any number of stories based on student data, including articles in this publication about how 12th-grade math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have recently hit their lowest levels in decades. Such information is protected speech, and when it comes to AP tests, Success Academy wants to share it. Suppressing one of the strongest objective indicators of our academic environment injures our schools’ reputations and deprives our students of the recognition they deserve. When AP results were counted last year, for instance, one of our high schools was ranked 11th in New York. This year, thanks to the state’s policy, the school fell to 196th.
Why would New York engage in such a flagrant First Amendment violation? One reasonable interpretation: The public education sector is desperate to avoid accountability for its failures.
New York’s approach to its Regents examinations is instructive. For years, students had to pass five of those tests to graduate from high school. When scores became abysmal, the state simply made it easier and easier to avoid massive failure rates. Until the late 1990s, earning a 65 on the basic algebra Regents exam required getting 65 out of 100 raw points correct. Now to pass with a 65, students need only 29 out of 82 raw points, or about 35 percent. Despite that generous curve, 44 percent of tested students failed two years ago.
Worse, the response of the state’s largest teachers union hasn’t been to elevate standards but to lobby against the requirement that students pass Regents exams to graduate. It won. That change will take effect those who begin high school in the 2027-28 school year. The union has aspired for “more teaching, less testing,” but it seems, in effect, to prize less oversight.
Objective standardized tests are one of the few ways parents and policymakers can determine how well schools are actually educating their children. They’re thus precious tools for holding teachers accountable, which has become increasingly uncomfortable for the union as the performance gap between charter and district schools has grown wider. At Success Academy, 91 percent of our students test proficient in English and 96 percent in math, compared with about 50 percent and 57 percent of their district-school peers, respectively. The proficiency rate of our Black and Hispanic students in math is more than twice as high.
When educators neglect sound measures of student performance, reporting AP results becomes more important. Those exams are rigorous, consistent and administered across the country. It isn’t surprising that New York’s teachers union would be hostile toward accountability, but it is scandalous that its Education Department, whose allegiance should be to our state’s children and their parents, is now going along with it.
For this reason, Success Academy has brought a lawsuit against Education Commissioner Betty Rosa in federal court. We’ve done so to vindicate not only our right to make our results known, but also the rights of parents and policymakers to have accurate, objective data about our state’s schools. Parents can’t demand excellence if government prevents them from seeing it.
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