Few public high schools in New York rack up achievements like Jericho Senior High School on Long Island. It was no different last school year: The senior class had 21 valedictorians and 64 admission offers from Ivy League universities.
But in August, Robert Kravitz, the school district’s second-year superintendent, received a call from the distressed school board president. Did you see the list of best high schools by U.S. News & World Report? What happened?
Year after year, the publisher had ranked Jericho as a top school in New York State and the United States, a point of pride that Mr. Kravitz had been repeatedly reminded of when he took the job. But not this time. Jericho had plummeted, tumbling thousands of spots to No. 3,959 in the country.
“I kept saying, ‘Oh, my God, what did I change?’” Mr. Kravitz said. “It’s just so stunning.”
The superintendent had, in fact, not changed a thing. But there was a shift at U.S. News, the highly influential but heavily criticized arbiter of schools whose annual rankings have the power to sway property values near top-rated schools. This year, its formula for ranking New York schools did not include data on Advanced Placement courses and scores, harming places like Jericho, which have a high rate of students who take the rigorous classes for college credit.
The omission stemmed from a dispute with the New York State Education Department, which ordered the operator of the A.P. program, the College Board, not to share the data with U.S. News, citing student privacy concerns. Three other states — Colorado, Maine and Vermont — also withheld their A.P. scores.
The result was a stunning collapse for schools that had long dominated the list, such as Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the acclaimed specialized school, which plunged to No. 2,561 in the nation from No. 33.
The new rankings have sent shock waves across the state, angering superintendents, confusing parents and spurring a lawsuit by the Success Academy charter network against the state’s education commissioner, Betty A. Rosa — as well as a war of words between U.S. News and the agency. The rankings have been the topic of conversation and debate on Reddit, in group chats and in school hallways.
“This is a little bit of a slap in the face by the state,” said Joseph Monastero, the superintendent of Cold Spring Harbor Central School District on Long Island, whose high school sank to No. 5,698 in the country from No. 250. (More than 90 percent of its students take an A.P. course before graduation.)
Mr. Monastero excoriated the Education Department in a letter to Ms. Rosa this month for not warning school districts before the rankings were published. “New York schools, students and educators are now left to bear the consequences of that decision,” he wrote.
J.P. O’Hare, an Education Department spokesman, said that the agency had no choice but to protect student privacy and withhold the data. Every three years, the College Board renewed its request to share A.P. scores with U.S. News, and the department rejected its latest submission. He declined to elaborate, citing the lawsuit.
“It does not take a back seat to U.S. News & World Report’s commercial ranking methodology, or any other desire to turn information about New York’s children into a for-profit product,” Mr. O’Hare said in a statement.
U.S. News disputed the Education Department’s characterization, saying it sought aggregated, school-level data — not individual student data. “This is categorically false,” the publication said.
There are many ways to evaluate a school, including qualities like its culture that cannot be captured in a formula. But since the magazine’s inaugural best high school rankings two decades ago, no other metric, publisher or district news release has been able to compete with the reach and impact of U.S. News.
Kevin G. Welner, the director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, called the publication’s annual list an 800-pound gorilla — dominant but deeply flawed. The methodology has incentivized selective schools to enroll students who will boost their scores, he said.
Nearly all the top 20 high schools in the country compiled by U.S. News are charter or selective schools, which can, to some degree, shape their student enrollment in ways traditional public schools cannot.
“Their ratings are not capturing everything that’s important because it would be impossible for them to do that,” Mr. Welner said. “Parents should read the U.S. News & World Report rankings with the same skepticism that we’ve learned to bring to Yelp and Amazon ratings.”
In some parts of the state, the rankings were cause for celebration. While U.S. News did not evaluate A.P. scores, it did consider a less common alternative for the college readiness portion of its formula: International Baccalaureate exam scores. (That portion amounts to 30 percent of the total U.S. News score, which also includes state exams scores and graduation rate.)
Jericho and Stuyvesant, for instance, do not offer I.B. courses. But the Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Queens does and jumped 85 spots to No. 201 in the country. Yonkers High School, another I.B. school, climbed 64 spots, which its superintendent credited to the “talent and brilliance” of its students.
The reshuffled rankings also elevated a new school to the top spot in New York State. Brooklyn Latin School, a specialized school in Williamsburg that also offers I.B. courses, jumped six spots to No. 1.
On Long Island, Commack High School, which has I.B. classes, jumped 420 spots to No. 1,083 in the country. Jordan Cox, the superintendent of the Commack Union Free School District, attributed the improvement to the district’s focus on a “more relevant and immersive high school experience.”
Success Academy’s High School of the Liberal Arts climbed last year to No. 9 among New York City high schools. The charter school network created advertisements highlighting that achievement and includes it on a flyer distributed during school tours.
This year, however, the high school fell to No. 63 in the city and nearly No. 8,000 nationwide.
“What’s so disheartening about this is the state Education Department should be advocating for excellence, and being on the side of students and academic achievement and scholarship,” Eva Moskowitz, the network’s founder, said. “Instead it’s suppressing information.”
In its lawsuit, Success Academy accused Ms. Rosa, the education commissioner, of violating the First Amendment and harming the network and its students. Nearly all students in the previous senior class at the High School of Liberal Arts received a passing grade on at least three A.P. tests, the network said.
School leaders said they have spent the past weeks trying to inform parents and their communities about the drastic changes for some schools and the reason behind them. David Yaron, a parent of a 2-year-old boy who has been looking to move into a high-performing school district on Long Island, said that the new rankings had upended his search.
“This new ranking system has definitely upset the apple cart in that there were towns that I was very interested in,” Mr. Yaron said. “Now I’m just a little bit confused.”
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