What happens when your school has more than 22,000 students, most of them Black, Hispanic, and low-income kids?

What happens when your school has more than 22,000 students, most of them Black, Hispanic, and low-income kids?

You get blacklisted. New York turned off the scoreboard because the charter school was winning.

Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter school network, filed suit this month against Commissioner Betty Rosa in the Southern District of New York. The claim isn’t complicated. This isn’t a privacy dispute. It isn’t a data glitch. It’s a state agency blocking a competitor’s report card because the grades were too good. 

NYSED refused to authorize the College Board to release Success Academy’s 2026 AP scores to U.S. News and World Report for its rankings. Last year, that data helped rank the network’s High School for the Liberal Arts in Harlem 11th in New York State. This year, with the AP numbers gone and no International Baccalaureate program to fall back on, the school scored zero in a category worth roughly 40% of the total and fell to 196th.

Nothing about the underlying data changed. New York authorized this same release, through this same testing agency, for this same magazine, for more than a decade. It objected to the one-year Success Academy’s seniors set records — 95% of the 2026 graduating class passed three or more AP exams; 79% passed five or more; 60% passed seven or more. Nationally, fewer than 25% of graduating seniors pass even one. 

Somewhere in Albany, someone finally found a good use for the state’s famously slow bureaucracy. It buried an inconvenient number faster than anyone expected.