Maybe because they are so embarrassingly miserable?
New York schools dropped off the US News high school rankings because the state refused to publish the Advanced Placement test scores. Now a once-well-ranked charter school is suing the state in an attempt to get its ranking back.
Eva Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools, writes:
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.
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…
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.
