I’ve spent 30 years telling institutional clients the truth about their returns, good quarters and bad ones, because a manager who hides the losses eventually gets caught hiding the gains too. Performance reporting in my business runs on one rule. You publish what happened. Audited, comparable, embarrassing when it needs to be.
New York’s State Education Department just found a shortcut that no regulator offers a fund manager. When a rival’s numbers make the incumbent look bad, you don’t have to beat the rival. You can just turn off the scoreboard.
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.
The lawsuit doesn’t stop at incompetence, and neither should we. It alleges the commissioner moved at the union’s urging, and the network’s attorney has said as much on the record: NYSED is closely aligned with the teachers’ union, New York State United Teachers, whose slogan, “less testing, more teaching,” reads more like cover than reform. When a unionized school can’t match a charter’s results, the union’s instinct isn’t to fix the school. It’s to make sure nobody outside Albany sees the gap.
That might be forgivable if it only protected adults on a payroll. It doesn’t. Success Academy serves more than 22,000 students, most of them black, Hispanic, and low-income kids who showed up, studied, and passed the hardest exams a school offers. Their reward for outperforming the unionized system next door was to watch the state erase the evidence of it.
Charter schools draw public dollars away from district schools per pupil, so every enrolled student is a rival for funding as much as for grades. The United Federation of Teachers has fought the network’s growth before, suing in 2023 to block two of its school co-locations in Brooklyn and Queens. Paying no attention to the man behind the curtain plays fine in a movie. It plays worse when he draws a state paycheck.
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NYSED says the issue is student privacy, and that compliance with New York law isn’t optional. Fair enough, except Success Academy isn’t asking for a single student’s name. It wants the same aggregate, school-level totals that the state published without objection for years. The First Amendment isn’t a favor the government extends when the results are convenient. It gives up one power, the power to silence, in exchange for every citizen’s right to speak and to listen. The Supreme Court said as much in 1976, holding that the Constitution protects a reciprocal right to receive information a state would rather keep quiet. James Madison made the same point two centuries earlier, warning that a government that starves its people of information is writing the script for a farce or a tragedy.
Nobody in Albany has explained why the AP data was fine to release every year except for the one in which a charter network’s students set records. Until somebody does, the simplest explanation is also the most likely one. A competitor was winning by a public, measurable margin, and the people keeping score decided the scoreboard itself was the problem. NYSUT exists to protect its members. That’s a legitimate job. But a teenager working for a shot at the American dream is not an inconvenience to be managed by a bureaucracy defending the status quo. If New York wants to argue that charter schools underperform, it should make that case with the numbers. Not by deleting them.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.