Success Academy, a charter school network with high schools in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Harlem, has filed a federal lawsuit against the New York State Education Department after seeing its ranking in this year's U.S. News & World Report list go from 11th in the state to 196th.

Multiple schools in Westchester and on Long Island had similar drops - blaming them on a new policy by the state to no longer share information from Advanced Placement tests.

"It impacts your college admissions - college admissions look to the rankings," explained Eva Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of Success Academies. "You would think that the State Ed Department would want transparency of the outcomes, and instead what do they do? They suppress information."

Since AP scores are a big part of how the rankings are calculated, schools that put more of an emphasis on them than others end up getting hurt the most.

Success would fall into that category - saying that 100% of its students take at least 18 AP courses by the time they graduate, with 95% passing three or more.

By comparison, a source tells News 12 that in New York City Public Schools, only 43.9% of the graduating class of 2025 took one or more AP courses, with 27.5% of students passing at least one.

"(The state) seems to be trying to erode standards at every single turn," Moskowitz said.

In a statement, the New York State Education Department says the decision to stop sharing the data was made to protect student privacy.

Moskowitz pushes back on that, though, saying "privacy refers to personal identifiable data, and that's not what this is. It's in the aggregate."

The state adds that "New York State’s AP participation data is collected to reflect student achievement in rigorous coursework, not to rank schools. If Success Academy believes that the commercial value of student information outweighs the State’s responsibility to protect it, it is free to explain as much in a lawsuit. But NYSED does not share that perspective."

Success is taking the state up on that challenge - claiming in its court filing that, based on the First Amendment, the state has no right to stop the data from being reported.

"The public needs to understand objectively how the school is doing vis-à-vis other schools," said Moskowitz, "they have a right."