New York withheld its AP data. The districts that invested most in AP fell furthest.
New York withheld AP exam data from U.S. News, and Jericho and Syosset fell thousands of places. The state's own public AP release shows which districts had the largest AP programmes — and the most to lose.
U.S. News published its 2026-27 high school rankings this month, and two of Long Island's strongest districts fell off a cliff. Jericho High School went from 108th in the country to 3,959th. Syosset went from 328th to 4,955th — a drop of more than four and a half thousand places, in a year its officials say produced its best Advanced Placement results ever.
Neither school got worse. What changed is that the New York State Education Department stopped giving U.S. News the College Board data the ranking is partly built on, citing student privacy. The rankings did not measure a decline. They measured an absence.
The districts that invested most in AP lost the most
This is the part worth sitting with. We publish the 2023-24 public state release on Advanced Placement — how many distinct AP courses each district offers, how many exams its students sat, and how many passed. Set that beside what happened to the rankings and a pattern appears immediately.
Distinct AP courses offered, 2023-24
- Syosset CSD
- 29
- Jericho UFSD
- 20
- Rockville Centre UFSD
- 4
Syosset and Jericho fell furthest in the rankings. Rockville Centre UFSD — which offers 4 AP courses and leans on the International Baccalaureate instead — held its position at 8th in the state.
NYSED AP & IB + federal CRDC
- Syosset CSD: 29 AP courses, 3,391 exams sat, 87% passed. Fell from 328th to 4,955th.
- Jericho UFSD: 20 AP courses, 2,501 exams sat, 82% passed. Fell from 108th to 3,959th.
- Rockville Centre UFSD: 4 AP courses, 155 exams sat, 65% passed. Held at 8th in New York.
A district that built a large AP programme had a large amount of information removed from its ranking. A district that deliberately did not build one had little to lose. That is not a judgment about either strategy — it is what happens when a ranking depends on a data source that can be switched off.
What the public record still shows
The withheld file is not the only AP data New York publishes. The state's own 2023-24 release is public, and we have had it on every district page since we built them. Across the 98 New York districts it covers:
- AP pass rates run from 31% to 89%, with a median of 71%.
- Course counts run from 1 to 29.
- 34 of 98 districts offer no dual-enrolment option at all.
- 10 offer no computer science course; 6 offer no calculus.
Those last two lines are the ones we would point a parent at. A ranking position moves for reasons that have nothing to do with a school. Whether the school offers calculus does not.
For newsrooms
Every figure here is from the public state release and links to its source on the district's page. The underlying data is free to use, and the district pages are free to embed or link. If you are covering the ranking drop and want the AP picture for a district we have not named, it is already published — or ask and we will pull it.
One thing we will not do is reproduce the withheld file. We do not have it. What we have is the public 2023-24 release, which is a different dataset covering a different year, and we would rather say so plainly than let the distinction blur.