Photo: ajay_suresh via Flickr
U.S. News & World Report published its annual Best High Schools rankings on Tuesday, and a school that sits a block from Lincoln Center and turns out working actors, musicians and dancers by the dozen came in far lower than it has in years. Its graduation rate held steady. Its test scores didn’t move. Nothing about the school changed at all.
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What changed was a decision made in Albany.Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, at 100 Amsterdam Avenue at the corner of West 65th Street, placed 258th in New York State and 8,749th nationally in the 2026-2027 rankings. The school’s own website shows a very different set of numbers: 92nd in the state and 39th among New York City public high schools.
The explanation sits in a notice U.S. News has attached to every New York school’s page. The New York State Education Department did not authorize the College Board to share Advanced Placement data with the publication this year. As a result, the two measures that assess how well a school prepares students for college, which normally draw on both AP and International Baccalaureate exams, were calculated for New York schools using IB results alone.
LaGuardia offers AP coursework. It does not run an IB program. Under this year’s arithmetic, its students’ college-level work counted for nothing.
New York was one of four states affected, alongside Colorado, Vermont and Maine, and the consequences are visible up and down the state list. IB schools now occupy nearly all of the top spots, with Brooklyn Latin School ranked first. Bronx High School of Science, one of the city’s specialized high schools and an AP stronghold, landed at 27th. Out on Long Island, according to the Long Island Press, Jericho Senior High School slid from ninth in the state to 41st, while Great Neck South High School went from 23rd to 43rd.
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LaGuardia is one of 573 high schools in the New York City public school system and among the largest, enrolling roughly 2,100 students, 32 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged. Admission turns on an audition rather than a test score, and the alumni roster runs from Al Pacino and Liza Minnelli to Jennifer Aniston and Timothée Chalamet.Nationally, U.S. News evaluated around 27,000 public high schools and ranked nearly 18,000 of them across six measures, including state test performance, graduation rates and how well schools serve underserved students.
ILTUWS has contacted the State Education Department to ask why it withheld the authorization and whether it intends to grant it next year. This story will be updated with any response.
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