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U.S. News & World Report released its annual Best High Schools rankings this week, and one Upper East Side public school that’s spent years as a fixture near the top of the state list landed somewhere very different this time. Its graduation rate didn’t slip. Its test scores didn’t fall. Nothing about the school changed at all.
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What changed was a decision made in Albany.Eleanor Roosevelt High School, at 411 East 76th Street between First and York avenues, came in 106th in New York State and 6,416th nationally in the 2026-2027 rankings. Last year it placed 19th in the state and 176th in the country, with an overall score of 99.02 out of 100.
The reason sits in a notice U.S. News has posted on 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 gauge how well a school prepares students for college, which normally count both AP and International Baccalaureate exams, were calculated for New York schools using IB results alone.
Eleanor Roosevelt is an AP school. In last year’s rankings, every senior took at least one AP exam and 90 percent passed at least one. It does not run an IB program. Under this year’s math, that record counted for nothing.
New York was one of four states affected, alongside Colorado, Vermont and Maine. The pattern shows up across the state list. The top of the New York rankings is now dominated by IB schools, with Brooklyn Latin School taking the number one spot. Bronx High School of Science, another AP powerhouse, sits at 27th. On Long Island, according to the Long Island Press, Jericho Senior High School fell from ninth in the state to 41st, and Great Neck South High School went from 23rd to 43rd.
Eleanor Roosevelt is one of 573 high schools in the New York City public school system and enrolls roughly 540 students, 54 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged. It admits about 125 to 140 students a year out of thousands of applicants, and gives priority to Manhattan residents for up to 75 percent of its seats.
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Nationally, U.S. News evaluated around 27,000 public high schools and ranked nearly 18,000 of them on six measures: performance on state tests, graduation rates, how well schools serve underserved students, and the two college readiness measures that were reworked for New York this year.East Side Feed has reached out to the State Education Department to ask why it declined to authorize the data and whether it will do so going forward. We’ll update this story with any response.
