Cambridge’s 11 public elementary schools vary considerably in popularity, according to recently-released data from the district’s 2025 Kindergarten lottery — with some big changes since lottery data was last released for the 2022 lottery.
In 2025, Baldwin was the most popular, with 70 families (out of 312) ranking it first. At the bottom of the list was Cambridgeport, selected by fewer than 10 families. (The data doesn’t reveal numbers under 10.) Those rankings were similar to the 2022 lottery data, when Baldwin was also first (although much easier to get into than it is now), and Cambridgeport tied FMA for last among schools that are still open. (The now-closed Kennedy-Longfellow was the first choice of 13 families in 2023 and 14 in 2024.)
But Graham & Parks (G&P) had the biggest swing, going from one of the most popular choices in 2022 to one of the least in 2025. It did do a bit better when accounting for all three choices, rising to 4th-most chosen at 88 families. Cambridgeport had about 48 families choose it across all choices, making it 3rd least popular by that count, with FMA last at an estimated 21 families choosing it in total.
In the past three years, by the numbers, every school but G&P has gotten harder to get into or stayed about the same, for families without priority points, which are based on having a sibling at the school or living in close proximity to the school. These numbers are not apples-to-apples, as the 2022 lottery had Junior Kindergarten students in it, too.
Baldwin went from having 26 seats available in 2022 for those without priority points to none in 2025. Fewer families might have put it first had they known how low their chances there were.
In fact, the district’s decision not to share the data could be one of the reasons that fewer families are getting one of their choices now. In 2025, only 85% of families got one of their choices, slightly down from 87% in 2024. But those odds were 94% in 2022 and 95% in 2021, for the combined Junior Kindergarten/Kindergarten lotteries.
Note that Cambridge’s schools had been closed or remote, starting in March 2020; they went back to in-person in January 2021. Fewer families entered the public school system during this time.
But few families had access to this data as they made their lottery choices last year, as the district only published the report two days before lottery choices were due, and without public announcement. The district stopped sharing data when the Cambridge Preschool Program (CPP) began in Fall 2024, saying the data from the old Junior Kindergarten/Kindergarten lottery would be too different from the now-separate January Kindergarten and October Cambridge Preschool Program (CPP) lotteries.
Jill Linnell, who submitted lottery choices this January for her daughter, posted the data to a parent Facebook group when she learned of it after submitting. Realizing they’d been unaware of the data, “People [who’d done the lottery] popped up there to complain,” she said.
One of them was Victoria Galizio. “We might have made different choices” given the information, she said in a recent interview. “We didn’t have a good sense of how difficult (or not) it was to get into various schools, despite taking tours and reading the websites.”
The stakes are high, according to Linnell. Not having the data meant that “choosing three popular schools could cost you any decision-making power and leave your family scrambling with unworkable logistics,” she said.
She added that the Kindergarten lottery she’d done for her older son in New York City was much easier — it allowed families to rank true preference order, without any negative impact.
Not so in Cambridge. Families can rank three elementary schools, but if they don’t get one of those choices, the district assigns their child to a school that has space.
The district supplied data for this article, but did not respond to requests for comment.
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I would appreciate seeing the actual number of K seats each school has, not just how many are available after sibling priority. As a former RAUC parent, I know Baldwin and Peabody have 2 classes/50 kids max for each grade 1-5, but K is a little fuzzier because the max is 20 kids per classroom so there’s at least one extra K class. I don’t know how that compares to the other schools, but I -think- some are bigger? Are the top picks also baseline lower-chance due to total seats?