Cambridge, K-Lo, & controlled choice
Controlled choice — also known as the lottery system — is how caregivers enroll their child into the Cambridge public school district for the upcoming school year. If you know about the lottery and are enrolling your child into kindergarten, well and good. If you do not know about the lottery and arrive after the enrollment period, however, your student will have a harder time attending a caregiver’s first choice school. This first choice deadline mechanism has ripple effects throughout the school district.
For example: at the beginning of school year 2024 - 2025, some schools in Cambridge were at capacity or overenrolled, with lengthy waitlists. But Kennedy-Longfellow was significantly under-enrolled, and had been for several years. It had space, so many (if not most) K-Lo students were mandatorily assigned to the school.
This practice created a massive imbalance in the proportion of high needs students (low income, English as a second language, or students with an IEP) throughout the city of Cambridge. 85% of Kennedy-Longfellow students were categorized as “high needs”; 1 in 5 of our students were unhoused.
Quoting from a newsletter that fellow K-Lo Caregiver Advocates and I wrote on December 16, 2024:
We’ve been thinking hard about what makes Kennedy-Longfellow what it is.
What distinguishes it from other schools within the Cambridge Public School District? Why is its version of excellence so hard to see from outside of the school, when you glance at data alone? Why is its warmth and character unmistakeable, once you have walked into the building or interacted with its staff?
Our conclusion, essentially, is that we are a neighborhood school within a choice-based system. It’s just that our neighborhood isn’t defined geographically – it’s defined in terms of timing and circumstance.
The families and students at K-Lo are not “consumers” of public education, able to pick and choose a precise fit out of a matrix of location and programming. If you arrived in Cambridge off-lottery or did not even know about the existence of a lottery for school enrollment, then it’s far more likely that your child will be educated at Kennedy-Longfellow. By that definition alone, our population of students have experienced the highest number of unexpected events, transitions, upheavals, losses of control, or adaptations of any student population in the Cambridge school system.
While the original policy was well-intentioned, it’s my opinion that controlled choice had badly backfired by the beginning of the FY 2024-2025 school year. Revisions to the original policy and a decade of lack of oversight resulted in unequal outcomes and wildly disparate proportions of high-need students throughout the district.
Grappling with controlled choice, enrollment, and the overall CPSD use of space, Interim Superintendent David Murphy took the following actions in the fall of 2024.
1) He recommended the closure of Kennedy-Longfellow.
2) He made a deal with the City of Cambridge to expand CPSD daytime classes into classrooms previously designated for afterschool use only.
3) He recommended that CPSD reserve seats in each classroom for students newly coming into the district after the lottery, rather than filling each classroom to their contractual capacity of 25.
And now, we’re waiting to find out what repercussions these changes have wrought on CPSD’s system-wide enrollment numbers and their impact on the controlled choice policy moving forward.
And I’d really, really like to know that information.
