Everything you need to know about D.C.’s school lottery

It’s not exactly Powerball, but for many D.C. parents, it’s just about as consequential. Yes, we’re talking about D.C.’s annual school lottery, the system that sorts tens of thousands of kids into school seats across the city. For many, it’s a simple-to-use tool for a confounding school system. For others, it feels like playing the odds with their child’s educational future. Either way, it’s a reality that parents have to contend with every year. 

Wait, there's a lottery to get into D.C. schools? What gives?

In most places, it’s pretty simple: your kids attend their neighborhood school. D.C., though, isn’t simple. 

While everyone in the city is zoned for a neighborhood elementary school (and the related feeder pattern for middle and high school) based on their address, families have long been able to apply to attend public schools outside of those zones. And their school choices expanded even further in the mid-1990s, when Congress authorized the creation of charter schools throughout the city, which accept students regardless of where they live. 

All of that school choice ended up being somewhat chaotic, though. A family could be faced with one application to get into an out-of-boundary D.C. Public School, and a multitude of other applications and deadlines for different charter schools. And once demand started exceeding supply at some of those charter schools, they would run lotteries to determine who got in. 

The problem only got worse as the charter sector expanded; there are now more than 130 charter schools educating almost half of the 98,000 kids who attend publicly funded schools. (When you add in DCPS, there are some 230 schools across the city, not counting private schools.) To restore some semblance of order to the process, a decade ago D.C. launched the My School D.C. universal school lottery – a single application families can use to apply to up to 12 traditional public and public charter schools at once.

Do I have to use the school lottery?

If you’ve got a kid looking to attend their in-boundary DCPS school at the Kindergarten level or above, you can simply enroll directly with the school – no lottery needed. 

But for everything else – Pre-K for three- and four-year-olds at any school that offers it, out-of-boundary placements at DCPS schools, application-only citywide DCPS schools, or any of the charter schools – you have to apply through the My School D.C. lottery. (There are two schools that admit students outside of the lottery process, and free pre-K programs outside of DCPS and charter schools also run their own applications.)

How does the school lottery work?

It’s thankfully pretty simple: you pick up to 12 schools you’d like to apply to, rank them in terms of preference, submit your rankings, and then wait to see if you’ve, well, won the lottery.

If you do score a seat in a particular school, great! You can either accept it or, in some cases, hold out for better. The lottery will automatically place you on waitlists for any schools that you ranked higher than the one you matched with. Say you snag a spot at your fifth-ranked school. For the four schools you ranked above that (so schools 1-4), you’ll get assigned a spot on their waitlist. The schools you ranked below your match (6-12) get dropped from consideration altogether. 

This year the lottery opens on Dec. 16, 2024, with an application deadline of Feb. 3, 2025 for grades 9-12 and Mar. 3 for Pre-K-8. Initial results will be released on Mar. 28, with an enrollment deadline of May 1 for students who get matched with a school.

What are my chances at getting into the school I like the most?

Well, it depends. Per data from My School D.C., 72% of the 23,312 lottery applicants in 2024 matched with at least one of the schools they ranked. (Remember: You can rank up to 12.) Still, there’s some big caveats there, the biggest one being that the overall match rate doesn’t properly account for the significant differences in how easy or hard it might be to get into a particular school. In short, demand is much higher for some schools, and thus your chances of getting in are much lower. 

Take the Spanish program at E.W. Stokes, a charter school, at its campus in Brookland. For the 2024-25 school year there were 14 available seats for Pre-K3 – and 500 applicants. That amounts to an acceptance rate of 2.8%. (For a random comparison, Harvard’s admissions rate is 3.6%.) At the Latin American Montessori Bilingual charter school in 16th Street Heights, there were 66 Pre-K3 seats this year – and 840 applicants. The waitlist ended up with 426 kids on it. And it only got tougher for Pre-K4: there were 322 applicants for one open seat. That dynamic often means that unless you get your kid into a preferred school as early as possible, it only gets harder as they age up. There are usually fewer seats in later grades because of the cohorts of kids that  get in for Pre-K and stay through the entirety of elementary school. At BASIS D.C., a charter middle and high school, there were 140 seats open for fifth grade this year – but none for any of the grades after that.

All that said, there are also schools with more seats than applicants. In fact, one criticism of the city’s current system of school choice is that there are thousands of unfilled seats across the city even as some schools are constantly facing demand they can’t meet. All told, in 2024 there more than 30,000 available seats across the city – and just over 23,000 applicants. Additionally, there were more seats than applicants for public and charter schools in D.C. across all grade levels, except for 8th grade. 

If you’re a data nerd and a bit of a sucker for punishment, My School D.C. makes lottery data easily available; it’s all here. There’s even school-level data on open seats, applications, waitlists, and waitlist movement here. And if you’re really nerdy and want to understand how the school lottery algorithm works, this is a great primer.

Is there any way to game the lottery to increase my chances?

The whole idea of the single lottery is to put everyone on something of a level playing field, at least as it pertains to applying to schools. So no, there’s not really a way to permissibly rig or skip the lottery altogether. And no, rushing to get your application in won’t increase your chances to get that coveted spot in a school. (Getting into a D.C. summer camp, though, is a totally different story.) Just get it done before the deadline.

That being said, some lottery veterans argue that how you rank schools on your lottery application matters, and that you should list the schools in the order of your actual preference – not because you think some might be easier to get into than others. (Read more on that here.) There’s also no harm in ranking the full 12 schools on your application, as you're allowed to do – but plenty of people don't.

Are there any preferences for applicants in the lottery?

The lottery does factor in some preferences that can increase your chances of landing a spot at your preferred school. The preferences can be weighted differently depending on whether you’re applying to DCPS or a charter school, but in general the most universal of the preferences is for siblings. That means that if you already have a kid at a school, their sibling will most likely be given preference for a seat once they apply. (The seat isn’t guaranteed, but it would bump a kid up on any waitlist.) 

There are also preferences in DCPS for geographic proximity. While you have the right for your child to attend your neighborhood school, you still have to enter the lottery for Pre-K3 and -K4 classes at that school. But in that case, the geographic proximity preference would kick in, giving your family a boost over one applying from across town.

Additionally, some 52 DCPS and charter schools now offer what’s called the Equitable Access preference, which is a boost for kids who are experiencing homelessness, in the foster care system, receiving government assistance (like food benefits), or have fallen a year behind where they should be (for high school grades). The logic here is that those at-risk kids could see additional benefits to attending schools that are in high demand, some of which have a lower percentage of at-risk kids than the citywide average. 

The at-risk preference varies by school; some set aside a number of seats for those applicants, while others give more weight to those applications for the pool of seats available. Still, to see it at work, we could look at Washington Yu-Ying, a Chinese-immersion charter school. For this school year there were 591 applicants for 73 open Pre-K3 seats – a 12% acceptance rate. But there were 55 applicants for 23 set-aside Equitable Access seats in that same grade – an acceptance rate of 41%. 

According to a study published by the D.C. Education Research Collaborative in August, at the time of the 2022-23 lottery, “there were 400 matches through the [Equitable Access] option, which was more than double the number of matches in 2021–22. Applicants matched through the EA option matriculated at their matched schools at higher rates than all applicants (59 percent versus 55 percent).”

Other preferences also exist for the children of school staff and founders. 

I’m on a waitlist for a school. Now what?

In short, you wait. But really, do. Where you are on a waitlist does make a difference, since not everyone who is matched with a particular school ends up enrolling. After the enrollment deadline in May, schools will start working their way through waitlists in June, August, and October to fill any empty seats. (The data that's available can offer you a historical snapshot of how much or how little waitlist movement a particular school may have.) If you get off of a waitlist, you have the option to accept or decline the seat. If you choose the latter, you’re at the mercy of any of the other waitlists you’re on. 

OK, wow. This is a lot. Is this a good way to run a school system?

One of the prevailing criticisms of D.C.’s lottery system is that it offers school chance more than it does school choice. That’s certainly true, especially if you’re trying to get into the most in-demand schools. 

But the lottery is  a tool that replaced  the chaotic system that existed before it. Even before charter schools came along, D.C. parents looking to get into out-of-boundary DCPS schools were known to stand in lines overnight to get their applications in as soon as they could. And before the current unified lottery existed, parents had to juggle multiple applications, deadlines, and waitlists. Systems like that often benefit families that have the most time and resources to navigate them.

Still, even proponents of the lottery have recognized over the years that for as orderly as it is, there are significant underlying challenges it cannot solve. For example, the lottery lets families apply to 12 schools at a time, but it hasn’t been able to meaningfully change the patterns that have led to incredibly high demand at some schools and empty seats at others. It also can’t change the reality that many parents feel like their in-boundary public school isn’t worth attending, thus spurring all the movement across schools that had led to the need of a lottery to begin with. (In-boundary DCPS attendance rates tend to be lowest in wards 7 and 8, which also see some of higher rates of school lottery use.)

D.C. officials have continued debating tweaks and policy changes to address the broader problems of segregation and mixed school quality, some of which can be addressed through the lottery. For example, last year the committee that reviewed and adjusted D.C.’s school attendance zones also recommended that more schools should set aside seats for at-risk students – especially schools where the current percentage of at-risk students is below the citywide average (which is 52%).