Summary:
Zip code 02140 in North Cambridge contains two elementary schools: Benjamin Banneker Charter Public School, a PK–6 charter school in the Benjamin Banneker Charter Public (District) with 352 students, and Peabody, a PK–5 school in the Cambridge district with 314 students. Banneker covers an extra grade and runs as its own charter district, so the two are not a perfectly even comparison, and free/reduced-lunch percentages are blank for both, leaving economic context unknown.
Benjamin Banneker is the standout. It holds 5 stars, a district rank of 1 of 351 (100th percentile), and a 2025–26 school rank of 3 of 899, up from 13 of 906 the prior year and 12 of 916 the year before. Its 2025–26 all-grade proficiency runs near double the state averages: ELA 81.01 vs. 40.03, math 87.15 vs. 41.11, and science 80.00 vs. 40.98. Grade-level results are uniformly high, led by 3rd-grade math at 97.87; even its lowest reported score, 4th-grade ELA at 71.11, is far above the state.
Peabody earned 4 stars and ranks 194 of 899, an improvement from 216 and 229 in the two prior years. It beats the state in all 2025–26 all-grade subjects and sits close to the Cambridge district average, with 3rd grade its strongest and 5th grade its weakest. Its biggest swing is science: a standout 77.27 in 2024–25 that fell to 48.72 in 2025–26, while Banneker rose from 68.00 to 80.00. Peabody spends more per student ($33,306 vs. $24,797 in 2020–21) and has a lower student-teacher ratio (11.2 vs. 18.5), yet Banneker posts the higher outcomes — a difference worth noting, though it does not prove cause and the schools differ in grade span, governance, and reporting years.
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