The Geography of Gifted Education: Exploring School and Neighborhood Predictors of Access to Gifted & Talented Programs in New York City

Black and Hispanic students participate in gifted education at lower rates than their share of general education public school enrollment would suggest, including within New York City's Gifted and Talented (G&T) admissions process. Debates over this disparity focus on how students are identified rather than where programs exist. This paper examines a related supply-side question by asking where G&T programs are located. Drawing on a neighborhood dataset that identifies specific NYC neighborhoods and a 14-year school-year panel (2010-2024) linked to census features, we examine school and neighborhood predictors of G&T program presence. Combining machine learning with cross-classified multilevel models, we find that G&T program access is structured more strongly between neighborhoods than between NYC community school districts. Neighborhood homeownership independently predicts program presence after accounting for poverty, education, and school demographics, whereas school racial composition does not. NYC’s 2022-2024 policy expansion marked a shift from earlier reforms focused on screening and admissions toward an explicit expansion of program sites. We show that this expansion placed new G&T programs in higher-poverty, lower-homeownership neighborhoods serving larger shares of Black and Hispanic students, disrupting the historical geography of program access. We discuss implications for understanding gifted access as a neighborhood-level phenomenon in large urban districts and for policies aimed at reducing inequities in advanced educational opportunity.