Determinants of the Availability of Opportunities for Gifted Children: Evidence from NELS ’88

The goal of this study is to present a brief, statistically rigorous assessment of the determinants of the availability of gifted and talented programming both across and within states. Of particular interest is whether gifted and talented program opportunities are randomly distributed across students by their socioeconomic status and race across the states. It is also important, however, to understand how variables like geographic location and school size may contribute to the availability of opportunities. We find that across states, higher socioeconomic status students who attend larger schools are more likely to have access to gifted and talented programming and students attending larger schools more likely to have access to comprehensive programming. We also find substantial variance across states in the relationship between student socioeconomic status and the availability of gifted programming.

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