Segregation and discrimination in the school systems persists even in the gifted programs offered. In 2021, then New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio announced that they were looking to phase out their gifted and talented student programs, following in the footsteps of Boston and Seattle, in an effort to remove a program that has been critiqued for, in many ways, reinforcing racist and segregationist systems that already existed. “It’s really hard in a city that has so much inequality — that has a history of so much inequality — to set up an exclusionary system and then pretend like
