https://doi.org/10.1177/0016986220941587 Gifted Child Quarterly 2020, Vol. 64(4) 259–274 © 2020 National Association for Gifted Children Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0016986220941587 journals.sagepub.com/home/gcq Feature Article Studies based on the analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress have found that while our nation’s low- est achieving youngsters made academic gains between 2000 and 2007, the performance of the nation’s top students lan- guished during this same period (Farkas & Duffet, 2008; Loveless, 2008; Neal & Schanzenbach, 2010; Plucker et al., 2010; Plucker et al., 2012; Reback, 2008; von Hippel et al., 2018). Additional research has shown that even among the highest scoring students, there continue to be racial/ethnic gaps in mean levels of achievement (Plucker et al., 2010; Plucker et al., 2012). Among a myriad reforms that have focused on critical education issues, gifted and talented (G & T) programs throughout the United States have attempted to address the needs of top students by introducing a more chal- lenging curriculum within public school classroom settings. Many researchers have found that socioeconomic and racial/ethnic achievement gaps are large at school entry and remain consistent across schooling (Reardon & Portilla, 2016; von Hippel et al., 2018). There are also significant dis- parities in access to G & T programs among students from disadvantaged backgrounds (Card & Giuliano, 2016; Ford, 1996, 1998; Ford et al., 2008; Ford & Harmon, 2001; Lu & Weinberg, 2016). Extant work has shown that earlier identi- fication of giftedness may hold greater promise for enabling children from all backgrounds to fulfill their academic poten- tial in the longer term (Goldhaber & Brewer, 1997; Meyer, 1999; Phillips, 1997; Phillips, 2013; Phillips & Chin, 2004; Raudenbush & Eschmann, 2015; Rivkin et al., 1998; Tach & Farkas, 2006). As one of the largest publicly funded G & T programs in the nation, and unlike other programs that iden- tify and select students at a later grade, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) G & T Program identifies children to receive gifted program services as early as pre- kindergarten (pre-K). In their examination of the 2009 cohort of New York City kindergarten students, Lu and Weinberg (2016) found sig- nificant disparities in every stage of the G & T identification process. Notably, the authors showed that disparities in G & T test-taking were one of the greatest contributors to differ- ential access to G & T programs. Using a logistic regression framework, Lu and Weinberg (2016) also showed that participation in a New York City public pre-K program, including full-time and part-time pre-K classrooms within district schools, and other publicly funded community-based 941587GCQ XX X 10.1177/0016986220941587Gifted Child QuarterlyLu et al. research-article 2020 1 New York University, New York, NY, USA 2 MDRC, New York, NY, USA Corresponding Author: Sharon L. Weinberg, Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities, New York University, 246 Greene Street, New York, NY 10003, USA. Email: sharon.weinberg@nyu.edu Test-Taking for Gifted and Talented Kindergarten: Underscoring the Importance of Outreach Ying Lu 1 , Sharon L. Weinberg 1 , and Meghan McCormick 2 Abstract Using proprietary data collected prior to the establishment of the public Universal Prekindergarten program in New York City, this study finds statistically significant differences in test-taking rates for the city’s Gifted & Talented (G & T) program between two matched samples of students—those who attended a public prekindergarten (pre-K) program and those who did not—for each of four cohorts from 2008 to 2011, favoring the public pre-K group. Results also demonstrate that access to information about the G & T program is a plausible mechanism underlying the higher test-taking rates among the public pre-K group, especially for underrepresented groups. With the establishment of the Universal Prekindergarten in New York City in 2015, our results highlight the importance of instituting new policies for promoting the dissemination of information regarding the G & T admissions process within the public school sector. If targeted to address diversity in G & T, such policies could help reduce inequality in gifted education. Keywords diversity, access and equity, gifted identification, information dissemination, matching methods, mixed effects logistic regression, observational study