Assessing the Influence of No Child Left Behind on Gifted Education Funding in Texas: A Descriptive Study

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has defined the past 15 years of public K-12 education. An incentive structure built around adequate yearly progress created an environment that was not aligned with gifted education. Texas, with over 11% of the total identified gifted population in the United States, state funding for gifted, and incentivized identification policies, made an ideal case study to analyze the ramifications of NCLB on gifted education. This article explores how Texas responded to NCLB and that response's influence on district-level funding for gifted education. In total, 16 years of financial and enrollment data were analyzed for the 1,025 public school districts in Texas using the frame work of a longitudinal mixed model. Results indicated that there was an annual decline in the percentage of budget allocated to gifted education of 0.04 percentage points for rural school districts, 0.08 for suburban, 0.07 for town, and 0.05 for urban.