About 2,500 children out of the school system's more than 60,000 kindergartners are in gifted programs. "I continue to believe that it is incredibly important for us to deliver excellent quality public education for each and every New Yorker, and that for kindergartners, we should not have a gifted and talented program that is separating them on the basis of that assessment," Mamdani said at an unrelated press conference on Friday.