♪ Boats up river ♪ Wont come down ANGIE MILES: Corey Harris is part of an elite class of high achievers.

He's an accomplished musician, author, world traveler and instructor at the University of Virginia.

He is also recipient of the prized MacArthur Fellows Award also known as the MacArthur Genius Grant.

♪ And I wonder if my baby caught that train ♪ COREY HARRIS: It was quite a surprise but it was also very gratifying to realize that the labor that I'd been doing hadn't been for nothing that it actually led to something.

And it enabled me to take time off from playing music and to write my first book.

ANGIE MILES: Harris is one of just over 1,000 Genius Grant recipients in the 40-year history of the program.

When Harris reflects on his own history, he remembers when his artistic and intellectual abilities were not as apparent to some.

COREY HARRIS: I went to a suburban school where I was one of very few Black children, and so very early on, the teacher, without even assessing me or speaking with me, she was saying that I would be put in the section for the children who were slower, I guess you should say.

After the teacher had already pegged me as being someone in need of like this remedial help, it turned out that I was the only student who could read in the whole class.

ANGIE MILES: Harris went on to be identified in late elementary school as a gifted student due in part to the encouragement and advocacy of his mother and stepfather, who were both educators.

His experience has been repeated throughout the country for as long as there's been a system of education.

One estimate suggests as many as 75% of Black children who are in fact gifted are never identified.

Across the grounds from where Harris studies and teaches, Tonya Moon has been at work for decades studying issues related to inequities in gifted education and looking at the persistent Black-white achievement gap from a research perspective.

TONYA MOON: I try not to do a lot of condemnation of teachers because they have a hard job, but the reality of it is, is that teachers are humans and that they actually can have low expectations for kids, intentional or unintentional.

Most often it is unintentional, but those things do play into then what happens in classrooms.

ANGIE MILES: Moon says that the same implicit biases that exist in society as a whole will necessarily appear in school settings.

But she says in recent years, schools have worked intentionally to improve equitable access to opportunities.

Henrico County's gifted program is an example of this intentional reassessment.

In 2010, the division was targeted by federal investigators for alleged inequities in its gifted programs.

While nearly 40% of Henrico's students were Black, only about 10% of those participating in gifted programming were Black.

In the eastern part of the county with higher concentrations of Black students, identified students were in the single digits.

While in the more affluent western part of the county identified students numbered 100 or more each year.

TEACHER: Here's your next challenge, okay?

I want you to try and code something that uses force.

ANGIE MILES: Prior to that investigation, Henrico had already begun making changes to bring greater equity to gifted referral identification and participation.

And since then, Jenna Conlee has been on the team addressing gifted equity issues more directly.

JENNA CONLEE: So we're providing a lot of training in Henrico.

In fact, just this past summer we did something like 30 trainings, and I will say a lot of that was geared toward talent development and looking for underserved students.

We've used a new tool for our teacher perception inventory.

We know that, you know, we want teachers to see students in the context of the classroom and that too, sometimes gifted traits present in different ways, okay, culturally, in different groups, and so looking at an instrument that really does address how we spot students from all backgrounds.

ANGIE MILES: Giftedness is not considered an achievement status but rather relates to innate needs and abilities of learners.

Achievement, more broadly, relates to the acquisition of knowledge.

For decades, for as long as there has been standardized testing, Black students in the nation and in the state of Virginia have consistently performed below their white peers on the tests that measure achievement.

LaSHAWN PAYTON: Alright, would you like to have a try?

ANGIE MILES: LaShawn Payton says low expectations are a factor in this regard as well.

Her experience is consistent with studies that show teachers, mostly white women tend to have lower expectations for students with more ethnic names.

LaSHAWN PAYTON: LaShawn, the first time you see that name, you already probably have a perception of who I am.

You probably already made up in your mind that she's not going to learn anything, she's not going to be capable of anything.

Sometimes those things were said to me as a child, growing up in the education system.

ANGIE MILES: Payton has come a long way to the professional life she's chosen as head of the school she founded.

She attributes her history as a low achieving, high problem student to low expectations, but also to a school system that was both culturally and individually unresponsive to who she was and what she needed.

But she says this fuels what she does today.

LaSHAWN PAYTON: When I first went to school, I literally cried and the teacher put me in a coatroom for crying and left me there by myself.

As an adult, that's a traumatic experience.

I still think about that.

ANGIE MILES: Cedric Jennings is also an educator, a professor at Northern Virginia Community College and a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University.

25 years ago, Jennings was the subject of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography "A Hope in the Unseen" by Ron Suskind.

The book followed Jennings as a student struggling with achievement issues at Ballou High School in Washington D.C. ANGIE MILES: You went through some things we learned about in the book that would be challenging for anyone.

Could you describe that for us?

CEDRIC JENNINGS: Well, traumatic things like in terms of evictions, that was pretty embarrassing.

Walking home from school with your friends who live in the neighborhood and they see all your stuff out on the street and then not knowing, 'Where are we going to stay tonight?'

Or, 'What am I going to eat tonight?'

Having to go back to school and see the friends who saw my things out on the street.

That was challenging.

ANGIE MILES: And this brings us to what many consider the heart of the achievement gap issue.

Nationally, more than 12% of children currently live below the poverty line.

In the 1990s, that number was often higher than 20%.

A disproportionate number of children impacted by poverty are Black, growing up in families that don't have advantages of generational wealth and who are often caught in a time consuming and sometimes traumatic struggle to just live.

COREY HARRIS: And it's easy to talk about it in racial terms, because that's what is most obvious is race.

That's what we can see.

We can even see it from a distance.

You know?

But economics is something that is a lot more subtle.

You can't see it.

But I know that if we were to have a society where people had equal access to resources and the people had generational wealth and if it was widespread among all communities, we would not have an achievement gap.

I don't believe it.