Ron Suskind, the author of "A Hope in the Unseen", received a Pulitzer Price for his work on this true story. The book was about a young boy living in the inner city and the battles he faced. The main characters name was Cedric Jennings. He was in high school at Ballou Senior High and continued his college years at an Ivy League university, named Brown University. He lived in Washington, D.C. where there was mostly crime, drugs, and education was not encouraged. This was different in Cedric's case. He was very smart honor student and studied every chance he got because his main dream was to make it to MIT.
At Ballou Cedric was faced with many problems because he was smart. Kids said he was being "white" because he was almost top of his class. Ballou awarded the honor students first by putting their names on the "Wall of Honor", which caused many problems by the kids who weren't on that list, and second, they decided to give a $100 check to the honor students with straight A's at awards assemblies. The school thought that if they gave money to the straight A students-the other students didn't want to get good grades because they didn't want to act "white"-then it would encourage everyone to achieve good grades. This didn't work very well because Cedric ended up dodging the awards assembly so he wouldn't have to experience getting on stage and hearing the normal comments. I don't know what the school should have done in this situation, but I definitely know the money is just ridiculous. No high school student would understand the motive behind this action nor would they care to even think about it.
The book talked a little bit about tracking in the school so others can achieve at their own speed. It said that it wasn't fair that students could be taken down in education because others are taking them down with them. That's not fair. I liked this idea here even though I"m not a fan of tracking.