{"id":655,"date":"2011-02-18T15:45:57","date_gmt":"2011-02-18T20:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thequicksliver.wordpress.com\/?p=655"},"modified":"2011-02-18T15:45:57","modified_gmt":"2011-02-18T20:45:57","slug":"2-18-11-unexceptional-miracles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/2-18-11-unexceptional-miracles\/","title":{"rendered":"2.18.11 Unexceptional Miracles"},"content":{"rendered":"

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There is nothing particularly exceptional about Cedric Hakeem.<\/p>\n

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His house caught fire on New Year’s Eve.\u00a0 But he and his family got out OK.\u00a0 Then the fool ran back into the smoky blaze to retrieve his laptop.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because it contained all his college applications that had to be mailed on January 1.\u00a0 He saved the computer, mailed in his applications, and got accepted into college.\u00a0 No big deal, really.<\/p>\n

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Compare his story to that of his classmate Alfonso Henderson.\u00a0 His house didn’t burn down, and he also got accepted into college.\u00a0 But not just one college, twenty-one colleges!\u00a0 And many of them offered Alfonso full-ride academic scholarships.\u00a0 (He’s still waiting to hear from the slacker admissions staffs at Harvard and Yale.)<\/p>\n

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But still, neither of these guys is exceptional.\u00a0 If you take a look at Cedric and Alfonso’s classmates, you’ll find that not just many, not just most, but ALL of them got accepted into 4-year colleges.\u00a0 The entire senior class, headed to the best schools in the country!\u00a0 And THERE is the exceptional part:\u00a0 all 104 members of the class are young African American men from some of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago.\u00a0 They all attend Urban Prep Academy, the nation’s first all-black, all-male public charter school.\u00a0 And this year, for the second year in a row, Urban Prep has sent 100% of its boys to 4-year colleges.\u00a0 Compare that to the Chicago average of only 54% of all public school students going on to college, and only 41% of black males graduating high school at all.\u00a0 And it becomes pretty clear this isn’t just exceptional, it’s miraculous.<\/p>\n

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This week the school held a celebration in which the seniors exchanged their all-red school ties for red-and-gold ties that they will wear until graduation.\u00a0 The ties were presented to them by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.<\/p>\n

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But there was a more noteworthy attendee in the audience, a young man named Israel Wilson.\u00a0 He graduated from Urban Prep last year.\u00a0 He’s now a freshman at Morehouse.\u00a0 Dean’s List.\u00a0 3.3 GPA.\u00a0 On his way to a great life.<\/p>\n

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He’s no big deal.\u00a0 Just another everyday, ordinary, unexceptional miracle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is nothing particularly exceptional about Cedric Hakeem. His house caught fire on New Year’s Eve.\u00a0 But he and his family got out OK.\u00a0 Then the fool ran back into the smoky blaze to retrieve his laptop.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because it contained all his college applications that had to be mailed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[239,271,514,569,1281],"class_list":["post-655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-6","tag-chicago","tag-college","tag-graduation","tag-high-school","tag-urban-prep"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}