Refugee Public Education and Transnational Families

This paper shares preliminary findings from my book project-Public Education Inequities and The School Choice Debate: Somali Students in Minnesota. The project investigates how recent refugee communities such as Somalis partake in the educational choice debate in Minnesota and how these students and their parents navigate the rhetoric of Americanization and integration considering the structural conditions and axis of inequality that persist in the United States. I argue that refugee children’s education can only be understood with the dual lenses of what it means to be a refugee from a country where access to education was limited, and of how children with transnational families get situated in racialized struggling urban schools. Research on refugee families’ cultural, racial, religious, and socioeconomic status and its impact on their educational experiences can help inform educators, researchers and policymakers. This work also speaks to the theoretical dilemmas around school choice and whether this opens new democratic spaces or simply more segregated ones.