Intersectionality and Outcomes of Refugee and Asylee Students: A Study of State Accountability Data

• In Event: Refugee education: context, pedagogy, access and outcomes

Proposal

Statement of Purpose and Research Question
Since 1975, the United States (U.S.) has resettled more than 3.5 million refugees (Refugee Processing Center, 2023), and over 750,000 asylees have been granted asylum since 1990 (Office of Immigration Statistics [OIS], 2022). Since 2000, almost 42% of all refugees and asylees resettled in the U.S. have been minors under the age of 17 (Monin et al., 2021; Refugee Processing Center, 2023). While research asserts education is paramount to social and emotional healing for refugee and asylee children (McBrien, 2005; McBrien, 2022) and educational attainment is integral to workforce and economic success (Araki, 2020), access to public education is a vital, yet not-well-articulated component of the federal resettlement programming (Author, 2022a; Author 2022b). Which leads to the lack of credible and consistent long-term educational attainment data for refugees and asylees, and limited large-scale research (Evans & Fitzgerald, 2017; Tesfai, 2022). This research aims to fill this gap in research by first conducting a landscape analysis of refugee and asylee students’ various intersecting identities and how they may be related to their early academic outcomes in Texas public schools, where schools serve as their main point of entry into the US.
In the last decade, Texas has consistently resettled the highest numbers of refugees among all US states (Monin et al., 2023). We take the opportunity presented by a Texas policy which flags its refugee and asylee students within its state accountability data systems, to provide them with an exemption from participating in testing (Texas Education Agency, n.d.). This identification, although done to provide exemption from accountability, provides a rare opportunity for exploration of long-term academic outcomes of refugee and asylee students. In this era of data-driven decision making, it is imperative that we explore how these vulnerable populations are coded in the state-level datasets, their characteristics, and long-term achievement. Since, the study is the first-ever to utilize state longitudinal data on refugee and asylee students in public schools, we aim to uncover the data on these populations to ensure their inclusion in discourses on educational policy and fair use of data. Particularly, this paper asks:
1. What are the demographic characteristics, educational classifications, and long-term academic outcomes of refugee and asylee students enrolled in Texas public schools?

Theoretical Framework

We employ the theory of intersectionality to explore how refugee students have been identified and sorted in Texas state’s ed data. Intersectionality refers to the ways in which mutually reinforcing multiple categorizations such as race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), age, and primary language, interact to shape the dimensions of the experiences of individuals and their outcomes in the society (Andersen & Collins, 2012; Crenshaw, 1991). Initially, researchers mainly utilized the theory of intersectionality to highlight experiences of women of color and how race, class, and gender manifests differently in individual lives (Andersen & Collins, 2012). More recently, there has been a push to utilize this theory to study the experiences of other marginalized groups (Brunn-Bevel et al., 2023).
To perform a landscape analysis of refugee and asylee students enrolled in Texas public schools, this study explores how a recently introduced immigration identity-related flag intersects with other aspects of refugee and asylee students’ identities, which together shape their experiences and outcomes in schools. The various flags, when assigned in state’s education database, also determine the policies that may apply to the individual student, the courses they have access to, and the additional services or resources the students may qualify for. In this way, the refugee and asylee students’ individual identities and state assigned flags inform their participation in the societal systems of privilege and advantage.

Methodology and Methods
Answering this research question will result in a landscape analysis of the refugee and asylee population in middle and high school that will serve as a much-needed point of reference for practitioners, policymakers, advocates, and researchers. Quantitative descriptive analysis involves measures of central tendency, variation, and frequency (Loeb et al., 2017), to describe individual characteristics and academic and early-career outcomes both as annual snapshots of students served each year, and also as cohorts of students whose journey we follow throughout the educational system and into the workforce. The analysis provides a detailed description of the population in aggregate and over time.

Preliminary Findings
Our findings suggest that refugee populations in Texas are a diverse group racially, ethnically, and linguistically. A large percentage of refugee and asylee students are classified as Limited English Proficient (EL/EB/LEP), however, a smaller percentage of those identified as LEPs are enrolled in the ESL or Bilingual programs. A larger percentage of refugee and asylee students are also labelled as economically disadvantaged. We also find that there are slightly more male refugee and asylee students identified in schools than females, however, females graduate high school at a higher rate than their male counterparts. When we cross-reference refugee and asylee students’ race with their home language. As many as 20% of Arabic speaking refugee/asylee students were identified as American Indian/Alaskan Native or Pacific Islander or Native Hawaiian, among other racial categories. These findings suggest the need of educational policies and resources to not only ensure that these students succeed in the host country, but also to ensure their multiple identities are not erased in the data.

Significance
This study presents a first look into the refugee and asylee student populations in Texas, their intersectional identities, and how they relate to their educational outcomes. Our study is intended to contribute new theoretical and empirical knowledge to the academic field through findings that describe the population of refugee and asylee students, and explore an extension of intersectionality theory to the refugee and asylee population. More broadly, we intend for our findings to contribute to the improvement of social policies surrounding refugee and asylee youth resettlement.

Authors

• Fiza Mairaj, University of Houston

• Toni Templeton