In June 2019, the Johns Hopkins for Education Policy published a report detailing the concerning and systemic failures of the Providence public school system. Among the chief conclusions of the report: that the school district “has an exceptionally low level of academic instruction”, that “safety is a daily concern for students and teachers” and that “parents are marginalized and demoralized.”

The conclusions were not unexpected for those familiar with the existing bureaucracy, yet it prompted the state to initiate its first ever takeover of the school district. The state has now launched a five-years-long process to reevaluate and hopefully reform the city’s educational bureaucracy. In this rare instance of political focus, BIP has decided to devote its resources towards a particular community we worry might be left out of the process: the hundreds of refugee students currently living in the city. Our theory of the case is that several issues listed in the Johns Hopkins report — poor academic instruction, student fears about their safety, marginalization of parents — might especially harm these students and their families.

We have partnered with Dr. Omar Bah and the Refugee Dream Center, a community organization that facilitates refugee resettlement, to conduct a comprehensive survey of high-school aged students and their parents / guardians. We have particularly focused not these students utilization of school resources, their feelings about school safety, and parents’ level of engagement with school teachers and staff. In drafting and ethically-performing the survey, we have been sponsored by Sociology Professor David Lindstrom. Our survey is currently awaiting approval by the Brown IRB (Institutional Review Board).

Our hope is that our findings might contextualize the already-published Johns Hopkins report and the upcoming articles on the school system. Although our explicit focus is on refugee learning, we also realize that our findings might still bear truth for thousands of other immigrants in the city, whose circumstances might be similar to our respondents. After our survey is completed, we hope to reconvene research and prescribe some tangible policy solutions.