By Kimetha Hill
Staff Writer via New America Media
SAN DIEGO — Two months after arriving in the country, Somali refugee Khalid is struggling to adapt to the second grade. But now he may face a new challenge: As his school rolls out a new set of educational standards known as Common Core, he could fall even further behind.
The new standards emphasize a deeper knowledge of subjects and reasoning skills, and require a stronger facility with language and computers — areas in which refugee students are already struggling.
“We put them into grades based on their age, not on their skills,” explains Melissa Phillips about the U.S. policy regarding placement of refugee children. A teacher at Ibarra Elementary and the co-founder of San Diego Refugee Tutoring, Phillips has spent the past 12 years teaching newly settled refugees in the city. She says many will need additional support if they are to succeed under the Common Core.
“You have one kid who doesn’t know what the number 2 looks like, the other kid doesn’t know how to add, the other kid can’t borrow, and in class you’re working on decimals,” she says. “These kids just need one-on-one help.”
Critics of the new standards say they supersede students’ cognitive abilities, especially in the earlier grades. In math, for example, second graders are now expected to master skills that under the previous California State Standards had been introduced a year later.
That has refugee advocates like Phillips concerned about how the shift could impact San Diego’s sizable refugee community.
San Diego is home to one of the largest refugee communities in the country. Between 2007 and 2012, the city took in some 20,000 Iraqi refugees, many of them women and children. They joined a burgeoning population of refugees from Bhutan and Burma. San Diego’s Somali community numbers around 10,000 and is clustered around the Little Mogadishu neighborhood in City Heights.
For these families, the challenges of adapting to life in the United States are numerous. Many carry the trauma of war and violence from their homeland, while poverty and language barriers are daily realities for most upon arrival. Their children can often miss years of school because of time spent in refugee camps.
Khalid smiles broadly as he completes his coloring worksheet. He speaks a few words of English and loves coloring, but struggles to name the colors he’s using. He confuses red and green, or purple and yellow. He can’t finish his homework, and says he often doesn’t understand it.
Such struggles explain in part the near 30 percent dropout rate for refugee students, three times that of whites and double U.S.-born Latino students.
Supporters of the Common Core say that while the standards are more rigorous, they also foster a wider variety of approaches to learning by narrowing the scope of material to be covered and going deeper into individual lessons. They add that this will be especially beneficial for struggling students, including English learners and refugees.
The Common Core was adopted by California in 2010, and replaces the previous California State Standards in English language arts and mathematics. The new standards place greater emphasis on critical thinking and analysis. Instruction is to be more interactive and project-based. Textbooks will have less of an emphasis on rote exercises and more on abstract reasoning.
California students in grades three through 8 as well as high school juniors began taking a pilot version of the new Common Core-aligned assessment known as the Smarter Balance in March. The computer-based tests replace the previous paper and pencil California Standardized Test that was scrapped last year.
Statewide, schools are now scrambling to ensure they have the tech capacity in place when the official tests are given next year. But students like Khalid – who will take the official test next year – often lack access to computers at home and so face an unfair disadvantage when they take the exam.
Phillips, who together with her husband has adopted three children from Africa, adds that refugee students could struggle with other skills required under the Common Core.
“They’re very literal,” she says of her children, alluding to the Common Core’s emphasis on abstract reasoning. “My daughter’s been here for four years and is still extremely literal. That’s a good amount of time in an English-speaking environment. [But] these kids are going to be literal for a really long time.”
Still, Phillips isn’t entirely opposed to the new standards. She acknowledges the Common Core offers teachers and students more creative ways of both teaching and learning. But she poses a bigger question: “How are we going to support them?”
About 40 students participate in tutoring sessions each Tuesday at the San Diego Refugee Tutoring Center, where they get one-on-one help from volunteer tutors. Phillips co-founded the weekly afterschool program but says there “simply isn’t enough support” to go around.
Bea Fernandez, program manager for Parent and Community Outreach with San Diego Unified, has been working to inform parents about Common Core and how they can best support their children. “Common Core is new for everyone,” she says, noting that even for English speakers, the new standards can be “overwhelming.”
San Diego Unified received $22 million from the state for Common Core implementation. Much of that is going toward teacher training, says Fernandez, though she says she’d like to see a portion of it go toward providing more informational materials to parents, including those in the refugee community.
Currently the district is legally required to provide informational material in Spanish, Vietnamese and Tagalog only. She says schools that serve large numbers of refugees who don’t speak any of these languages often bring in translators to facilitate school-site Common Core workshops for parents.
“The best way for parents to get informed is at the school site level,” explains Fernandez.
But despite the district’s best efforts, many parents in the refugee community still are not being reached.
“We have some families who had an education in their countries, so they fully get the importance of engagement,” says Phillips of Refugee Tutoring. But others don’t. “The homework sits in a [students’] backpack for weeks, and they have no clue.”
