Refugee communities in the U.S. are often marginalized when it comes to education. For example, due to emerging language skills and different social norms, school personnel have perceived refugee children as having learning disabilities even when no diagnoses are made. This contributes to refugee students dropping out of school at a rate three times that of White students and twice that of Latinx students.
The state of Arizona’s 2010 adoption of the Arizona College and Career Readiness Standards, and their subsequent implementation, revealed concerns, particularly in the subject area of mathematics: Teachers would require professional development to address the new standards in their classrooms, and administrators would need instruction in how teachers should be evaluated according to those standards.
Arizona students are at significant risk for low academic achievement. According to the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 30 percent of Arizona fourth-grade students are reading-proficient.