OUR ANSWER FOR CATCHING PRE-LITERATE REFUGEE STUDENTS UP TO GRADE LEVEL?
HIGH DOSAGE TUTORING. "T" is one of my favorite students. He is bright, funny, and a hard worker. Like many of our students, he speaks five languages. Unfortunately, his reading skills remain low even though he has been in the United States and American public schools for a few years. Students like "T" struggle because they missed years of foundational learning while refugees. Moreover, because of political oppression in their homelands, their parents do not read and write and, therefore, do not know how to traverse the U.S. educational landscape or provide needed at-home academic support. These students face inordinate difficulties. One of the few academic research papers investigating the status of SLIFE (Students with Limited or Interrupted Education) students found that less than 1% graduated high school (Ross & Ziemke, 2016).
We simply cannot give up on a 12-year-old who has so much potential. He deserves a fair chance to become fully literate. The oppressors who deliberately targeted his (Rohingya) ethnic group by denying schooling must not be allowed the triumph of another generation deprived. He, and all others like him, need and deserve an actionable plan to become fully literate. High dosage tutoring (HDT) is a practical solution that can unlock the potential of millions of unschooled refugees. This tutoring is the heart of what we do at FORA. HDT is strongly associated with high rates of learning, so much so that recent research from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University recommends high dosage tutoring as the most effective response to address pandemic learning loss (Robinson, Kraft, Loeb, & Schueler, 2021).
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