I read Refugee High and kept thinking: I could never teach there.
But then I rethought it. If I were there early in my career, if I hadn't become jaded and cynical, if I could see the students coming along, genuinely interested in learning about the history of their newly acquired country, maybe I would dive into it like nothing else. Maybe it would make absolute sense.
Maybe it would be the way I could fight a cruel and uncaring administration's repressive regime, one that turned back hope for thousands of refugees per year. It might be that I would say to myself: I'm going to give them a chance to show them a thing or two. I'm going to give them the chance they want to really be Americans.
Refugee High is Elly Fishman's account of Sullivan High School, in northern Chicago, a place that would, like dozens of other similar places, be called our new melting pot. Her efforts to depict the desperate hope of many teenagers trying to grab onto something, somewhere, to get a foothold in this vast, perpetually challenging new world of America, is a victory of immersion and ultimately enormous trust in her to tell the story straight. She does.
She tells of Sarah Quintenz, my new hero, the director of the school's ELL program. She throws herself at the problems and anxieties of students new to America--confused, scared, looking for direction. She provides them with support and hugs and confidence. Some respond well. Others do not. Still others start, then stop, then start again.
Sarah knows they will suffer setbacks. She knows sometimes they can't help it. Always, always, she is there for them and never gives up on them. She pulls them aside. When she feels she needs to, she visits their homes. She encourages them endlessly. She embraces diversity and likes the multicultural atmosphere. She provides a safe haven. A place like Sullivan needs a Sarah. To the immigrant kids, she's their Gibraltar.
Fishman tells of Alejandro, who misses his homeland of Guatemala but knows that once he has made it to America, he can't go back. His very life would be in danger. But the new regime is hunting him down, trying to winnow out as many newcomers as it can. Can he graduate from high school before they get him? Will graduation itself make a shred of difference?
She tells of Shahina, a Muslim from Myanmar, who's escaped persecution but is now trying to escape her former culture, into which she could be permanently trapped. She can't wait for school to provide her with the magic piece of paper, the diploma: things aren't completely in her control. She can work to get money and she does. But she won't get to where she needs to, either.
She tells of Chad Adams, the principal. All studies of schools indicate that the central difference in their success are building principals and what constitutes their direction, however they display it. Adams is handed a disaster--low on money, low on esteem, high on gangs. Nobody thinks he can succeed. Nobody but him, that is.
Can he make the decisive difference? Can he raise the stature of something that feels like the bottom's above it? The first-day speech he gives to the assembled student body is pathetic indeed but it's like his approach to all things: straight-laced, realistic, but filled with soul. It's all he's got, but he'll give it.
Amidst it all, forces outside the school act upon it in destructive ways: drugs, gangs, violence, alcoholism, forced marriages (a bigger problem than what you'd think)--what the kids have come to school to rise above if they only can. As you read, you can only marvel how anybody graduates from that place at all.
But they do. Some of them do better than that: They get chances to go to college. They get to the next level.
The only thing missing in this book is what it must be like to have whole classes of such kids and try to teach them English, science, math, history. Is there a pull to bring what is usually a decent level of learning down to them? Are corners cut? Does mercy push them along when in other places, like the one in which I taught, they would deserve to fail?
That dynamic is missing. It is an important one. But you can understand how Elly Fishman couldn't cover every base. The information she managed to procure to give us a proper idea of what these intrepid young people have had to overcome must have been a full-time job for months.
Fishman works in the Journalism Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, literally a walk away from where I live. She recently appeared for a book talk at the independent bookstore only a block away from me. I missed it. It's a shame I did.
Because now that I've finished this remarkable work, I have lots of questions. Will she follow up? Will she learn what happened to Abdul Karim, Mariah, Shahina, and Aishah? Where has Sullivan gone since she documented its challenges--up, down, or the same? It has the problems big city schools have all over the country--crumbling infrastructure, squeezing budgets, security, reductions in vital staff. I feel like walking down the street and making an appointment to see her.
It's easy to drill down and focus upon one school, but consider other cities with what must be the same kinds of mountains to climb: New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Seattle. Things have been written about them, too. Their challenges are the same. Is this book a mere documentation of a hopeless case, or is it a cry for help?
How this country will meet those challenges remains the key to unlocking our new energy. For their potentials are, in the end, ours. No cruel and heartless administration can, and could, get rid of the overwhelming crush of immigrant students and their wide-eyed promise. The key to making America great again isn't getting rid of them, it's providing what they need to let them grow and flower and bloom.
Of course it would be a much simpler, easier place to educate kids if not for these addendum. But for nearly two hundred years now, since immigration became a very big deal, we have had these challenges facing us, though we forget the same angst and issues of language, fear and parental resistance: Italian, Polish, Irish, Czech, German, Scandinavian, Jewish. They came in waves and faced bullying and petty prejudices as well.
Some of them are now teaching the Middle Easterners and Latin Americans who make up their classes. They don't have to look that far into their own backgrounds to know and feel the striving, the hunger, the amazement of opportunity. They can see it in the kids' eyes. They want it bad.
America will always be that. May we never forget.
Seeing the results of that might prove to fulfill a career. I taught in a much safer, pristine place, where poverty was but an abstraction and more often than not, the kids went through the motions. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But look what I missed.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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