Refugee High

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What to expect

A year in the life of a Chicago high school that has one of the highest proportions of refugees of any school in the nation

For a century, Chicago’s Roger C. Sullivan High School has been a landing place for migrants. In recent years, it boasts one of the highest proportions of immigrant and refugee students in the country. In 2017, around half its student population hailed from another country, with students from thirty-five different countries speaking more than thirty-eight different languages.

Some had arrived having lived only in refugee camps. Nearly all carried the trauma inflicted on them by the world at its most hateful and violent. Life is not easy for them in Chicago. They cope with poverty, racism, and xenophobia, with overburdened social-service organizations and gang turf wars they don’t understand. But above all, they are still teens, flirting, dreaming, and working as they navigate their new life in America.

Refugee High is a riveting chronicle of the 2017–18 school year at Sullivan High, a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric was at its height in the White House. Even as we follow teachers and administrators grappling with the everyday challenges facing many urban schools, we witness the complicated circumstances and unique education needs of refugee and immigrant children: Alejandro may be deported just days before he is scheduled to graduate; Shahina narrowly escapes an arranged marriage; and Esengo is shot at the beginning of the school year.

Raising vital questions about what the priorities and values of a public school like Sullivan should be, Refugee High is a vital window into the present-day American immigration and education systems.

Critics Review

  • “A wondrous tapestry of stories, of young people looking for a home. With deep, immersive reporting, Elly Fishman pulls off a triumph of empathy. Their tales and their school speak to the best of who we are as a nation—and their struggles, their joys, their journeys will stay with you.”

    Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here

  • “Fishman unearths the inner lives of her subjects with care and precision and skillfully balances lighter moments with harrowing turns of events. The result is a powerful portrait of resilience in the face of long odds.”

    Publishers Weekly

  • “Educators and general readers alike will find this vividly intimate work insightful.”

    Library Journal

  • “As the only refugee in an Oklahoma high school in the 1990s, I used to have fantasies like this: what if a school existed that represented the wider world, everyone displaced, everyone applying for the same papers, pockets of society not defined by ill-fitting American markers, but following the precise contours of my own continent, its many faiths and colors? Refugee High is the realization of that daydream, and a riveting real-life answer to those youthful mysteries. A deep dive into an experiment I’ve always wanted to witness, meticulously researched, lovingly written, and rich in revelation.”

    Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee

  • “Elly Fishman’s Refugee High takes readers inside one of the most remarkable schools in the country. Fishman brings to life the individual experiences of the school’s teenagers, teachers, and administrators, their struggles and joys. Through these intimate accounts, Refugee High shows the widening conflicts—of a city, a nation, and world—that concern us all.”

    Ben Austen, author of High-Risers

  • “No reader will be able to forget these students and the almost unimaginable hurdles they struggle to surmount, and no reader will forget the teachers who dedicate themselves to preventing the American Dream from becoming a betrayal.”

    Drew Faust, president emeritus, Harvard University

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