This article explores the disjuncture between refugee's pre-migratory educational aspirations and their everyday encounters with urban public schools. This study engages with two main questions: How do refugee youth's experiences with their urban public schools act as barriers to their educational aspirations? How do these experiences inform their understandings of citizenship? This research centres refugee youth critiques and questions as they explore the meaning of citizenship, particularly during this political moment when Muslim refugees have been framed as the ultimate "Other" and as a threat to national security and identity. This data for this article comes from a three year, multi-sited, multilingual ethnography, with recently resettled Iraqi refugee families in Philadelphia. Participant observation, interviews, and family focus groups were conducted in refugee households, public schools, welfare offices, hospitals, and refugee resettlement agencies. The article centres the case study of Seif Hassan, a 21-year-old 11th grader, who was excluded from his high school as well as adult education programming due to the market fundamentalist attack on public education. This study then examines the relationship between educational exclusion and the production of refugee youth as (non)citizens, suggesting that staging interventions to improve their lives necessitates a thoughtful reevaluation of educational policy and practice.