[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_00:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Andy Hargraves. Dr. Hargraves is an internationally renowned researcher, professor, government advisor, and global change agent. He's the founder of the Atlantic Rim Collaboratory, a group of nations committed to excellence, equity, wellbeing, inclusion, democracy, and human rights. Dr. Hargraves has consulted with the OECD, the World Bank, governments, universities, and teacher unions worldwide.
[00:39]
And he's the author of more than 30 books, including his new book, Moving, a memoir of education and social mobility.
[00:48] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:51] SPEAKER_00:
Andy, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you, Justin. Well, it's a little bit unusual in our profession to find a memoir. And after writing dozens of other books, you've chosen to write moving in the format of a memoir. What prompted you to write this particular book?
[01:06] SPEAKER_01:
Lots of things, I think, were behind this. Obviously, some things in my personal life and stage of life. My experiences of reflecting on my experiences of social mobility growing up in a working class community in the north of England in the 1950s and 60s. The importance of equity and social mobility now, I think, as an issue for people, social mobility is in decline. So it's now harder coming from an ordinary family or a family that struggles to move on, be successful, get on to college, develop a middle class career. And for those who are upwardly mobile, whether you come from the white working class, as I do, or from a minority culture or an indigenous community or whatever it might be, the experience of social mobility is also often quite difficult.
[02:05]
It's not simply a heroic and triumphal like it was for Tara Westover in her book Educated or J.D. Vance in his book, Hillbilly Elegy, it's often a journey where you're always struggling with how to hang on to one culture that you grew up from, while in a sense you're moving away and moving up to join another at the same time. So I felt in a way that my experience is obviously very much about me in a certain time and place, but that it speaks to many people now from different backgrounds and cultures who I think are engaged in a common struggle to move from ordinary and sometimes challenging beginnings to be successful without losing sense of who they are.
[02:55] SPEAKER_00:
And I think this gets at the heart of a belief that we've held as a profession. As educators, we've long believed that part of our charge as educators, part of our mission is to give students the tools they need the background they need so that regardless of what they came into school with regardless of what their family was able to provide that public education in particular should level the playing field and give everyone equal opportunity and you said just a moment ago that that that has become harder that that mobility is uh perhaps on the decline uh what are some of the forces that are contributing to that decline of mobility
[03:34] SPEAKER_01:
In societies around the world, including in the United States, massive economic equalities. So wealth is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. That's being not passed on to people below, not being put into public service, public institutions, whether they are libraries or housing or public schools. So people who are trying to make it up have less behind them than I did. I had a free university education. I had no debt.
[04:04]
probably if people would have told me I'd be racking up something like $50,000 debt per year, which happens in the UK now just as much as it happens in the US. I'd probably never have moved away to university. I'd never gone to a good university. I might have gone to some kind of local college or program at home, but we know those offer less positive and dynamic opportunities than going to Harvard or Yale or a state university or whatever it might be. I had state funding for my school uniform, even, because we couldn't afford that. A lot of my clothes were hand-me-downs.
[04:43]
I was running three part-time jobs at the same time. I was looking after my mum after my father died. She had a nervous breakdown and couldn't get out of the house for pretty much over a year. And I had a lot of resilience and a lot of grit, not because I'm particularly noble, but because, frankly...
[05:01]
So it was the only way to get through and get by. But when I found difficulty succeeding in some of my courses, I had a public library that I could go to with all the materials there that I could consult and so on. So in terms of my mobility, you can see it as a personal story. I think in North America, we like to hear and see those. But I also had a lot behind me. I had a lot of investment, public funding, a son, not all good teachers here and there.
[05:29]
And I think there's less of that now. When I was nine years old and living in public housing, my dad won a competition in a national newspaper. We were able to buy a modest home a bit further down, closer to town, no indoor bathroom, but it was ours. And suddenly we found we had different kinds of neighbors now. We had neighbors who were teachers, neighbors who were office workers, neighbors who worked in law enforcement. And so the community around you is very important for supporting you, as well as the investment in public life.
[06:06]
But in North America now, as people like Bob Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, describe, our communities are becoming divided. The middle class are coming to live in walled communities on other sides of the tracks from the working class, from African-Americans, from Hispanic, Mexican and other immigrants and so on. So we're less well supported by people around us, we're less well supported by public funding. When we talk about our schools having diversity, often we actually mean there are no white people in there.
[06:42]
So we need mixed communities. We need schools where you've got children from middle class families as well as from working class families. You need models of good behaviour as well as models of bad behaviour. around you. These things are harder to do. Inequity divides people.
[07:01]
It puts people into separate communities. And then once you have income, if public funding is in short supply, middle class families know where to buy extra tuition, how to get extra tuition, how to get an internship for their kids when they're looking for a new job in a way that people from more modest backgrounds don't. So it's about inequity. It's about declining public investment. And it's about the division of communities rather than finding ways to bring those communities together. And what a school has to do and teachers have to do and principals have to do is to find all kinds of ways in their own way to compensate for these things, to support kids where they're not getting support from elsewhere, to support the whole child, to know the family.
[07:45]
My school didn't know or communicate the fact that I never arrived for some time between 11 a.m. because I was lighting the fire, cleaning the house, buying in the food until my grandmother could come up. And now we need to, and we have examples in the U.S. and my colleague Mary Walsh from Boston College of Wraparound Schools that actually think about the whole child, not just about their math achievement or their literacy and how to have extra time, extra instruction, but how to really care and support the whole child.
[08:19]
And the best schools do that collaboratively as a community. So we're not looking for Mahatma Gandhi's or Mother Teresa's to know everything and do everything for the children as individuals. But if we're going to support the whole child, we need the whole staff and the whole community collaboratively to support the whole child. So this memoir is in a way drawing on my own experience to say, what does it mean for us now? in supporting children who struggle, who have even less behind them than I did when it applied to me.
[08:53] SPEAKER_00:
I want to let the memoir and the narrative there speak for itself. So I definitely want to encourage our readers to go through that story and to experience that vicariously through your writing. Several of the examples that you gave just now impress upon me just the complexity involved in succeeding in the world today. Becoming an adult, going to college, getting an education, getting a good job. it seems so much more complex. It seems like there's so much more information that you have to have in order to navigate that successfully.
[09:21]
Where do you see that kind of complexity? What's going on with the economy that's driving that complexity and perhaps making it more difficult? I think back to my own experience as a high school student, and I know that my mother knew that to become a national merit scholar, I would have to take the PSAT, which a lot of American students saw as just kind of optional preparation for the SAT. And she had that one piece of knowledge that she was able to pass on to me. But I feel like now one piece of information is not enough to create that social mobility that we really want education to offer to our students. What's going on there with our economy and that complexity?
[10:01] SPEAKER_01:
There are three ways to be upwardly mobile. One is you move up on the job. You move into some kind of manual job. You do well. Perhaps you're a bit entrepreneurial. You get noticed.
[10:12]
You might start up a small company making banners. It gets into a big company. So a few people, not many, can kind of move up on the job. And there used to be a lot of that in the 1950s, 60s. People could start in a factory job, go to night school, get a few extra courses there. That's one way.
[10:32]
The second way you can be social mobile is through crime. You can steal things, you can deal drugs, you can, right? So it is a path for, it's not a desirable path, but it is a path for kind of getting on and getting up. But most times it will eventually kind of bite you by the tail. So it's not an advisable path. The third is education.
[10:55]
And so what our public schools are like and what our universities offer are is really important. Through my state school that I went to, when I applied to university, nobody advised me about universities. Nobody in my family had ever been to university. Nobody knew where they were, what they were like. My teachers didn't talk to me. So when I faced the blank page of the application form, it was terrifying.
[11:22]
They asked me, there's a spot that said hobbies. I thought I had no hobbies. I'd been on no school teams. I'd led no school clubs. I didn't go sailing. I didn't play golf.
[11:32]
I didn't play rugby union, which my school did. What I did was in my community, I played soccer and cricket with my friends. We called them my mates. I did things in the community. We loved hiking over the moors. I hike the Appalachian Trail these days in stages.
[11:50]
It's stayed as a big part of me because hiking didn't cost anything. But walking over rough moorlands for 15 miles a day didn't count as leadership. And yet I planned a 270 mile hike up the spine of England with a girlfriend of mine when I was 17. Never thought of listing this as a hobby or as leadership or as anything else. Never thought of looking after my mum and my family actually as leadership. Which it was because taking care of things in the home, getting her out of the house, Getting her back up and healthy and back into work.
[12:26]
All this is leadership. None of this counts as leadership. We see it as a deficit. We see this as a problem. We see this as something to hide and to be ashamed of. And so a really simple thing schools and colleges can do is create a space on the application form at a point in the interview where people can talk about not what they don't have, but what they do have.
[12:49]
And what that looks like in working class and ethnic minority life, not the standard clubs, teams and so on, or internships or travel, which are available to middle class kids very easily. So we have to start to turn our institutions on our heads and get them to look at the strengths, not the strengths that people need, but the strengths they already have and on what they can bring. And when somebody applies, from a poor school district and has got, you know, has got an SAT score, if you've got an SAT score and you're applying from a poor postcode, your SAT score should be worth more than the SAT score from somebody who is not from a poor postcode. And we should have ways of accounting for that. And we should make internships illegal because internships are free labour.
[13:42]
And the only internships that should be permissible, and there's ways to legislate this, should be through an accredited educational institution. That gives everybody the opportunity for an internship. And it also means that companies or corporations no longer get free labor. So they actually have to offer jobs for people who are looking for entry-level positions. So we talk about this as if it's hopeless. Money is locked up in a very tight, small 1%.
[14:16]
There's less to play with for the rest of us. But there's lots that institutions can do now, actually, to give kids a hand up. That doesn't mean more resilience. I mean, it means all that, more grit, all the things that Angela Duckworth talks about. But it does mean turning institutions on their head. I'm thinking about helping kids as they are and not how they want the kids to be.
[14:39] SPEAKER_00:
Very well said. Yeah, so many examples there of where basically money has created an advantage earlier and earlier for the kids who have it, and it produces these opportunity gaps that no amount of grit and studying and hard work for a child who doesn't have those advantages – And thinking about who designs these systems that honor that advantage, that perpetuate that advantage, I think we have to, as educators, take some responsibility for saying, hey, if we have a system where if you got to be on the rowing team and play golf, you should get a better education, that's not a system that's going to create equity and going to create that social mobility that we're supposedly here to create.
[15:24] SPEAKER_01:
I'm hearing, you know, there's resonances of what I've described in your background. And I'm hoping that when I've talked about bits of this book and about myself and my own narrative, but some people cry when I talk about that. In some places, they laugh because some parts of it are ridiculously funny. But in some parts, they cry, particularly, you know, when I talk about being home, missing school, kind of trying to take care of the family instead of the family taking care of me and then I ask people why they cry and they're not crying for me. They're either crying for themselves because many teachers actually come from, it's the only middle class job they know and they want to help kids who went through things like they did. So many teachers come from that kind of background.
[16:16]
And the crying for the kids, the crying for the kids that they teach who go through these kinds of things. And whether the kids are, you know, Chinese-American or indigenous, but kids who have to look after their brothers and sisters, who, you know, might have a parent who's sick or dead or in prison or whatever it might be. So I hope what this book does is it speaks to many teachers who have had struggles in their life and many teachers who have all kinds of kids who have struggles in their life and helps them to think more about how as a whole school we can support them.
[16:53] SPEAKER_00:
So Dr. Hargraves, as you consult with governments, with international bodies who advise on education policy, typically we look at a lot of data, we look at a lot of numbers, we look at a lot of economic statistics, but you've chosen in this book to take a narrative approach in the vein of JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy or Tara Westover's Educated. Why is it so important that we see what's happening in the economy, see what's happening in society and causing people to be left behind. Why is it so important that we see that as a story?
[17:29] SPEAKER_01:
The town I grew up in is in the north of England. It's an old mill town. When I grew up, it was 100% white working class apart from the Indian restaurant under the railway viaduct, the Chinese restaurants on the other side of town. And the five Jewish kids in my high school who disappeared for morning assembly for reasons we never understood and then returned again afterwards while we'd all been singing Christian hymns. And that was diversity until I was getting towards the end of high school and then lots of Pakistani immigrants came into the community. I come from a very proud people.
[18:10]
who work hard, support each other through thick and thin, neighbors, family, have an incredible loyalty and tightness. They're like Bruce Springsteen on steroids, basically. And there are many towns like this in North America, Youngstown, the mill towns of New England and so on. But there are also people...
[18:37]
who are suspicious of outsiders. Outsiders include people from the south of England as well as people from the north of England. So suspicious of anybody who's different. And when the jobs disappear and things get hard, it's easy for that to turn into what look like forms of prejudice against particular kinds of outsiders. When Brexit happened, when the UK left the European Union on January 31st, 2020, one of the most pro-Brexit towns in the country was mine. Almost 70% of people in my community voted for Brexit.
[19:21]
The BBC came to my town and towns around it as the paradigm case of people who wanted to get out of Europe, feel they could take control of their lives, feel like Other people weren't speaking to them. Other people weren't talking to them. And we know the whole narrative of America has been around this over the last few years. People who feel left behind, not recognized, and so on. I think we've developed very good ways of talking about...
[19:51]
many kinds of disadvantage, inequity, and marginalization in the last 20 years or so, about homophobia, about LGBTQ, about immigrants, about Native American communities, about all these kinds, and of course, about historic African Americans, about all these groups who struggle, who've been marginalized, who've who suffered from prejudice and so on. And in all this, we've not found a way to talk also about the white working class and their struggles and prejudice. And we associate rightly, historically, intellectually, whiteness with privilege. I'm immensely privileged. I think probably, you know, Justin, you'd say you were too. But
[20:41]
But if you live in Appalachia, if you're the biggest part of the opioid addiction problem, if you've experienced homelessness, joblessness, if you are employed but you're working three jobs to make ends meet and you're barely getting by, it's hard to see yourself as privileged, even though technically, intellectually, historically, You are. But it's hard for us to know what to do about this. We can have a gay pride day, but you can't have a poor pride day.
[21:21]
You can have Black History Month, but if you had White History Month, the consequences of that and the meaning of that would be dreadful. So I think really what we truly need to strive for is not to pit the needs of the white working class against other inequities and sources of diversity and say me too don't forget don't forget about me and vice versa but we need to find a narrative and change is not just about data and stats it's about narrative we need to find a narrative where where we recognize that actually historically in America we're all immigrants Irish Germans Dutch people have fled the Holocaust Italians Portuguese and now Brazilians, Mexicans, Cambodians, Vietnamese.
[22:17]
It's a nation of immigrants and all immigrants are looking for something better. I was privileged when I immigrated to Canada. My middle brother was working class and came to Canada with five suitcases and $1,000. He was an economic migrant. It was white, but there's nothing wrong with being an economic migrant compared to being a refugee. When people are looking for better lives, that's why they come to America.
[22:45]
It's the great beacon of hope for them. So we have to build a narrative which includes the white working class, doesn't exclude them, understands that it's not a synonym for poor either. Some of all the working class, they're auto workers, they work in fishing, they're janitors, they're truck drivers, they're cleaners of people's buildings and homes. And to talk about how we all struggle, we all want something better. That is, there's dignity in the way we work. And we need to unite people who struggle and recognize everyone who struggles and have a language for it and talk about education and learning and support in ways that are directed to all those communities.
[23:32]
And I think in Britain where I come from and in America where I've spent the last 15 years until I returned to Canada to be close to my grandchildren, we've lost this narrative. We've lost this sense of what brings people together. And then it's easy for other people to come in who will pick off the ones who feel they've been left behind, not addressed, but pick them off in a way that opposes them to and against other people, against African-Americans, against Mexican immigrants against other people who are wrongly depicted as, in a way, subtracting from who we are rather than adding for who we are. And I think we need to do this in politics, Republican or Democrat or independent and unregistered.
[24:24]
The party doesn't matter, but we need to find a spirit and a spirituality that brings people together. And our teachers need to do that in our classrooms. And our principals need to do that in our schools. And our superintendents need to do that in our school districts. The future is not in the data. The future is in the narrative and in the story that brings us all together in a common past, a common struggle, and a common future.
[24:50]
The answer to your question is many people are left behind now, where absolute poverty is better than it's ever been, actually, in most parts of the world. The issue now for people is relative disadvantage. It's not how I am compared to nothing, but how I am compared to the person next to me. And if we don't understand that most of our problems now come from indecent concentrations of wealth that are not passed on, that don't trickle down, that mean a shrinking rather than expanding public sector. And by the way, when you have a strong public sector, it's more jobs. So public sector has less nepotism.
[25:32]
It has less brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins who can who can give you a line in to this corporation or this company. So a stronger public sector actually means more mobility. To have a stronger public sector, people have to pay more taxes. Most of those taxes are not just income taxes. They are corporate taxes. They're corporate taxes from Starbucks, from Amazon, from huge companies who do not pay tax in the country's where they trade, for example.
[26:08]
So what people see subjectively is not that. They see the person who's just got a bit more than them who looks like they've got an unfair advantage. Until we solve that problem, we'll have a meaner society, a more competitive, in a bad way, society, a more prejudicial society because, as they say, when they When the water hole dries up, the animals all look at each other differently. And so our solution is on a very big scale, all of us, and to educate our young people to want a stronger society. And we all see ourselves as contributing to other people's good as well as our own. And when that does, we have stronger communities and our life feels better as well.
[26:57]
There's great work by And this is data by two people called Wilkinson and Pickett, who wrote a book called Best Seller called The Spirit Level. And what it shows is all kinds of indicators of well-being or ill-being, which are poverty, educational underachievement, alcoholism, drug abuse, early pregnancy, obesity. Rates of imprisonment, severity of treatment during imprisonment, length of sentences, obesity, mental health problems. The strongest predictor of all these things, country by country and state by state, is economic inequality. So if you want greater well-being, including for yourself, then it makes sense to want a world
[27:56]
and to strive for a world where we're not socialists but we're all a bit closer together and the gaps aren't so great and it becomes better able to build community and a stronger community means stronger families and stronger mental health and stronger well-being. And that's our task now.
[28:19] SPEAKER_00:
So the book is Moving, A Memoir of Education and Social Mobility. Andy Hargraves, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been an honor. Thank you. Bye-bye, Justin.
[28:30] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
