Privatising educational leadership through technology in the Trumpian era

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the changes that the election of Donald Trump enables in education policy domestically and in education discourse internationally. I argue that Trump’s own charismatic leadership style is a distraction from the privatisation that it is facilitating through Betsy DeVos, Trump’s appointment as US Education Secretary. I draw on two contemporary examples of technology-enabled privatisation in education – cyber charters and predictive analytics using big data – to argue that in the Trumpian era, educational leadership may be shifting from corporatised forms, where professionals understood as ‘school leaders’ fulfil corporate objectives through corporatised means. Instead, Trumpian-era privatised educational leadership retreats fully behind the technology boardroom door, where it renders superfluous lead professionals in education institutions, and where its objectives are to generate profit through re-conceptualising learners as data providers. This analysis highlights the need for new tools and methods to describe and explain what is happening, and to help develop understandings of what educational leadership in this new landscape might be, do or achieve.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporatised educational leadership
• privatisation
• Donald Trump
• cyber-charters
• big data
• predictive analytics
• technology

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bryan Mann, Rob Higham, Helen Gunter and Ruth McGinity, conversing and/or corresponding with whom has greatly clarified my thinking on some of the aspects of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Steven J. Courtney is Lecturer at the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, UK, from where he also received his PhD in Education. His current work is focused on conceptualising and theorising educational leadership, and on exploring the professional agency and identities of those constructed in education policy as ‘leaders’.

ORCID

Steven J. Courtney http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2379-7035