From "Data-Driven" to "Democracy-Driven" Educational Leadership: Navigating Market Bureaucracy and New Technology in a Post-Fordist Era

• In Event: 18.018 - Theoretical and Topical Focuses of Educational Leadership From The International Handbook of Educational Leadership

Abstract

This paper charts the intellectual origins of data-driven educational leadership, the economic interests related to its rise, and the ideological assumptions that undergird its practice. The paper explains how data-driven leadership is at odds with democratic conceptions of education. It suggests the need to steer educational leadership away from an instrumental data-driven paradigm to a critical democracy-driven paradigm.
Dominant conceptions of educational leadership are rooted in a corporate managerial logic and set of practices that has evolved in concert with the rise of neoliberal ideology since the 1980s and 1990s (Waite, 2014). This corporate managerial model is characterized by a vast expansion of state bureaucratic authority in the name of anti-bureaucratic market freedom. It is aggressively enacted through the state, which is thoroughly reconstituted as a vehicle of elite financial and corporate interests. Within this frame, educational leadership tracks with the emergence of a vast ‘new market bureaucracy’ in K-12 education modeled not on the factory as in a previous era of Fordist industrial management, but on the corporation in a post-Fordist era of network governance (AUTHOR, 2013; AUTHOR, 2012). In the words of neoliberal educational reformer Fredrick Hess (2009), educational leaders are ‘cage busters,’ charged with dismantling supposedly inefficient public systems under democratic oversight and replacing them with supposedly efficient private systems under corporate oversight. The concrete result has been to produce a paradoxical situation whereby privatization and corporate managerialism generate a profound intensification in the reductive instrumental domination of educational institutions, which is then legitimated through the celebratory language of markets, creativity and innovation (AUTHOR, 2013b).
Within the data-driven paradigm, ‘dynamic’ and ‘transformative’ educational leaders are those who dutifully adhere to and enforce rigid new systems of privatization and accountability. This includes administering a proliferating set of performance evaluations, auditing tools, examinations, scripted curriculum, credentialing mechanisms, and high-stakes tests that operate under the banner of ‘evidence-based’ and ‘data-driven’ practice. New digital technologies such as IT-based administrative platforms and predictive analytic software are also rapidly being developed and implemented that further rationalize and extend these administrative practices. This paper argues that the new emphasis on data-driven educational leadership has little to do with educational improvement in any meaningful sense. Rather, what is fundamentally at stake is a redistribution of control over social life, including over public educational institutions and administrative practices. Specifically, as the conclusion details, ‘data-driven’ audit culture displaces collective, dialogically-enacted forms of administration and teaching that involve deliberation and contestation over knowledge production, values, and pedagogical practices.

References
Hess, F. (2103) Cage Busting Leadership Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
AUTHOR. (2013) Schooling in the Age of Austerity: Urban Education and the Struggle for Democratic Life New York Palgrave.
AUTHOR. (2012) The Failure of Corporate School Reform New York: Palgrave.
Waite, D. (2014). Imperial Hubris: The Dark Heart of Leadership. Journal of School Leadership, 24, 1202-1232.

Authors

• Kenneth J. Saltman, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Alexander Means, SUNY - Buffalo State