Curriculum, learning and teaching
International schools’ leadership – Trump this! Alexander Gardner-McTaggart looks at what we can learn from the success of the US president
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as Stephen Ball titled it, ‘The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity’. Neo-liberalism sees problems, and requires ‘the fixer’; every setback has a clear solution. In neo-liberalism the world is simple yet, unfortunately, quite unlike any aspect of school or childhood that I have ever seen. The field of international schools is diffuse, distended, and far from cohesive. These schools jostle to ‘up’ their value and present a distinct picture of the education they provide. We all know there is an implicit ‘ranking’ among international schools – some are simply wonderful institutions of learning, while others try to be and some, of course, just don’t make the cut. Anyone who has visited an international schools job fair knows the familiar scene: the ‘good’ schools with the long queues of smartly dressed teachers, and the lesser known schools, where the principals sit alone. They peer hopefully at these exotic professionals as they stride past – avoiding eye contact – without stopping. It is easy to understand why this happens. International school teachers know what they want from a school: reputation, location and package. The order of these three components may vary, depending on what is on offer and what the teacher brings into the bargain. Essentially, an international school teacher is far more of a Autumn |
Spring
Leadership is a fascinating thing. In education, building a reliable system characterised by consistency and coherence can be difficult, and transition and change unhelpful, especially when rigid market pressures meet the soft norms of human development. Checks and balances are essential, because when leaders step outside of the structure and the rules they can, and do, become the rules. Leaders are so particularly susceptible to self-aggrandisement. Donald Trump came as a bit of a surprise to a lot of people. Not to me. As a phenomenologist, I had just concluded a five-year study on leadership – in international schools. Donald Trump is remarkable: a ‘winner’, as he would describe himself. He is all the more remarkable for the fact that he managed to become US president, paradoxically it seems, because of his lack of experience and credentials, not despite it. He created a powerful image of himself from an often-fictitious narrative of his success as a leader. In this way, he most perfectly embodies the market force of neoliberalism as it interacts with the State. As David Wilkinson commented in a recent issue of International School, neoliberalism abounds in the international school sector. This is the rule of performance: ‘quantifying the unquantifiable’ or,
| 2017
