Systemic maladministration in the digital age: Serving the individual or bureaucracy in educational administration?

For the purpose of this chapter, I will define maladministration as dishonest administration, or administration where educators or educational administrators carry out their work with ‘scissors in the head’ when trying to safeguard their educational clients’ legitimate rights to identity development. That public administration can become distorted is a relatively longstanding topic in the literature on public maladministration (Caiden 1991), and such distortions are to some extent common to bureaucratised organisations (Samier 2001), including educational organisations (e.g. Ball 2015; Cusick 1992; Wittmann and Dormann 2014). In what follows, I will argue there are some specific risks stemming from digitalisation to the administration of education and that, in the context of digitalisation, educational administration is in danger of becoming ‘systemically sick’ (Caiden 1991: 488). This includes two presumptions: first, that digitalisation is likely to become a cause of educational maladministration; and second, that the risk is systemic, rather than caused by individual actors, and should be weighed and addressed on a political rather than local level.