ABSTRACT
In introducing me to a group of fellow urban superintendents, to whom I was to make a presentation on the moral dimensions of leadership, a superintendent wryly called attention to the ‘obvious oxymoron’ in the title of my presentation. Indeed, in the present academic and political climate, attempts to propose such an orientation to leadership may indeed qualify one for membership in the looney bin. The times, however, are filled with contradictions and paradoxes. At a time when the public would seem to be willing to settle for political leaders of questionable moral qualities, there are simultaneously calls for leaders of school systems to engage in the seemingly impossible task of restructuring school systems for the twenty-first century. This seemingly universal and insistent call for educators to transform schools from their apparently present state of anomie and mediocrity gives a certain legitimacy, nay, urgency, to an attempt to speak of the moral leadership of schools (Beck, 1994). While some would see the transformation of the schools as primarily a technical task of introducing new efficiency and productivity standards, others would readily assert that the task requires a profoundly moral resolve to tap into, nurture and unleash the moral as well as the intellectual energy of communities of parents, teachers and students to create whole new approaches to schooling (Beck and Murphy, 1994; Henderson and Millstein, 1996; Hodgkinson, 1991; Purpel, 1989; Sarason, 1996; Selznick, 1992; Sergiovanni, 1992; Sizer, 1996).
