ABSTRACT
Educationally, the decade of the 1980s can be best characterized by an overdose of educational reform pollution controlled mostly by a conservative discourse that celebrates a language of management, competition, testing, choice, and free enterprise. This chapter explores how different and contradictory ideologies are played out in the present educational reform movement. It argues that the ambiguity in the reform movement is directly linked to the reform objective itself. In other words, the reform is being carried out by those players who have been and are part of the problem they are trying to solve. In essence, one need to rethink what it means to educate people capable of a new vision, people who can rewrite the narrative of educational leadership by developing a public philosophy capable of animating a democratic public culture, one which prepares students to enter the ever-changing, multicultural world of the 21st century.
