It should come as no surprise to anyone close to the discourse concerning public education in the U.S. today that educational leadership is under attack from a variety of internal/external critics and agencies, not the least of which is the U.S. Government under the new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. This paper is a response to begin to identify those enemies of educational leadership programs, their ideological agendas and their allies. The network involves outspoken individuals with elitist credentials, long time neo-liberals, right-wing think tank pundits and their conservative foundation sponsors, other foundations such as Wallace and the Broad Foundations, and quasi-government agencies such the Southern Regional Education Board in Atlanta. It is not an exaggeration to say as Kowalski did in 2004 that we are in a “war for the soul of school administration” (pp. 92-114). Of prime importance in understanding our enemies is that we find our collective voice in a response to their agenda because as Giroux (2004) has remarked, “There is no language here for recognizing anti-democratic forms of power, developing nonmarket values, or fighting against substantive injustices in a society founded on deep inequalities, particularly those based on race and class” (p. 61).
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