Ideology, Shifts of in Educational Leadership Preparation

John L. Keedy

The United States is undergoing an ideological shift from that of civic promotion of the common good (progressivism) to that of restoring the citizen's right of private property (neoconservatism). After over 100 years (approximately 1840s–1950s) of providing its citizenry with government protection from capitalism's rough edges, the ideological pendulum has swung toward citizens' rights to private property as goods and services are being redistributed from the public to the private sector through privatization and marketplace competition. This shift in national ideology has a crucial implication for the field of education administration (EA): as the public school is subjected to market forces and is decoupled from schools of education, the EA field inexorably is shorn of its institutional lifeblood for political protection and its supply of administrator candidates. As argued below, the public school even during the height of progressivism in the nineteenth century exhibited a precarious cyclical existence. In this ...

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