0.16 Surface, j. (october 2011). assessing edad candidates' leadership  (Page 3/7)

There is a tendency in discussions of ethics to emphasize morality and pay less attention to questions about what is good. The reduction of ethics to morality is a mistake. What is “good” is an important question and it is not the same for everyone. Good lives are lived from the inside out and are affected by nature and culture. We are individuals and are different from the beginning of life. Our families and cultures shape our wants and needs. Societies are good because they permit and support us to flourish in a variety of forms (Strike, 2007). When ethics collapses into morality, the tendency is to disconnect morality from the nature of good communities and their goals and ideas. At the very root, the ethic of school leaders must lead an environment that allows children to flourish and have a moral responsibility for creating that environment. Our graduates will be faced with individual ethical choices that are extremely difficult. Knowing some basic theory about ethics will help guide them in making those tough decisions.

Shapiro and Stefkovich (2005) and Shapiro and Gross (2007) outlined five ethical theories. The Ethic of Critique , The Ethic of Justice, The Ethic of Care, The Ethic of the Profession and Turbulence Theory. The Ethic of Critique is aimed at the bureaucratic context of schooling.

The Ethic of Critique philosophy is based upon thinkers such as Habermas and others who explore social life as intrinsically problematic because it exhibits the struggle between competing interests and wants among various groups and individuals in society. Questions posed to the self are: Who benefits from these arrangements? Which group dominates this social arrangement? Who defines the way things are structured here? Who defines what is valued and disvalued in this situation? The point of this is to uncover inherent social injustice and dehumanization that is imbedded in the language and culture of society; critical analysts invite others to act to redress such injustice. Some examples include: sexist and structured bias in the work place and legal structures; racial bias in educational arrangements and in the very language used to define social life; the preservation of powerful groups hegemony over media and the political process; the rationalization and legitimating of institutions such as prisons, orphanages, armies, and nuclear industries. This ethical perspective provides a framework for enabling educational administrators to move from an kind of naïveté about “the way things are” to an awareness that social and political arena reflect arrangements of power and privilege, interest and influence, often legitimized by an assumed rationality and by law and custom (Shapiro and Stekovich, 2005). Throughout our program, social justice is emphasized. In addition, the understanding of diversity and equity, sociocultural consciousness, cultural proficiency, and community connections are included in the coursework in an intentional, developmental manner in order to promote measure growth in the knowledge, skills and dispositions of diversity (Keiser, 2009).