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While it is reasonable to surmise that the vast majority of leaders, regardless of whether they are educators in the broad sense of that term, exercise their leadership in accord with sound ethical principles, the regular instances of exceptions to this rule highlight the importance of incorporating the study of ethics in leadership programs. Recent instances of leaders who have acted unethically in educational settings attest to the critical role of ethics education in the education doctorate (EdD). The scholar practitioner emphasis of the EdD envisaged by the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) warrants an approach to ethics education that integrates collaborative action learning, field-based learning, and reflection. This article describes an endeavor to implement best practice in ethics education in a CPED-inspired EdD program, given that the essence of such best practice entails exploring and promoting an undistorted view of reality.

Bass (1990) referred to leadership as being supported by mythologies, which he defined as “plausible and acceptable explanations for the dominance of… leaders and the submission of… subordinates”(p. 3). Both “plausible” and “acceptable” depend on the perspective of the subordinates, and Bass went on to assert that “the greater the socioeconomic injustice in the society, the more distorted the realities of leadership—its powers, morality and effectiveness”(p. 3). To highlight the point that Bass made about socioeconomic injustice and distorted realities, and to open this article with a broad perspective, consider the weekend of December 17–18, 2011, which saw the death of two major leaders on the …