For the past 3 years, the educational leadership faculty at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) has been engaged in program reform and curricular innovation. The reform process was initiated by centralized external authorities--a combination of international rankings, national accreditation bodies, national leadership standards, and state standards, all culminating in a required state certification examination. In the academic world, this conflagration adds up to a managerialist reform movement, which more or less describes the current state of school leadership in the U.S. Who finds this state of affairs to be strange? Through the lens of history as well as culture, one could hardly have imagined today's school leadership state of affairs. Before one thinks of declaring democracy to be dead, paraphrasing the April 8, 1996 cover of "Time Magazine," the author takes a closer look, first at what happened at the school leadership program faculty level, and then, afterwards, at the level of his classroom teaching. This essay begins with a straightforward assumption: Unless educators are willing to practice democracy, even under difficult circumstances, they cannot have a legitimate platform for teaching or advocating democratic practices.