Starting around the mid-1980s the public became increasingly more demanding on the school system to raise standards and improve students’ academic performance. Along with this emerged the critical observation of school leadership and the link between leadership and school effectiveness. Adams and Kirst (1999) stated, “The ‘excellence movement’ was launched, and in its wake followed an evolution in the notion of educational accountability commensurate with the movement’s challenge to obtain better student performance” (p. 463). Leithwood, Jantzi, & Steinbach (2002) refer to these initiatives as large-scale school reform. Several other initiatives were implemented as a means of providing more accountability. Adams and Kirst state, “Policy makers, educational leaders, practitioners, and parents also continued to seek better student performance and accountability through management practices, professional standards, teacher commitment, democratic processes, and parent choice” (p. 466). School reform and accountability movements pressure school principals to improve student achievement, yet little information is provided on best practices for achieving this. Numerous accountability schemes are exclusively based on high-stakes standardized testing, which is typically incongruent with what most educators recognize as effective ways of measuring quality teaching and learning. Educational accountability schemes are complex and they are often accompanied by both internal and external turbulence that must be mediated by the school principal. The new focus for schools has created a cohort of “old school” principals who must now embrace a conceptually new form of leadership.