Secondary school principals face no shortage of issues and challenges when it comes to ensuring that their teachers and students are ready for the Common Core State Standards. With so many issues competing for scarce time and resources, it is understandable that for many school leaders, the needs of high-ability and high-potential students are not front and center in the college-and-career-ready discussion. Further compounding the challenge are some misperceptions, chiefly that the Common Core is rigorous enough to substitute for gifted education services. The gifted education community, by and large, views the Common Core as being reasonably rigorous and a major step forward to upping the game of US schools. Even with rigorous standards, however, the very nature of common standards--benchmarks for all students at each grade level--means that they will be insufficient on their own for the most advanced students. Given this reality, it is important for principals to foster environments in which teachers are able to work within the standards to provide learning opportunities for high-achieving and high-ability students. This will require school leaders to commit to gifted students--a cohort estimated to account for about 10% of the total student population in the United States--and those high-ability learners who may not yet have reached high levels of achievement. In this article, the authors discuss the intersection between the Common Core and gifted education, explore the leadership role of the principal as it relates to the Common Core, and describe resources that can support principals in their work.