The purpose of this study is to determine the perceptions of New York State superintendents and board presidents in high-achieving and low-achieving school districts on the six superintendent leadership responsibilities identified by Waters and Marzano (2006) and their relationship to improving student achievement: (1) creating research-relevant goals, (2) providing principal autonomy, (3) monitoring goals, (4) allocating resources to support goals, (5) ensuring board support of goals, and (6) collaborative goal setting. A survey instrument was created in order to analyze the perceptions of superintendents and board presidents from selected New York State public school districts. Districts were identified as a high-achieving or a low-achieving based on the mastery rates from 3 years of New York State Math A Regents Examination results. The review of data was accomplished through the analyses of a 52-item survey that contained Likert-type questions. Each item used a five-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1--strongly disagree to 5--strongly agree. Results from the 110 returned surveys (28% return rate) were analyzed and subjected to a factor analysis. The factor analysis confirmed the existence of six factors: (1) creating research-relevant goals, (2) providing principal autonomy, (3) monitoring goals, (4) allocating resources to support goals, (5) ensuring board support of goals, and (6) collaborative goal setting. The findings from this study suggest that all the respondents, superintendents and board presidents from high-achieving and low-achieving districts, agreed to strongly agreed with the six superintendent leadership responsibilities. Results of this study indicate that when comparing superintendents from high-achieving and low-achieving school districts, there were no statistically significant differences in perception on how they viewed the six leadership responsibilities. When comparing board presidents from low-achieving and high-achieving school districts, board presidents from high-achieving districts statistically had stronger agreement on all six superintendent responsibilities compared to board presidents from low-achieving districts. When comparing superintendents and board presidents from high-achieving districts, board presidents from high-achieving districts statistically had stronger agreement on the variables ensuring board support of goals and providing principal autonomy than superintendents from high-achieving districts. Another finding from this study is that the longer the superintendent was in his or her role, the less likely they agreed with the superintendent responsibilities indicated in this study. The results of a logistic regression indicated that the free and reduced lunch was the best predictor as to whether or not the district was a high-achieving or low-achieving school district. No other variables emerged as significant predictors of the achievement level of the district. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]