Public school principals encounter a sizable gap between the autonomy they believe they need to be effective and the autonomy that they actually have in practice, especially when it comes to hiring, firing, and transferring teachers. That is a key finding of this report from the Fordham Institute and the American Institutes for Research, which is based on a series of interviews with a small sample of district and charter-school principals. Regrettably if understandably, many district principals have also come to accept this "autonomy gap" as a fact of life. They learn to work the system, not change the system. The final interview protocol is appended. (Contains 9 tables and 23 endnotes.) [Foreword by: Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Michael J. Petrilli. Additional funding support for this study was provided by the William E. Simon Foundation.]