The conceptual framework of this study suggested that Socio-Cultural Leadership was composed of the following four factors: Instructional Domain, Emotional Domain, Community Domain, and Cultural Domain. Furthermore, it was posed that these factors, collectively and independently, directly impacted student achievement in schools ofhigh poverty. From this framework, the Socio-Cultural Leadership Questionnaire was developed (SCLQ). The research questions that guided this study were: 1. Do the items of the survey instrument divide into the four domains as described? 2. What is the relationship, collectively and independently, between SocioCultural Leadership and student achievement in high-poverty schools? 3. Is the frequency in observed principal behaviors different between lowperforming and high-performing schools? Therefore, the purpose of this study was to, via exploratory factor analysis; verify that these four factors existed as described and to, via regression analysis, find the direct relationship between the resulting factors and student achievement in high poverty schools. High poverty schools were defined as schools where 50 percent ( 40 percent for high schools) or more of the student population participated the federally funded Free and/or Reduced Price Lunch Program. This study also sought to differentiate these findings according to the performance levels of the schools sampled. The pilot study, the descriptive statistics, the principal components analysis, and the measures of internal consistency, all provided the researcher with empirical evidence to establish the reliability and validity of specific SCLQ items along with the significance of the resulting factors. Two of the five SCLQ subscales that resulted from the factor analysis, OP (outreach to parents) and MIPD (management of instructional process detractors), positively correlated with student achievement in the total sample (n = 903). There is a less than 5 percent chance that these findings were due to a Type I sampling error. Finally, principals in high-performing schools exhibited behaviors indicated by subscales OP (outreach to parents) and MIPD (management of instructional process detractors) significantly more than principals in low-performing schools.