Great article by Larry Cuban on the Washington Post that you should forward to principals.
"Yet studies of principal behavior in schools makes clear that spending time in classrooms to observe, monitor, and evaluate classroom lessons do not necessarily lead to better teaching or higher student achievement on standardized tests. Where there is a correlation between principals' influence on teachers and student performance, it occurs when principals create and sustain an academic ethos in the school, organize instruction across the school, and align school lessons to district standards and standardized test items. There is hardly any positive association between principals walking in and out of classrooms a half-dozen times a day and conferring briefly with teaches about those five-minute visits.The reality of daily principal actions conflicts with the theory."
Over time, students' personal values become more similar to those of their school principal, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Associational for Psychological Science. The findings indicate that head-teachers' values are linked with aspects of school climate which are, in turn, linked with students' own values.