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PROBLEM: Increasing accountability in public schools has created a new set of problems for school leaders. With the prominence of high stakes testing, the pressure to make Adequate Yearly Progress, accountability for closing the achievement gap of every subgroup of students, the demand for a highly qualified faculty and related pressures from school boards and communities, school leaders are faced with an array of unstructured, complex problems. Set within a rich literature on educational leadership and the relatively unexplored literature on problem solving, this study examines the school principal’s interaction with the problems created by accountability to determine how expert leaders perceive, approach, and engage others in addressing complex problems. Three areas of interaction are explored (Leader Capacity, Leader Response and Organizational Response) in order to address the following questions: Does the mental model of the expert principal differ from a more typical principal as it relates to problem solving? How do leaders ’ beliefs, conceptions of problems, and knowledge influence their response in problem solving