This article describes superintendents' and principals' beliefs about organizing students for mathematics instruction in the intermediate grades. Our immediate purpose was to see if teachers were permitted to choose an organizational style for presenting mathematics and if the apparently infrequent use of small-group instruction in mathematics could be explained by administrators' lack of support for its use. More broadly, we attempted to assess administrators' preferences and policies concerning various aspects of mathematics instruction and their perceptions of current practices in their intermediate mathematics programs. We randomly selected 60 elementary schools from among the over 1200 in Missouri. A central conclusion from these data is that teachers' infrequent use of small-group strategies cannot be attributed to superintendents' and principals' disapproval of this technique. The article describes the need for additional research into how administrators provide instructional leadership for classroom teachers.
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