Over 250 leaders in education, business, and publishing signed Better Leaders for America’s Schools: A Manifesto (Broad Foundation, 2003). This manifesto states that schools and school districts are failing, because they lack the leadership required to build excellent schools. School leadership has become so demanding and complex that many potential educational leaders are not interested in administration and those applying for the jobs do not have the right skills. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between school administrators’ teaching experience and their leadership effectiveness to determine if it is necessary for aspiring administrator candidates to have classroom teaching experience. To accomplish this, the study analyzed administrator leadership in Christian schools, because they have opened up leadership positions to people who have not been classroom teachers. Many Christian schools have principals, headmasters, and superintendents who have experience as a pastor, in the military, or in business but have not served in the classroom as a fulltime teacher. This study will also analyze secondary variables including level of education, type of schooling (secular or religious), and areas of educational emphasis (college major/minor). This study used a demographic survey to gather basic factual information about each administrator and the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) created by Kouzes and Posner to determine leadership effectiveness. This study was a non-experimental descriptive research design using the Pearson-r correlation coefficient, a point-biserial coefficient which is a specialized variation of the Pearson-r correlation coefficient, and a one-way analysis of variance. This study was unable to reject the null hypothesis that classroom experience is required for an administrator to be an effective leader which supports the Broad Foundation’s call for opening up school administration positions to those from outside education. This study did not identify any other variables that correlate with increased leadership effectiveness which can help committees, boards, or people when they are interviewing and hiring administrators.