Prior research has suggested that well-performing school leadership clusters around a set of general core practices, which appear to be effective across a range of national, social and cultural contexts, yet contingent of school leaders being responsive to context and responding appropriately to their different contextual demands when they employ these core practices. So far school leadership in rural regions has received only modest attention in leadership research. Therefore, this study was designed to explore the relationship between the core practices of school leaders, organizational school climate and student academic achievement in primary and lower secondary rural schools in a county in Norway. The research design involved a cross-sectional study based on ratings from 275 teachers situated in 20 rural schools, split into two sub-groups of 10 "high-performing" and 10 "low-performing" schools. The results from the multivariate analysis and comparisons between the sub-groups suggest that two distinct core practices of school leadership emerge as critical in Norwegian rural school settings. Further, the results indicate that in the higher performing rural schools, the teachers reported a more positive organizational school climate, with higher level of collaborative learning and self-confidence, than in the opposite sub-group.