By working toward and arriving at a workable and agreeable solution, Tombaugh's principal and teachers together demonstrated the power and effectiveness of collective leadership. Cushman (March 1997) further points out that in today's changing and increasingly demanding educational environment, with the best, most dedicated faculty often not given much credit for all they accomplish, and with increasing pressure placed on educational leaders and faculty alike due to national standards and emphasis on test score performance nationwide, the traditional school hierarchy of principal as leader and the rest as followers, works far less successfully than in the past. As Cushman states, leadership must instead spring from "reciprocal processes" that help to identify, and work toward, a common purpose. In other words, in today's complex and increasingly demanding educational environment, schools need all the leaders, working together, that they can get. It is also crucial to optimal school success, Cushman adds, that education leaders; faculty; parents, and the community at large be able to foster, and maintain, a supportive problem-solving atmosphere for all concerned, where hard questions can be discussed and solutions worked toward by all for the common good of a school and/or district. The example of Tombaugh Elementary school's solution, arrived at by everyone's working together, to the problem of how to best teach Spanish speaking students, illustrates the efficacy of shared leadership in operation.

The third article I read was: The longitudinal evaluation of school change and performance in Title 1 schools (Turnbull, 2001). The main point of this article was that the longitudinal study described had made a connection between student gains in achievement,...

However, other practices also supported by standards-based reform, however, appeared not to yield as much increase in student performance.
The study, The Longitudinal Evaluation of School Change and Performance (LESCP), was conducted for the U.S. Department of Education by Westat and by PSA Policy Studies Associates). The study tracked progress of students in 71 "high-poverty schools," from the third through the fifth grades. Researchers for this study sought to determine whether or not "nine school and classroom practices commonly cited as important elements of standards-based reform contributed to student performance in reading and mathematics" (Turnbull, 2001).

The study found that (despite the fact that most students who participated in the study had achievement levels below the national average), students taught at schools and by teachers with "above average" levels of these nine favorable conditions had the highest achievement, indicating that schools and teachers adhering to these nine favorable conditions make more progress than those schools and teachers that do not, toward closing their students' achievement gaps in math and reading.

The article also discussed "effects of the larger educational policy environment on instructional practices" (Turnbull, 2001). Researchers for the study learned that in districts and states stressing assessment and accountability the most, teachers were also most likely to report having participated in quality professional development activities in math, which was "a practice... linked to better student gains."