By Dr. Catherine Burns, President & Chief Academic Officer, Accelerate Institute
Every August, we choose a rally cry to guide our work at Accelerate Institute. For the 2025–26 school year, our rally cry is: Finding Your True North.
For us, True North is the compass every school leader needs: the values, vision, and moral clarity that help them stay steady when the path ahead is uncertain. And this past year reminded us why that compass is so critical.
School leaders are being asked to do more than ever — close opportunity gaps, build strong school cultures, and deliver academic results — all while navigating shrinking budgets, staffing shortages, and high-stakes accountability. It’s no wonder that leadership often feels like navigating in the dark.
That’s why we exist: to help leaders find their True North and stay oriented toward what matters most — students.
Learning From 2024–25: Measurable Growth
Last year, we saw how powerful it is when leaders commit to developing themselves and their teams. The growth across principals, executives, and rising leaders was not just anecdotal — it was measurable.
Leadership Growth Across All Levels (2024-25)
What the Survey Results Tell Us — and the Questions They Raise
The end-of-year survey results confirmed that leaders at every level—executives, principals, and rising leaders—showed meaningful growth in the skills and dispositions that matter most for school improvement. Leaders reported greater focus, preparedness, and ability to drive toward school goals.
These aren’t just numbers—they are evidence of leaders building the capacity that schools need most: sustainable systems for talent development, distributed leadership, and clarity around priorities.
But two data points stood out as exceptions:
- Executives ended the year reporting a decreased ability to delegate effectively so they could maintain focus.
- Principals ended the year reporting that they felt less effective as leaders than they had at the start of the year.
What makes this finding especially intriguing is that at mid-year, both groups had reported increases in these same areas. Somewhere between mid-year and year-end, the trend reversed.
These year-end decreases raise important questions for our work:
- What accounts for the dip? Was it the cumulative demands of the school year? Changing district pressures? Leadership fatigue?
- How can we better support leaders in sustaining growth across the entire year, not just in the first half?
- What structures or mindsets help leaders maintain confidence in their effectiveness and ability to prioritize, even as challenges intensify?
- What skills and tools will support rising leaders to be more effective in their current roles?
Where We Go Next
The broader survey results are shaping our learning agenda for this year. Specifically, we are looking to answer:
- What tools and supports can strengthen executives’ ability to delegate consistently, so they can remain focused on the highest-leverage work?
- How can we help principals sustain a sense of efficacy and effectiveness in the face of mounting end-of-year demands?
- How can we build interventions that address the seasonality of leadership stress, ensuring that growth continues even when the pressure is highest?
- Knowing that 60% of rising leaders started last school year with doubts that they were prepared to excel in their role, what skills and tools can strengthen their ability to be effective this year?
Our commitment is not only to help leaders grow in skill but also to help them sustain that growth through the toughest parts of the year — because that’s when their students and schools need them most.
Staying Oriented
This year, our rally cry of Finding Your True North is more than words — it’s a call to action. For leaders, it means anchoring in purpose when the work feels overwhelming. For us as an organization, it means staying true to our mission: closing the opportunity gap for students by developing the leaders who make schools thrive.
Because our True North is clear: students first.
